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The Secret Sound of Stax
It wasn’t the singing; it was the song. When Deanie Parker hit her last high note in the studio, and the band’s final chord faded behind her, the producer gave her a long, appraising look. She’d be great onstage, with those sugarplum features and defiant eyes, and that voice could knock down walls. “You sound good,” he said. “But if we’re going to cut a record, you’ve got to have your own song. A song that you created. We can’t introduce a new artist covering somebody else’s song.” Did she have any original material? Parker stared at him blankly for a moment, then shook her head.
No. But she could get some.
Parker was seventeen. She had moved to Memphis a year earlier, in 1961, to live with her mother and stepfather, and was itching to get out of school and start performing. She was born in Mississippi but had spent most of her childhood with her aunt and uncle in Ironton, Ohio, a small town on the Kentucky border. Her grandfather had sent her there after her parents divorced, hoping that she could get a better education up north. Her aunt Velma was a church secretary and a part-time college student; her uncle James worked for the C. & O. Railway. They gave her piano lessons at a Catholic convent and elocution lessons at home. On Sunday afternoons, her aunt would take her to church teas and teach her proper etiquette—how to fold her white gloves in her purse and set her napkin on her lap. In Ironton, the races were allowed to mix a little. Churches and most social clubs were segregated, but Parker went to school with white kids and sometimes even played in their homes. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that there was no difference between them.
Deanie Parker, shown with Al Bell, Jim Stewart, and the civil-rights leader Julian Bond, at a Stax sales conference in 1969.Photograph courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music Archive
Not in Memphis. Memphis never let you forget your place. It was the capital of the Mississippi Delta, the home of the Cotton Exchange, where plantation owners once made their wealth. Whites lived downtown and in the better houses to the east; Blacks were in the poor and working-class neighborhoods to the north and south, corralled there by redlining. Schools, bars, restaurants, buses, libraries, rest rooms, and telephone booths all had their shabbier counterparts across town, their shadow selves. (When the city parks were finally desegregated, in 1963, the public pools shut down rather than let Black people in the water.) Even Beale Street and its blues clubs kept to one side of the line: the street ran along the southern edge of downtown, where whites could step into a club without walking through a Black neighborhood—or having Black musicians walk through theirs. “Every single thing was segregated, from cradle to grave,” a local civil-rights leader later recalled. “I never really understood why the graveyards had to be segregated, because the dead get along with each other pretty well.”
On her first day at Hamilton High School, Parker wore her favorite outfit: a pleated floral skirt with a sleeveless, orange-and-fuchsia top—perfectly matched, as her aunt Velma had taught her. She might as well have had on a ballroom gown. Everywhere she went, the kids snickered and stared. Most of them were dressed in hand-me-downs or castoffs from their parents’ white employers. Who did she think she was? To survive in this two-sided city, she realized, she would have to vary her behavior to match. It didn’t take her long. “I think it’s in the DNA,” she says. “Or like this old Black lady once told me, ‘It’s in the Dana.’ ”
Singing was her secret strength. She’d been doing it since she was five years old, in the sunbeams choir at her African Methodist Episcopal church. She could read music and outline harmonies and knew most of the Wesleyan Methodist hymnal by heart. In Ironton, all you could get on the radio was country music. She lived for the moment every night, at nine o’clock, when she could catch a signal out of Nashville—WLAC playing “I Don’t Want to Cry,” by Chuck Jackson, or some other rhythm-and-blues hit. “I knew what I liked to listen to and the music that moved me,” she says. “I didn’t have that, and I wanted it so badly.”
In Memphis, it was everywhere. The city was both a foreign country and her heart’s home. By five in the morning, her grandparents were tuned in to Theo (Bless My Bones) Wade, who played spirituals on WDIA radio. Then A. C. (Moohah) Williams or Martha Jean Steinberg would come on with doo-wop and R. & B. and handy tips for homemakers, or Nat D. Williams, the city’s first Black disk jockey, would play some B. B. King or Nat King Cole. The station’s fifty-thousand-watt transmitter could blast over any color line. “I cut my teeth on that music,” Parker says. “I learned harmony and timing through the disciplined music of the church. But what I wanted to do was not about that. It was about ‘Let it go and let it flow.’ ”
Her glee-club director must have heard it in her voice. Memphis schools had long been feeders to the record industry, and the teachers knew how to foster talent. The city’s first high-school band director, Jimmie Lunceford, took his students to Harlem after they graduated, and they became the house band at the Cotton Club in 1934. By the time Parker arrived, WDIA had a rotating cast of rising stars called the Teen Town Singers. Isaac Hayes was at Manassas High, the Bar-Kays were at Booker T. Washington, and Carla Thomas, the Queen of Memphis Soul, was at Hamilton with Parker. One day after class, the glee-club director pulled Parker aside. She’d heard her sing with some boys from the school who’d started a band. You ought to sign up for the talent show at the Daisy Theatre on Beale Street, she said. First prize was an audition at Stax Records, the hottest studio in Memphis.
Winning was the easy part. For the audition at Stax, Parker sang “The One Who Really Loves You,” a jumpy Motown number, written by Smokey Robinson, that was a hit for Mary Wells that year. But the producer was after something fresher. When Parker told him that she’d bring some new material next time, she was bluffing. She’d never written a song in her life. “That was the challenge,” she says. “This was the early sixties in Memphis, Tennessee. Where in America could you get that opportunity, regardless of the color of your skin? I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to become a female vocalist to rival Aretha and Gladys Knight. I wanted legs like Tina Turner. And I was not going to be outdone.”
