The Colorblind Soul of Stax

Fifty years ago, on February 1, 1960, four black college students walked into the Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat at the "whites only" section of the lunch counter to buy something to eat. This sparked a wave of similar sit-ins across the southern U.S. to challenge the long-standing "Jim Crow" laws of separate facilities for "white" and "colored".

Around that same time, though, blacks and whites were working together in the Southern city of Memphis, Tennessee to create incredible soul music that still sounds sweet today. At the Stax Records building on McLemore Avenue, there were no separate sections for "white" and "colored".

Brother and sister Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, two white businesspeople in Memphis, used the first two letters of their last names (STewart/AXton) to come up with the name of their record label and studio in 1961. Over the next several years they produced crossover hits on both the R&B and pop charts by artists including Sam & Dave ("Soul Man", "Hold On, I'm Coming"), Eddie Floyd ("Knock On Wood"), Carla Thomas ("B-A-B-Y"), Wilson Pickett ("In The Midnight Hour"), and Otis Redding ("Respect", "Try A Little Tenderness", "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay").

Part of what wove these songs by different artists into a cohesive Stax sound was the label's house band, the core of which also recorded instrumental hits as Booker T. & the MGs ("Green Onions", "Time Is Tight"). This integrated band of two black guys (Booker T. Jones on keyboards, Al Jackson on drums) and two white guys (Steve Cropper on guitar, Lewie Steinberg and later Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass) often surprised audiences at concerts and TV viewers who expected to see an all-black band. The image of blacks and whites working side-by-side, bound together by their love of the music they were co-creating, helped smash the assumptions behind the segregation laws just as surely as the images of blacks and whites trying to drink coffee together.

In a 2005 interview for Philadelphia's WXPN radio station, Cropper reflected on this colorblind atmosphere: "As far as I know the whole time I was at Stax Records there was absolutely zero color. Everybody came in there equal through those doors." Isaac Hayes, who cowrote many Sam & Dave hits with David Porter before starting his solo career, confirmed this in his own WXPN interview in 2003: "We were all mixed there. We were a family. And that's a testament of the power of artistry, because it has no boundaries. Music has no boundaries. It's a human process and that's what brought us together."

Cropper and Dunn helped revive interest in this music in the late 1970s by playing in The Blues Brothers band. Despite their name, a nod to the electric Chicago blues of Chess Records, many of this comedy/musical act's songs came right out of the Stax catalog: frontmen John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd would run out on stage while the band played Redding's "I Can't Turn You Loose"; they had a hit single with a remake of Sam & Dave's "Soul Man"; and their third album featured remakes of The Bar-Kay's "Soul Finger" and the MGs' "Green Onions". Belushi and Aykroyd were the first to admit that their versions were at best pale imitations of the originals, and they urged fans to revisit those original recordings. During a scene in their 1980 movie when Aykroyd pushes an 8-track tape cartridge into his car's player, the camera lingers on the "Best Of Sam & Dave" label as the music plays, as if to say, "buy this album!".

Yes, by all means, buy this incredible music, and celebrate the example of these artists for whom the important question was not whether you were "white" or "colored", but only if you had soul.