Television Review | ’Respect Yourself’: Cutting A Tumultuous Era’s Soul Soundtrack

One day in the early 1960s, a young man who worked as driver and baggage handler for a group called Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers lugged its instruments into the studios of Stax Records in Memphis, where the band was scheduled for a recording session. As it happened, the young man sang too — in a husky tenor — and spent his idle hours that afternoon begging people to hand him a mike.

More about Stax Records on pbs.org Stax Records

Otis Redding

Isaac Hayes

Carla Thomas

By the end of the day, no one had given him a shot, and the labels founder Jim Stewart felt guilty. Mr. Stewart was simply that kind of guy. The task of hearing out the eager aspirant fell begrudgingly to Steve Cropper, guitarist for Booker T. & the MGs, one of the labels popular bands. As Mr. Cropper tells it in Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, a Great Performances documentary tonight on PBS: He started singing These Arms of Mine, and I know my hair lifted out about three inches. I couldnt believe this guys voice. It belonged to Otis Redding.

Reddings death in a plane crash in Wisconsin in 1967 — he was just 26 — was one of the many setbacks the Stax label would endure. Ill-conceived distribution deals and the ouster of Clive Davis at CBS, with whom Stax had a fortunate relationship, were others. By the mid-1970s, the label was in bankruptcy and fated for an undeserved obscurity among the wider world beyond the fans of R&B.

Stax, eventually owned by the marketing innovator Al Bell, gave birth to the Memphis Sound — a funkier, less refined analogue to Detroit soul — and some of the most influential recordings of the 1960s: Soul Man, Respect (written by Redding), (Sittin on) the Dock of the Bay and Whos Making Love?, among many others. It has not, however, shared Motown Records sustained celebrity. That this constitutes one of the crimes of American music history is an argument Respect Yourself makes by the pure virtue of its narrative.

The label came to life in the late 1950s when Mr. Stewart, a white bank teller, and his sister Estelle Axton took over an old movie theater in a Memphis neighborhood that was becoming predominantly African-American, with plans to use it as a studio. Mr. Stewarts interest in music initially did not extend beyond country. But, as he points out here, The wind blew in, and we were smart enough not to fight it.

The wind came in the form of R&B, and Stax helped create a hurricane. Stax completely ignored segregation in a city where the public pool chose to shut down rather than abide by an order to allow blacks and whites to swim together. Booker T. & the MGs was a marriage between Booker T. Jones and other black musicians and the white members of the Mar-Keys. They met and began talking at the Stax record shop, run by Ms. Axton, which operated next to the studio in what had been the movie theaters concession stand.

With the exceptions of people like Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes, many of the Stax artists remain unfamiliar to the public now, a problem that cannot be explained solely by the labels twisted financial fortunes. While Carla Thomas and her father, Rufus, for instance, are fairly well known, many Americans would be hard pressed to cite a single one of their songs or identify either of them in an MTV lineup.

There is a poignant story to be told in the absence of these artists from our collective cultural memory and, regrettably, Respect Yourself leaves it aside. Still, this documentary provides an essential account of auteurism in one of American musics greatest eras.

RESPECT YOURSELF

The Stax Records Story

On most PBS stations tonight (check local listings).

David Horn, executive producer; Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, producers/directors; John Walker, series producer for music; Bill ODonnell, director of program development. Produced by Tremolo Productions, Concord Music Group and Thirteen/WNET New York.

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