“We definitely weren’t that happy on our way up.”
Cartoon by Lila Ash
One afternoon, forty-four years later, Cheryl Pawelski was listening to a tape of old Stax recordings when an unfamiliar track came on. Pawelski was a producer for Concord Music Group in Los Angeles. She was putting together a fiftieth-anniversary set of Stax hits, and looking for unreleased recordings for other collections. Most of the Stax catalogue was ingrained in her memory: “Soul Man,” “Theme from Shaft,” “I’ll Take You There,” “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” It was music both blunt and seductive, plaintive and hard-hitting, driven by the world’s best house band, led by the multi-instrumentalist Booker T. Jones. The Motown sound was polished, upbeat, radio-friendly. Stax was grittier and less accommodating—in 1972, the studio threw a benefit concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to commemorate the Watts riots, of 1965. If Motown was Hitsville, the saying went, Stax was Soulsville.
Most Stax hits were written by teams of songwriters and sung by performers like Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, and the Staple Singers. But this song, written by Deanie Parker and Mack Rice, seemed to belong to an alternate history. It was a driving, full-throated duet called “Until I Lost You,” with strings and horns. It easily could have been a hit when it was written, in 1973, yet Pawelski had never heard it before. As she went through the Stax archives, she kept coming across recordings like this, marked as demos and sung by the songwriters themselves. Some were demos of songs that later became hits—raw, emphatic versions, often backed only by a guitar. Folk songs with a deeper pulse. Others, like “Until I Lost You,” had been fully fleshed out in the studio but never released. “They were cut every which way,” Pawelski said, when she told me about the demos a few years ago. “They are all fucking awesome.”
Cheryl Pawelski, the producer of the Stax collection “Written in Their Soul,” outside the Stax Museum.Photograph by Patricia Rainer
I’ve known Pawelski for more than twenty years. When we first met, she was dating my brother’s ex-wife, Audrey Bilger, an English professor and the drummer in an all-female blues band. They’re married now. Pawelski has her own label, Omnivore Recordings, and has won three Grammy Awards for Best Historical Album. Audrey is the president of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. In their house, every available storage space is stuffed with records, CDs, cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes—more than seventy thousand in all. Pawelski says that she likes being a college president’s wife, sitting next to an astrophysicist one night and a rhetorician the next. But it’s hard to imagine her in the role. Her wardrobe seems to consist mostly of worn plaids and record-label T-shirts. She wears black rectangular glasses, her hair ruffled like a pile of straw, and charges around with her shoulders squared, her eyes fixed on the next thing and the next. She never seems to get enough sleep, and gives off an energy both frazzled and elated.
Music has always been a treasure hunt to her. As a thirteen-year-old in 1979, living in Milwaukee, she was already trading bootleg concert tapes with collectors across the country—“waiting for the next bag of cassettes from Omaha,” as she puts it. Her tastes were eclectic to the point of omnivory: ABBA, Ella Fitzgerald, Professor Longhair, the Clash, Krautrock, Afro pop—she loved it all. She would ride her bike to a local collector’s house, and they’d trade copies of tapes they’d bought and lists of ones they wanted. She was fascinated by outtakes—demos and discarded studio recordings that tape traders would toss in at the end of a side. “These were songs that I knew backward and forward,” she says. “But there would be a different guitar part, or lyrics that would wind up in an entirely different song. It brewed my little-kid brain. ‘That’s not the song! How did they do that?’ ”
Pawelski wanted to be part of that world, but she didn’t know how. She could sing a little and play guitar, but she knew that she wasn’t a gifted musician. She was obsessed with recordings but not that interested in making them. It was their secret history that consumed her—the story behind the story of the songs she loved. But how could you make a career out of that? “What do you do when you grow up in a sleepy Midwestern town with your ass on fire?” Pawelski says. “I was ambitious, but there is no track for doing what I do. There is no path that will take you there.”
She was on it already, as it turned out. She took a job as a temp at Capitol Records and worked her way up until she was in charge of catalogue development. When she arrived, in 1990, CDs were replacing vinyl as the dominant format, and there was great profit to be made from reissues and boxed sets. By the time she left, a decade later, CD sales had peaked. Songs could be shared online, and streaming services were on the way. Anyone could compile a greatest-hits collection now: it was just another playlist. What you couldn’t do was hear an artist’s unreleased recordings—the songs buried so deep in the vaults that even their keepers had forgotten they were there. Pawelski knew where to find them.
When Pawelski talks about vaults of recordings, I imagine vast underground facilities filled with miles of mechanized shelving. I picture endless rows of master tapes in cardboard boxes marked with barcodes and serial numbers. There are places like that. Universal Music Group keeps some of its masters at Iron Mountain, a 1.7-million-square-foot storage facility deep within an abandoned limestone mine in western Pennsylvania. But the tapes that interest Pawelski aren’t always so well preserved. Some were never logged by the studio or sent to a music publisher. Others were tossed out or misfiled. “A lot of these projects don’t exist if I don’t find them,” Pawelski says.
