The Soul of Stax - ACE286.3

Bell says that though Stax itself was very integrated, segregation affected the company’s success; photographs from Memphis in the 1960s. Stewart says that Axton set up a record shop in the lobby of the former cinema; photograph. Axton describes how people would meet there and discuss their music. Wexler talking about the studio band, Booker T. & the MG’s (photographs), Steve Cropper, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Al Jackson, and Booker T. Jones. Original footage of Booker T. & The MG’s playing Green Onions (1962) with young people dancing. Jones, Cropper and Dunn talking about their music, and about the Stax studio. Stewart notes that Otis Redding came to the studio in 1962. Cropper describes how amazed he was on first hearing Redding sing. Photographs of Redding; his 1963 recording These Arms of Mine over. Photograph of The Memphis Horns; Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson talk about the radical nature of the racial mixture at the Memphis studio musicians. It’s a Long Walk to D.C. But I Got My Walking Shoes On sung by Mavis Staples over shot of man on country road and original footage of people arriving at Washington DC in 1963; the March on Washington with Martin Luther King and others. Isaac Hayes talking about working at Stax where so much of the music was arranged on the spot. Love and Jackson playing, and talking about Otis Redding’s songs "[happening] in the studio". Cropper relates an anecdote about the genesis of Mr Pitiful (1964); Love and Jackson play introduction; recording over dramatisation of anecdote with car travelling through suburban streets towards the former studio site.