After Stax

Stax Records served as a neighborhood anchor institution throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, employing but also profiting from the wealth of talent in the South Memphis community. In the years after the assassination of Martin Luther King and then the decline and shuttering of Stax Records, South Memphis—or Soulsville, as it came to be known—underwent many of the changes that affected American inner-city neighborhoods in the wake of urban renewal, integration, deindustrialization, and globalization. Using oral histories, census records, and other sources, this essay shows how neighborhood change in the post-Stax era was shaped by the distinctive legacy of the company and its intertwined relationship with the community.

So You Want to Be a Rock'n'Roll Scholar — Well You Need to Get an MBA

Stax Records was a record label based in Memphis, Tennessee from the late 1950s through December 1975, when it was forced into involuntary bankruptcy. "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Scholar — Well You Need to Get an MBA" uses Stax Records as a case study to problematize what has often been a tendency within popular music scholarship to attempt to understand the political economy of the record industry primarily via the mechanical application of Marxist theory on a macro level. In looking in detail at the relationship between CBS Records and Stax from 1972 through 1975, the author concludes that to fully understand the nature of the distribution agreement between the two companies, its ramifications, and the consequent subsequent actions of the various principals involved, all of which eventually led to Stax's bankruptcy, one needs to take into account on a micro level the different modi operandi of independent and major labels, differences in the retail world of black and white America, and individual agency. Finally, all of the above needs to be considered very specifically within a temporal framework. The final conclusions prove to be significantly different from what would have resulted from solely from a Marxist analysis on a macro level.

The Stax sound: a musicological analysis

In recent times there has been an encouraging increase in the musicological study of Western popular music by members of the academy. Both Richard Middleton and Alan Moore have published important books that are emphatic about the need for such study (Middleton 1990; Moore 1993). Also there have been a number of articles in a variety of journals over the past several years that have either addressed the need for, suggested various approaches to, or actually taken a musicological approach to one or another aspect of popular music (Foret 1991; Brackett 1992; Hawkins 1992; Moore 1992; Taylor 1992; Walser 1992; Middleton 1993). Despite this flurry of activity, as far as this author is aware, there has been no academic musicological work, other than Robert Walser's recent study of heavy metal (Walser 1993), that has attempted to ferret out the component parts of a given genre through an analysis of a sizable body of repertoire. There is an acute need for such work if popular music scholars are going to begin to understand in concrete terms what is meant by terms such as rock, soul, funk, Merseybeat and so on. This essay is an attempt to begin such a study for the genre of southern soul music as it was manifested by Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.