The Stax masters were recorded on professional audiotape, but the demos came in every condition and format: cassette tapes, studio tapes, quarter-inch home recordings. When Stax went bankrupt, in 1975, its catalogue was chopped apart. Atlantic Records owned all the master recordings made before 1968. The rest were sold to Fantasy Records and later to Concord Music Group. But the demos were scattered across the country. A few ended up in Iron Mountain and places like it. (“There are salt mines everywhere,” Pawelski says.) Some survived only on cassettes that were passed around Memphis for years. Most of the rest were owned by Rondor Music International, a publisher in L.A, but they’d been transferred to digital audiotape. Their original sources were destroyed. Worse, the digital tapes were a hodgepodge of recordings from various artists—everything from Broadway show tunes to songs by the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento. To sift out the Stax material, Pawelski would have to listen to every tape from start to finish. There were thirteen hundred tapes in all—nearly two thousand hours of music.
“Comedy show after the beheading! Free with flyer!”
Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers
“Some projects, I just roll over and I’ve got a record,” Pawelski told me. “But the Stax one was pretty epic.” For the next fifteen years, whenever she was on a plane, train, or road trip, she would listen to a tape or two between stops. When she was home, she would play them while she was working. “It’s got to be horrible to live with me,” she says. “I’d be sitting at the dining-room table and Audrey would be grooving in the kitchen, making dinner, but she never got to hear a full song. As soon as I knew what a track was, I’d go on to the next, until I got to ‘Holy moly, listen to this!’ ”
There were a lot of those moments. By the time Pawelski listened to the last song on the thirteen hundredth tape—on a flight home from New York to Portland, as she recalls—she had found six hundred and sixty-five songs worth keeping. A buried treasure of soul. There were slinky R. & B. numbers and grinding blues, diaphanous ballads and floor-shaking shouters, backed by full horn sections. They were just demos, thrown together on the fly to convince a producer or a performer that a song was worth recording, but there was nothing tentative about them. Deanie Parker didn’t sound like an ordinary songwriter on “Until I Lost You.” She sounded like a star.
“So here’s the thing,” Pawelski says. “Everyone knows Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes. But do they know Homer Banks and Bettye Crutcher? Do they know Deanie Parker? To be able to honor some of these songwriters—it’s more than just getting a cool record out for me. This is the last Stax story. A story that hasn’t been told.”
The studio was an oasis, Parker thought. From the moment she walked in for her audition, in 1962, she could tell that Stax wasn’t like other places. Outside, on the streets of South Memphis, the cops would chase you away if you lingered too long on a corner; the shopkeepers kept an eye on your hands as you went down the aisles. Inside Stax, there was no time for all that. People were too busy making music. The studio was in a converted movie theatre, across the street from a barbershop where one of the Stax drummers used to shine shoes. Its cavernous space was subdivided by curtains and sound panels of pegboard and burlap. The men’s bathroom had been turned into an echo chamber; the concession stand was a record store. When the building was a theatre, it was for whites only, but the studio made no distinction. In every room, musicians Black and white were hashing out lyrics, honing bass lines, or bending over mixing boards, moving sliders into position. “It was magic,” Parker says.
The label had been founded four years earlier by the brother-and-sister team of Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. They started out in Stewart’s wife’s uncle’s garage, then moved to an old storeroom along a railroad track in Brunswick, twenty miles east of Memphis. To get the money for a recording console, Axton took out a second mortgage on her house. By the time Parker came for her audition, they had bought the movie theatre and christened their label Stax—short for Stewart and Axton. A series of hits had followed, including “Gee Whiz,” by Carla Thomas, and “Green Onions,” by Booker T. & the M.G.s. Atlantic Records had agreed to distribute Stax recordings nationally. (It would be years before Stewart realized that the distribution deal included ownership of the master tapes.) And in 1965 Al Bell, a former d.j. who was a natural salesman, was named the head of promotions. But it was clear to the artists by then that the real money wasn’t in selling records. It was in writing songs.
“We all realized it after we got that first royalty statement,” Parker says. “I mean, it was a no-brainer.” A recording artist made a few pennies on every record sold. But a songwriter earned royalties every time a song was covered by another musician or appeared on a recording or on sheet music. It was an endlessly branching revenue stream. Soon, the studio’s musicians were pairing off to collaborate, vying with one another to write the best tunes: William Bell and Booker T. Jones, Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper, Homer Banks and Bettye Crutcher, Isaac Hayes and David Porter, Mack Rice and Deanie Parker. They met in the Stax offices and studios and at the Four Way grill, where they liked to eat lunch. They went to the Lorraine Motel—one of the few such places in Memphis that allowed Black guests—and holed up in a room until a song was done.
The idea could come from anywhere. Bell and Jones wrote “Born Under a Bad Sign” for the blues guitarist Albert King in 1967, when astrology and mysticism were thick in the air. “I had a verse and chorus and bass line,” Bell told me. “So Booker and I went to his house and finished it that night. Albert cut it the next day. He couldn’t actually read, so I had to sing it in his ear. In a couple of takes, he had it down and put his iconic guitar on it.” Floyd and Cropper wrote “Knock on Wood” at the Lorraine, in a honeymoon suite covered in plush red velvet. A storm was blowing outside, and Floyd recalled how that used to scare him as a boy. “I told Steve that my brother and I, when it started thundering and lightning like that, we would hide under the bed,” Floyd says. Before long, another verse was done: “Our love is better than any love I know. It’s like thunder, lightnin’, the way you love me is frightenin’.”
