This Saturday, July 29, would have been Jim Stewart’s 93rd birthday had he not passed away last December, and so we linger a while longer at the doorstep of Stax Records to pay tribute to the man who started it all. With the Stax Museum of American Soul Music celebrating its 20th anniversary all this year, and fast on the heels of Stax Music Academy’s triumph at the Lincoln Center, it seems a fitting time to honor Stewart, whose unorthodox vision led him to recruit his sister, Estelle Axton, to invest in recording equipment for a storage space he’d rented in Brunswick, Tennessee, back in 1957. That would become the first studio for what was then called Satellite Records.
His no-nonsense manner didn’t mark him as a firebrand, but his quiet determination made him a maverick of sorts in West Tennessee, as Stewart “had to stand before the [Brunswick] town council and testify to his own integrity, and promise that drug addicts, thieves, and other lowlifes attracted to the music business would not infiltrate the crossroads and poison the minds of Brunswick’s fine children,” Robert Gordon writes in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. As it turned out, defending his business before the Brunswick town council was just the beginning of his trials.
That was foremost in the mind of Deanie Parker when reminiscing about Stewart recently. Parker, who started as a songwriter and singer at Stax before becoming the label’s chief publicist, worked with Stewart during the 1960s and ’70s, and knew him well. Recalling those days of racial segregation, Parker noted that creating a safe space for Black and white artists to work together came at a price.
“I can clearly remember Jim standing out in front of his own damn business under the marquee,” Parker says, “talking to his Black artists, only to have a white policeman come up and tell him, ‘Get your ass out of here, you can’t be talking to these Black people. No! That’s not going to happen out here in front of this building on McLemore Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee!’ I don’t remember if it was Isaac or Otis that Jim was talking to, but it was one of them. And Jim tried to reason with the police and the officer said, ‘I tell you what, I’ll just take your ass down and lock you up.’ So he was not liked. He was not respected. I don’t think he was encouraged. I never heard any white person say they appreciated him except for the people he worked with. That’s a lot to swallow. One thing he never got over was, in the end, Jim did not have a social circle. The white friends that he had, I bet you could count them on one hand.”
Nonetheless, he persisted. Indeed, Parker credits Stewart with initiating both the professionalism and the multiculturalism of Stax. “It really was about him,” she says. “Because if he had not been who he was, we would not have had the place, the resources, the encouragement, or even the demands to ‘Do it again, play that again — somebody’s out of tune!’ ‘No, it ain’t right yet!’ Jim would say. That was the discipline he had and demanded of us. Without that, it would never have happened. Stax was like a garden spot. It was a utopia where we could feel safe, all of us working together, playing together, learning about each other together. Being creative and making a decent living … in Memphis, Tennessee!”
The struggle to keep that spirit alive, and the forced bankruptcy that caused the label to fold in 1975, haunted Stewart for decades. “The privileged and powerful in Memphis had something else in mind for Stax Records,” says Parker ominously, and Stewart took the label’s demise personally. When Parker later took up the cause of creating a Stax museum and music academy, Stewart was less than gung-ho. “Jim had not healed,” she says. “He had not gotten over his feelings of disappointment and feeling, I’m sure, that every good deed he did was punished.”
Finally, after the museum and Stax Music Academy were underway, Parker sensed the moment when Stewart embraced them. “It happened when he saw how that Stax Music Academy was training the next generation of people to learn and respect and preserve the music that he had made possible on that corner. When we were able to get him there to witness the students, he was never the same.”
