The year 2023 will have been that of Stax Records. In addition to the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the Stax museum in Memphis, in addition to the reissue in expanded format of the famous “WattStax” concert which electrified the city of Los Angeles in August 1972, a box set of seven CDs exhumes the archives of this record company which revealed Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Sam & Dave and Eddie Floyd, among others.
These rare documents allow us to hear the beginnings, the sketches, the first echoes of works that have become, for some, great classics and which accompanied the daily lives of African-Americans at a pivotal period in their history. To understand the heritage value of these archives now returned, we must evoke the city of Memphis, its painful past, its cultural vigor and its geographical location. Located in Tennessee in the south of the United States, Memphis has always been a crossroads where blues and country crossed paths, where the sacred and the profane met, where whites and blacks sometimes spoke to each other, where Martin Luther King was assassinated, where he delivered his last speech, where Elvis Presley made his debut, where Otis Redding revealed himself. All these elements demonstrate how much the effervescence of an era is part of “The Epic of Black Music”.
Tim Sampson is the communications director of the Stax museum in Memphis which, for 20 years, has been preserving and protecting the heritage of this historic label, much more eclectic than it seems: “Stax Records is, of course, a soul-music label but it is also a record company which recorded blues, rock, pop, country, gospel artists… This record company had the particularity of calling on white and black musicians even if, in recent years, the proportion of black musicians was greater due to the commitment of certain artists to the “Black Power” movement. It has therefore become an almost social institution to the detriment of the purely discographic aspect.”
During his long years at the Stax museum, Tim Sampson was able to converse with some of the label’s pillars including Booker T. Jones, William Bell and Steve Cropper, and realized how much these musicians have advanced the notion of sharing and listening to a time when relations between whites and blacks seemed impossible. Were they already activists? Were their compositions ultimately political? Tim Sampson is not convinced: “ If I stick to this that they told me, he it was no activism. They did not seek to prove anything by rubbing shoulders with each other others. They were just musicians whose job it was to record records. In the studio, skin color of each of the artists had no importance. Even at all At the start of the Stax adventure, civic engagement was not a priority because they were not even aware of being pioneers in this historic social fight. They didn’t even realize that Stax was a unique place where whites and blacks shared the same passions.”
Many artists accompanied the civil rights movement, and the death of Martin Luther King in April 1968 reinforced the rebellious spirit of certain musicians and performers. The Staple Singers, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, multiplied messages of unity and resilience. David Porter was a young composer on the Stax label at the time. Today he admits to having written songs that called for citizen action: “We understood that success gave us the opportunity to transmit messages. From then on, we said that we had to use this means to speak to our fellow citizens in several ways. We must remember that in those times, it was very difficult to have an engaged speech. It was therefore necessary to find subterfuges to make oneself heard. Therefore, our songs had to appear harmless for racist white people and full of meaning for the black community. Isaac Hayes and I quickly realized that we had become messengers.”
The archives of Stax Records, brought together in the box set “Written in their Soul”, are a good way to detect the creative energy of dozens of songwriters who, over the years, wrote part of their history but also that of black America confronted with the assaults of racist conservatism, rooted even in its roots. institutions. This anthology highlights the fervor of musicians totally invested in their art and the strength of a label originally established in Memphis, the nerve center of black and white American music. “I would say Memphis is the funkiest city on the planet. I would like this to be said once and for all. When you travel around the world, you are introduced to certain cities in you saying: “It is the highest city in the world or the most isolated or the closest to the North Pole”. Well, I would like you to remember that Memphis is the funkiest city in the world”. (Robert Gordon, American author and documentarian)