Cropper was born on a farm in Missouri, Floyd in rural Alabama; Jones was the son of a high-school science teacher; Bell had planned to become a doctor. Yet they shared the same language. “We had the same input, heard the same radio,” Bell says. “One day gospel, the next day blues, then jazz, rhythm and blues, and country-and-Western. That was the beauty of it. We were all family.”
For the most part, at least. Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton were white, as were the members of the original house band, the Mar-Keys. The songwriters were all Black, aside from Cropper, Bobby Manuel, and a few other musicians who contributed to songs. Music was their only common ground. “I had two different childhoods,” Manuel told me. As a boy, he went to all-white schools and lived on an all-white block. Elvis Presley lived a few doors down, at 2414 Lamar Avenue; Manuel used to sneak over and hide in the bushes outside his window, just to hear him sing. But the Manuels’ house backed onto an African American neighborhood, known as Orange Mound. So Manuel would often head over there to eat fried-bologna sandwiches with his friends Butch and Donny, and to listen to their uncle, Willie Mitchell, play the blues. “Some of my white friends would say, ‘Why do you play with those guys?’ But it wasn’t such a thing to me,” Manuel says. “When Willie came to Memphis, it was just like Elvis coming.”
The other musicians had similar stories. By day, they lived separate lives in a segregated city. By night, they met onstage at the Flamingo Room or the Plantation Inn, or traded solos in jam sessions at the Thunderbird or Hernando’s Hideaway. It was only at Stax that their two worlds came together—that they could work as closely, and equally, as they played. They just had to be good enough. “It was hard to get in there, man. I felt fortunate,” Manuel told me. “That was the beginning.”
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
For Deanie Parker, music meant a different sort of double life. After her audition at Stax, she went home, sat at the white piano that her mother had bought her—“It was the biggest damn thing you’ve ever seen”—and wrote a bouncy little love song called “My Imaginary Guy.” For the B-side, she wrote a slow tune, “Until You Return,” and she recorded them both in the studio. The single became a regional hit. She wrote her next song with Steve Cropper—a churning torch ballad called “I’ve Got No Time to Lose”—and thought that it would be her follow-up single. Instead, Carla Thomas walked through the studio one day and heard Cropper playing the chords. Thomas was the studio’s biggest star. When she asked if she could record the song, the answer, of course, was yes. “Here’s the thing you must understand,” Parker says. “Jim Stewart would have volunteered to be in a fight with a bear to get the best song for Carla.”
Stardom owes as much to circumstance as to talent. Fifty years later, it’s hard to choose between Parker’s demo of “I’ve Got No Time to Lose” and Thomas’s official release. Thomas finds a deeper, steadier groove, with the chorus crooning back her lines and punching in on the offbeat: “No! No! No!” The horns are fuller, swelling and fading in the background, and Cropper’s guitar fills are more intricate and cleanly worked out. But Parker’s version sounds more heartfelt, more true. She leans into the words like she’s talking out loud, too distraught to care what people think: “I’ve got to find my man, make him understand. I’ve got to try and see if he’ll come back to me.” When two voices join in—“No time to lose, no time to lose”—they sound less like backup singers than like girlfriends sitting on her bed, echoing her words as she weeps.
“I’ve Got No Time to Lose” was a hit for Thomas. For Parker, it marked the end of her dream of becoming the next Aretha. She wasn’t prolific enough to keep writing hits, and she didn’t have the stomach for touring. She’d been on a couple of road trips with Thomas, Otis Redding, and Booker T. & the M.G.s, but she could never get used to being a Black musician in the South. “You couldn’t check into a hotel or motel. You couldn’t go in the front door of a restaurant. You couldn’t go into a rest room in a service station,” she says. “And, hell, if you were driving a luxurious automobile, you were really asking for trouble.” Thomas had her father, Rufus, to protect her—they toured together as Rufus and Carla. Parker was alone and only eighteen years old. After the shows, the guys in the band would go out drinking or hang with groupies. Parker and Thomas had to stay back at the hotel and lock themselves in.
“I learned very quickly that I wasn’t going to be a success on the road,” Parker told me. “I didn’t have the stamina to deal with it. Not in that time, in that place.” Others kept at it. Thomas was still touring long after her father quit performing with her. Bettye Crutcher, Stax’s only full-time female songwriter, continued composing while raising three sons as a single mother and working night shifts as a nurse. Her songs for Sam & Dave, the Staple Singers, and others would later be covered or sampled by everyone from Joan Baez to the Wu-Tang Clan. For Black women in an industry as cutthroat and unforgiving as music, success required more than talent and luck. It required sheer, unwavering drive.
