"Take the Service Elevator."
"America has come a long way on the issue of race relations over the last 65 years. But anyone who doesn’t think it still has a long way to go is either uninformed or willfully blind."
Decades before Carla Thomas was dubbed “The Queen of Memphis Soul,” she was just a teenager who wrote short stories, poems, and sometimes song lyrics as she sat at the piano. She and her father, Rufus Thomas, worked for a small music recording company that had just launched in Memphis, Stax Records.
A man named Jim Stewart started the company out of his garage, then brought his sister, Estelle Axton, in as an investor/cofounder and rented out larger space and an adjoining record shop. Stewart loved country music, and that’s what he aimed to produce. But it didn’t catch on.
Soon Stewart was swayed by local Black musicians to start recording their music. The depth and breadth of local talent in town was insane; all they needed was a shot. And Stewart needed to put down some sound that would sell. This story is told in the first episode of the new HBO docuseries, STAX: Soulville, U.S.A.
Eventually, Stax would work with magnificent soul artists to create some of the best music of the 20th Century, including records by Otis Redding, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers… It’s a long list.
But one of the company’s very first big hits that got the ball rolling all started when Stewart said to Thomas one day: “Well, you think you might want to cut something by yourself?”
Thomas had written Gee Whiz in about 20 minutes at her home piano, and she cut it at Stax. Stewart was a white country music lover and the Thomas’s were Black soul/R&B musicians. It mattered not. They got along famously. All of the musicians and artists did, regardless of color or background. Ironically, Steve (“The Colonel”) Cropper, a white guitarist and producer who worked on records at Stax — would join the all-white Blues Brothers in the late 70s — and play covers of many of the songs that were produced by Stax and other soul artists back in the 50s and 60s! (Sam & Dave songs were all over The Blues Brothers slapstick musical comedy of 1980).
It is not lost on me that the preceding paragraph touches upon the historical reality that many white musicians and businesspeople leveraged — some would say “stole” — plenty of Black artists’ creativity. And I’ve written about this. It goes all the way back to 1830 when a struggling white actor named Thomas Dartmouth Rice overheard a Black stablehand singing a song — and then changed the lyrics and sung it on stage. In Blackface. The name of the man who owned the property was Jim Crow.
One hundred and thirty years later, Carla Thomas was an emerging star at Stax. She was incredibly excited, especially after the owner of Atlantic Records in New York, Jerry Wexler, called Stewart and offered to sign the Thomas’s and mass distribute “Gee Whiz.”
Wexler traveled to Memphis and invited father, daughter and Stewart to have dinner in his hotel room. But the year was 1960, and when the trio arrived, hotel management told them that because they were Black, they could not enter the lobby or any common space. They were told that their only option was to take the freight elevator.
Rufus Thomas was an adult who’d run into plenty of this before. But Carla was just 17. Jim Stewart describes how mortified he felt — because of how mortifying it was for Carla:
“I rode up with Carla in the freight elevator. I didn’t know what to say. I put her in this situation, through no fault of her own. I’ve never been more embarrassed in my life.”
As I watched this first episode of the docuseries, at various points I found myself wondering: Would Cropper and Stewart and Axton have developed such close friendships with so many of their Black colleagues if they weren’t colleagues? If they didn’t have this common artistic passion and also the drive to make a living through the work they were all partnering on?
That question is in no way a judgment about any of them. For all I know they already had many Black friends. But I doubt it. The fact is that through our country’s fraught racial history, Blacks and whites are wired to notice our differences — even when we’re not conscious of it. It was fascinating to see when the Stax artists went to perform in London, played incredible shows — and described their surprise at being treated as equals. Sam Moore says “it was the first time we felt really free.”
In my own life, there’s no question that the deep bonds I’ve made with Black friends all started once we realized what we had in common. And each time, it began with what ideas we believed in and what we were working toward. Then came the laughs, chemistry and trust.
America has come a long way on the issue of race relations over the last 65 years. But anyone who doesn’t think it still has a long way to go is either uninformed or willfully blind.
I can’t wait to watch the next few episodes of Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A. I’d be shocked if there if aren’t many more examples of much deeper strife. The first installment was pretty Kumbaya. But either way, there are more lessons to learn. From the good and the bad. Always.
Meanwhile, just one final thought on this Juneteenth: Long live The Queen of Memphis Soul!