Eddie Floyd and William Bell, photographed in 1973.Photograph from David Reed Archive / Alamy
Parker wasn’t that single-minded. She enrolled in business classes at Memphis State University, worked part time in the studio’s record store—the nerve center of Stax, where Estelle Axton played demos and new singles for customers and tracked their shifting tastes—and eventually established the Stax publicity department. “Those were the early days at Stax, when things hadn’t galvanized yet,” she told me. “We were all searching, all trying to master something, trying to define that Memphis sound.” Parker was essential to the task. She knew the music from the inside, and she was an expert at shuttling between worlds. She would chaperone the artists on interviews and promotional tours—Johnnie Taylor and Albert King were a particular handful—and help explain their music to an indifferent or openly hostile press. “You can tell when a journalist really doesn’t give a shit about you when they won’t even look in your Black face, and that was typical,” Parker says. “Sitting on a gold mine in Memphis, Tennessee!”
They paid attention eventually. Hits like “Knock on Wood” and Mack Rice’s “Mustang Sally” were hard to ignore, and Parker had the eloquence and the poise to promote the rest. “Deanie is Memphis friggin’ royalty,” Pawelski says. “She’s the reason, beyond the music, that Stax has such a huge footprint.” Parker would release only one more single under her own name: a sultry girl-group number called “Each Step I Take.” But she never stopped writing songs—including “Who Took the Merry Out of Christmas” for the Staple Singers and “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” which Sam & Dave recorded. “I’m not the kind of person who can sit in a room like Carole King or Eddie Floyd, doing it over and over,” Parker says. “A song comes to you in crazy ways and crazy places. Somebody might have just cussed you out, or made great love to you, or given you a piece of wisdom. I cannot plan for it. I just think”—she held up the flat of her hand—“let me do it when the spirit hits!”
The first time I heard the Stax demos, I was in a studio built by Pawelski’s audio engineer, Michael Graves, in a garage behind his house in Altadena, California. Pawelski and I were slouched in wicker chairs facing a huge monitor on the wall. Graves was perched at a long desk in front of us, manipulating an iPad and an audio interface. When he played the first song—a demo of the 1966 hit “634-5789”—a spectrogram began to scroll across the screen, showing the song’s rising and falling frequencies.
Pawelski and Graves were there to master the demos for a seven-CD collection called “Written in Their Soul.” Pawelski had managed to winnow her hoard of six hundred and sixty-five songs to a hundred and forty-six. “That hurt,” she said. “That left a mark.” Fifty-eight were demos of official Stax releases; twenty-two were demos of songs on other labels; the other sixty-six were never released. “634-5789” was from the first batch. The hit version was sung by Wilson Pickett; the demo was by Eddie Floyd. Steve Cropper, who wrote the song with Floyd, played guitar on both takes, but the demo lacked the tight, chugging rhythm of the official release. The reason to hear it was Floyd. His singing had a sweet, almost bashful quality that belied the silky self-assurance underneath. Where Pickett yipped and rasped and leaped to falsetto, Floyd’s voice was full of pleading sincerity. “If you need a little lovin’, call on me,” he sang. “I’ll be right here at home.”
Graves paused the song and scrolled back through the spectrogram. He zoomed in on a jagged section where he’d heard a click—a frequency spike between five hundred and a thousand hertz—and smoothed it down. One click gone, a thousand more to go. Tall, fine-boned, and pale, with rose-gold spectacles and a tuft of blond hair, Graves worked with delicate, unhurried precision. When I first met him, in 2007, he was mastering an album of folk songs called “Art of Field Recording,” for which he later won a Grammy. (He has since won three more, two of them with Pawelski.) He dealt mostly with old 78 records back then, trying to unearth music from beneath decades of nicks and scratches and needle wear. Pawelski’s projects posed a different problem. The tracks that she collected were almost always on tape, but in a bewildering variety of formats. To play them, Graves needed a battery of devices that hadn’t been made in years. “People talk about tapes disintegrating,” he said. “They will outlive all of us. It’s the machines that are the bottleneck.” His house was a museum of obsolete technology, populated with devices of every shape and vintage: MiniDisc, Hi8, DAT, ADAT, and DTRS players, and quarter-inch, half-inch, and two-inch reel-to-reel players. “You can go down a serious rabbit hole of collecting weird, esoteric gear,” Graves said.
Without the machines, the music would be lost. But even if you had the right gear and kept it running—“The know-how to fix these machines is almost gone,” Graves said—the recordings could sound terrible. Some were made on noisy boom boxes: you could hear the thunk of the Record button. Some were transferred to digital tape at fluctuating speeds, so the music wobbled out of pitch. Some were recorded on four-track tape but were transferred to two tracks, so two songs would play at once, or one would play forward and the other backward. The newer the tape, the worse its condition. Starting in the eighties, a new adhesive was used to bind magnetic particles to tapes. This absorbed moisture over time, rendering some tapes unplayable. Digital tape was even worse. An analog recording might sound a little dull after a few years, but digital tape lost whole chunks of code. “Either the sound goes away or it’s an ear-piercing screech,” Graves said. “Whatever is trying to read that tape just says, ‘Nope.’ ”
Fortunately, he had some digital tools to compensate. If a track went silent for a few measures, Graves might clone a similar passage elsewhere in the song and drop it into the gap. If the song was missing a beginning or an end, he could create one out of a guitar riff or a drum fill. He was like a record producer working on a miniature scale. At one point, Graves pulled up a demo of a song called “Coming Together.” Written by Homer Banks and Carl Hampton, it was an earnest appeal for peace, set to a sinuous groove. “Why must bullets fly before we live as one?” Banks sang. “Why must so many die now, before we ban the guns?” Banks was a Vietnam veteran and a former gospel singer. He sang with keening conviction, but the recording was strangely muffled. Pawelski grimaced. “Now you have to unfuck that for me,” she said. Graves laughed. “My life in noise.”
He suspected that when the original tape was transferred to digital it was spooled onto the player incorrectly, flipping the tape inside out. “It sounds like a pillow was held over the speaker,” he said. He tried boosting the upper frequencies to lift the music out of the murk. That brightened the instruments but added a loud hiss. A digital de-noiser could get rid of that, Graves said, but raising the top end had also distorted the singing. To fix it, he needed a program of more recent invention, known as a de-mixer. It took the original recording and disentangled its parts, sending each instrument to a separate track. Graves could now work on the vocal line alone, clarifying the sound without distorting it. When he was done, he dropped it back into the mix and moved on to the next song.
“‘Demo’ stands for ‘demonstration,’ ” Pawelski said. “This is not going to sound like it was made last week.” Yet most of the recordings were startlingly clear. The rock and folk demos that I was used to hearing were mostly home recordings. The singer strummed a guitar, or played some chords on a piano, and mumbled a few cryptic lines into a cassette deck. These were nothing like that. All but a few of the demos were professionally recorded, in the same studios as the official Stax releases. Homer Banks, William Bell, and the other songwriters had all been singers first, and the musicians were a crack unit, always on call. Al Jackson, Jr., the drummer in the M.G.s, lived just around the corner from the studio. “It’d be two in the morning and we’d call him up, say, ‘We’ve got something going!’ ” Eddie Floyd told me. “Twenty minutes later, he’s walking through the door.”
On official releases, the arrangements were more intricate, more subtly fused: vocals, guitar, horns, and rhythm section, all interlaced in a shimmering fabric. “This music is so much about the groove, about the underlying bass and guitar,” Manuel told me. “It took a long time to get right—it could take twenty or thirty tries. It had to have that magic, the right lick for that moment, and it hooked you. You couldn’t sit still.”
The demos didn’t always have that magic, but they had their own sort of potency. These weren’t just sketches or aide-mémoire. They were audition tapes—a writer’s one chance to sell a song to an artist or a producer. Yet they were never meant to be released. Even the best songs that Pawelski found had long since been filed and forgotten. She could dust them off and restore their sound, but she sometimes had no idea who the musicians were, or who wrote the songs.
For that, she needed Deanie Parker.
“I want this to be good, but not too good,” Parker said, setting a Crockpot full of spaghetti on a table. “I don’t want them to think that they’re here to fill up.” We were standing at a buffet station in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, waiting for the other Stax songwriters to arrive. Built in 2003 on the site of the former studio, the museum is part music school, part performance space, archive, and memorabilia collection. (Booker T. Jones’s Hammond organ and Cropper’s Telecaster sat in glass cases along the walls.) Parker had swept in a few minutes earlier in black pants and a sunflower-yellow top, her shoulders wrapped in a jewel-toned silk scarf. Her hair was pure white and pulled back into a French roll, her round cheeks still unlined at seventy-six. “I’m responsible for the mood food,” she said. She took two bottles of strawberry Fanta from a shopping bag and plunked them on the table. “We’ll have to toast each other with red pop.”
An elegant older gentleman, with a snowy beard and a brocaded vest, sauntered over and lifted the lid on the Crockpot. “I hope it’s edible,” he said.
“Henderson, that was not the right thing to say.”
“What would be nice is some bologna and crackers.”
“You can get your own little freaky food.”
Henderson Thigpen was one of Parker’s early collaborators at Stax. They wrote their first song together in 1966—“It’s Catching,” sung by Mable John—when Thigpen was eighteen. He had grown up on a cotton farm in Red Banks, Mississippi, writing poetry and reciting it in the fields. “I was a mama’s boy,” he told me. As soon as he graduated from high school, he started taking the Greyhound to Memphis every weekend, just to hang around Stax and learn how to write songs. Parker eventually took him under her wing. Bobby Manuel taught him some guitar, and Thigpen went on to co-write some of the label’s last hits, including “Woman to Woman,” by Shirley Brown, which reached No. 1 in 1974. Thigpen was now seventy-five and living back on the family farm. He had come up from Mississippi at Parker’s request to help identify Pawelski’s demos. They hadn’t heard some of the songs in more than fifty years.
Pawelski walked past us on her way to the archive—she’d spent the day there, looking for photographs of the songwriters. “We just saw you partying with Janis Joplin,” she told Parker. Parker laughed and fell in behind her, along with Thigpen. “I couldn’t keep up!” she said, “When I heard about the after-party? That wasn’t my pay grade.” The pictures that Pawelski had found were mostly black-and-white, with an occasional Kodachrome thrown in. It was hard to believe that they were half a century old. The people looked so vibrantly alive: Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas, the Staple Singers, and others less known but equally dashing, draped on couches and standing on street corners, scribbling in notebooks and gathered around microphones. They wore beads and headbands, porkpie hats and department-store dresses, seemingly unaware that they were future royalty.
Deanie Parker and Bettye Crutcher, photographed in 1963, at the Rivermount Hotel in Memphis.Photograph courtesy Deanie Parker collection
“You see these really square-looking people next to really groovy-looking people,” Pawelski said. “And you think, What’s happening here? But everything in this picture is serving the music. That’s the privilege of being in those rooms. The only qualifiers are how good you are.” Bobby Manuel had joined us and was bent over Pawelski’s shoulders beside Parker and Thigpen, looking at the pictures. There was one of Manuel as a lanky young hipster in a cowboy shirt, with a scruffy mustache. He was rounder now, with silver hair and shy, thoughtful eyes, but still dapper in a suède jacket. “There’s O. B. McClinton,” he said, pointing to a rugged-looking man with long sideburns and a heavy overbite. McClinton was Stax’s only Black country artist—its answer to Charley Pride, the RCA star.
“Lord, I hated to get hung up with O.B.,” Parker said.
“He would keep you forever.”
“I did not like to shake his hand. He had the hand of a reptile. Cold!”
Music could sometimes blur the lines between genders. A good song was a good song, whether it was written by Isaac Hayes or by Bettye Crutcher. As long as women like Carla Thomas and Mavis Staples were producing hits, all the writers courted them. The demos were full of musical cross-dressing, as male songwriters sang lyrics meant for women, and vice versa. “We women work hard every day, doing our very best,” Homer Banks complained in “Too Much Sugar for a Dime.” “But you men will buy tires for your automobiles and get mad if we buy a dress.”
Still, role-play wasn’t the same as real equality. Parker’s mood food was part of a long tradition of women taking care of men at Stax. As a publicist, Parker was everyone’s champion and mother confessor. “They are interesting creatures, and you know their temperature,” she said. “I can’t remember anybody storming out of the office, but whining, yes. Whining was common. Some of us can’t accept our own failures.” Even Crutcher, who died last fall, and who was one of the label’s best and most prolific writers, sometimes needed extra leverage to get her songs heard. “Bettye was soft-spoken, and the writers protected their turf,” Parker said. “So she would cook a pot of spaghetti. That’s what she would do. And when she had finished feeding these jokers”—she arched an eyebrow at Henderson and Manuel—“they were ready to cut anything.”
The songwriters took their seats around a conference table in the museum’s main gallery. Parker, Thigpen, and Manuel sat next to a video feed of William Bell, at his home in Atlanta, wearing shades and a black baseball cap. Pawelski was beside Robert Gordon, the author of the 2013 book “Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion.” Gordon and Parker would be writing the demo collection’s liner notes together. “Are you going to doctor the demos up to make them sound better?” Thigpen wanted to know.
“I would never think to add any instrumentation,” Pawelski said.
“I just had to ask. Because I know some of those demos.”
“Henderson, let me tell you, you sound great,” Parker said. “If I hadn’t been so in love with Johnnie Taylor, I would have gone for you.” She lifted her cup of red soda and offered a toast to another forty years. Then Pawelski played the first song.
It was a girl-group number backed by a bluesy honky-tonk piano, called “You Make a Strong Girl Weak.” Isaac Hayes and David Porter were the songwriters, but who were the singers? Manuel guessed the Soul Children. Or was it Jeanne & the Darlings? “That makes every kind of sense,” Parker said. Jeanne Dolphus, the group’s leader, was a home-economics teacher from Arkansas who sewed the band’s costumes at night, she said. “They wore everything alike, and they were not fashion designers. Let me tell you something: Henderson says Mississippi is slow. Arkansas is from the dinosaur age.”
And so it went. Pawelski would play a demo, names would fly around the table—“David Porter!” “Byrd Burton!” “That’s Crop on the guitar!”—and a flood of reminiscences would follow. That jangly piano part must have been recorded in Studio C; it had an old brown upright in it. But that flabby bass sound was definitely from Studio B—it never had much bottom end. A high voice with a bit of a quaver came over the speakers, and suddenly it was as if Carl Smith, who wrote “Higher and Higher” and “Rescue Me,” was standing there in the room, with his oversized glasses and boyish grin. And that deep moan? It could only be Mack Rice, mouthing his improbable rhymes—thrown, gone, own, telephone. The longer they listened, the more the gallery around them seemed to fade, replaced by the dusky halls and echoing rooms of the old theatre. Every song was a memory palace, every instrument a key to a different door—though not always the same one for every listener.
“That sounds like Jeanne again.”
“Not unless she was taking hormones.”
At one point, Parker asked to hear “Woman to Woman,” Thigpen’s biggest hit. The song was inspired by a conversation that he’d overheard between his second wife and one of her friends. “It was just like when men say, ‘Let’s talk it out man to man,’ only this was woman to woman,” he said. In the demo, Thigpen delivered the opening monologue in a gently aggrieved voice—a wounded lover trying to talk sense into a rival: “Barbara, this is Shirley. . . . I was going through my old man’s pockets this morning, and I just happened to find your name and number. So, woman to woman . . . it’s only fair that I let you know that the man you’re in love with, he’s mine, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.”
“This is going to be on the album?”
“Yeah.”
Thigpen covered his face with his hand. But then, after a moment, his voice on the recording began to sing—a rich, warm baritone with a delicate vibrato: “Woman to woman, can’t you see where I’m coming from? Woman to woman, ain’t that the same thing you would’ve done?” The other songwriters were snapping their fingers now, as the bass and the drums found their groove and Thigpen’s voice rose to a soft, clear falsetto. He looked up and grinned. “That’s the money note right there,” he said.
“Woman to Woman” was the studio’s final hit. A year and a half later, Stax was forced into bankruptcy, done in by mounting debt, bad distribution deals, lawsuits, and accusations of bank fraud and tax evasion. Federal marshals served an eviction order on January 12, 1976, while Manuel was rehearsing in the studio. They marched him and the other employees to the parking lot in single file, with Jim Stewart in front, and padlocked the doors behind them. Parker’s utopia was long gone. The dream of music as a refuge from racism and violence was always a fragile thing. At Stax, it was shattered eight years earlier, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel—the same place where so many songwriters, Black and white, had done their best work together.
On the night that King was shot, Parker and Crutcher went to the studio to work on a song for Albert King. “I had to get to Stax,” Parker later said. “I didn’t even think about stopping at home. I needed to be with the people I loved, the people I trusted—with the people who could understand what I was feeling.” A curfew had been declared to prevent rioting, and Parker could hear the National Guard walking on the roof above the studio. If the soldiers hadn’t discovered them and sent them home, she says, she and Crutcher would have kept writing through the night.
The Stax demos traced the full arc of that history—from hope and denial to disillusion and protest. The songs were messy, unfiltered, incomplete. The voices faltered and the musicians missed notes. By the end of our session at the museum, no one doubted that the demos were worth releasing. But the question remained: Why now and not then? What was missing from these songs in the first place?
Earlier that week, I had gone to see Steve Cropper in Nashville, where he now lives. He was too busy to come to the museum, he said, and wasn’t especially interested in hearing the demos: “If I’d known they’d release them, I would have erased them.” Tall and craggy, with a balding pate, a white beard, and a ponytail, Cropper looked like an old moonshiner, or an elder in some austere religious sect, but he spoke with easy, self-deprecating bluntness. He was a ubiquitous figure in the stories about Stax—hanging around the studio at all hours, playing guitar or running the board, pairing up with other writers at will, like a free radical in a pool of more stable molecules. “Cropper was convenient,” Parker told me. “He was always around. Did he help with my lyrics? Not a lot. But he would fill in the pieces that were missing. He could sharpen your song. He was like the shoelaces on the shoe—ain’t no good if the shoe doesn’t hold together.”
Cropper had the same refining touch on the guitar. He wasn’t a flashy player, but he knew just what a tune needed—whether a quick rockabilly fill or the two-note slide at the beginning of “Soul Man.” Cropper was always working on new material. When we met, he was recording a tune with his engineer, Eddie Gore, in the historic RCA Studio A building, where Chet Atkins and Jerry Lee Lewis used to record. He was hoping to pitch his song to Shemekia Copeland, who’d had a minor hit with a chorus that began, “I’m drivin’ out of Nashville with a body in the trunk.” Cropper’s song was of a milder sort. He’d come up with the idea at a bar down the street, watching a young woman dance in shoes that were too big for her. He and Gore had recorded the demo that day—an easy, mid-tempo ballad, with Cropper’s voice croaking amiably over the beat:
Now I’m dancing in my mother’s shoes
Looking for someone to hold on to
Wondering what Mama would do
Now that I’m dancing in my mama’s shoes.
“I know I can’t sing,” he said, switching off the tape. “I can write a pretty good song, but I can’t sing shit from Shinola.” But then this demo was never meant to be heard—not by the public anyway. As long as Copeland, or some other singer, could hear the gist of the song in the demo, it had done its work. Cropper was a perfectionist by nature, a fixer, a finisher. He had no patience for rough edges or unruly inspiration. Look at “Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks, Gore said. When that song, written by Dewayne Blackwell and Earl Bud Lee, became a smash in the late eighties, everyone assumed that it was a surefire hit. Who could resist that melody and title? But another singer, David Wayne Chamberlain, had recorded the song before Brooks did, and no one bought it. Success was all in the execution. “As far as I’m concerned, anything I write can be a hit,” Cropper said.
The Stax demos tell a different story. It’s hard not to feel, as you listen to them, that success is arbitrary, ephemeral. That inspiration is what lasts. Toward the end of the session in the museum, Pawelski played a recording that no one could identify. The singer’s name wasn’t written down, and he never sang at Stax again. Pawelski suspected that the demo was taped at one of the “neighborhood auditions” that the studio held on Saturday afternoons, open to anyone with a song. “Was on a cold Saturday night and we just had a fight,” the singer began. “You walked out on me, knowing that you killed my heart with grief.” His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter. He sounded hopeless, abandoned, as if he knew that there was no point in begging, but he couldn’t help but do so. “Just walk on back,” he sang, and a pair of voices joined in to help carry the tune. “Walk on back. I don’t care how long it takes if you just walk on back.”
It was only one song, salvaged from a pile of old rejects. The arrangement was simple, the artist unknown. But if it lacked the polish of a full Stax production, it had something more elemental: urgency and need. Like Parker and Thigpen, this singer knew that he had one chance to be heard. One chance to strip a song to its essence. He and his bandmates must have practiced for days, in a bedroom or a basement or on an empty street corner, till their harmonies chimed like bells and their voices dipped and swooped in perfect synchrony. “Walk on baa-aack.” For just one take, they sounded as good as anyone. “That first take had the feel,” Eddie Floyd told me. “The way I thought of it, every song was a demo. It was always the first time.” ♦
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