Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Rufus’s simple act of entering on his own terms was actually no simple act at all. As James Baldwin wrote: “[W]hen the black man, whose destiny and identity has always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will reject the identity imposed on him, and control his own destiny, he is talking revolution.”

  A revolt of that very nature was fomenting in public on the streets of Memphis. The fear of arrest, and the certain brutality in jail, had quelled activism for generations. But after serving the country in World War II and the Korean War, the black community had a new sense of entitlement. At the start of February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, a sit-in of four students at a white lunch counter grew to three hundred protestors in less than a week; shortly thereafter, Memphis students began a series of similar direct actions, forcibly integrating lunch counters, public libraries, and the art museum. Ministers joined, urging African-Americans to make their economic contributions felt by boycotting downtown businesses on Mondays and Thursdays. Even the most devalued were rumbling. The sanitation department employees worked the worst job in the worst conditions for the worst pay. Many of the department’s full-time employees were eligible for welfare, and many had been there for decades because they knew that, lacking education, lacking training and skills, hauling garbage was as far as they’d go in Memphis jobs. (The head of the Department of Public Works in the latter 1950s, Henry Loeb, had taken to hiring black men with arrest records, knowing they’d have fewer options and thus would be easily victimized.) So the headline on February 6, 1960, stating SANITATION MEN WANT MORE PAY became a call to action; if the garbagemen were standing up for themselves, then many of the city’s African-Americans who’d been afraid to publicly demonstrate had to take stock.

  When organizers in 1960 began to unionize the sanitation workers, the city’s new mayor, that same Henry Loeb, responded that he would dissolve the department and hire private contractors before he’d recognize a union—despite the city’s recognition of unions for white-skinned white-collar workers, including those in the sanitation department. Six weeks later, the black public’s anger had increased: NEGROES AT FEVER PITCH. An interracial citizens’ council was formed, and desegregation of public facilities began in earnest, though slowly. The progress at the sanitation department was negligible.

  Rufus meeting Jim on McLemore was taking place five years after the nearby Emmett Till murder; three years after the Little Rock Nine defied the city and upheld the nation’s law, integrating their Central High School. It was four years before the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act forbidding hotels, restaurants, gas stations, theaters, and the like to segregate or discriminate “on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” It was five years before the Voting Rights Act, which was passed to buttress the Fifteenth Amendment, created ninety-five years earlier.

  The entertainment culture, music particularly, moved at a faster pace than social changes. The year prior to Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, in Memphis a white kid had embraced the disenfranchised culture of blacks, recording songs in their musical style—white and black musical styles were decidedly distinct then—and Elvis Presley’s popularity had soared. Adjacent to a 1960 newspaper article about the expanding protests on Main Street is an advertisement for one of the city’s most prominent record stores, Pop Tunes, with the simple statement RECORDS FOR EVERYONE.

  Social issues were not on Jim’s mind when he leased the Capitol, but music was. While Stax was getting into rhythm and blues, rhythm and blues was working its way into Jim. The only music by African-Americans that he’d ever heard had been on warm 1940s evenings as a teenager in Middleton, when he and a date would sit outside the black church near town and listen to the congregation sing. Both soul music and rhythm and blues would grow from church music, reworking the exuberant spirit and exulting lyrics into secular songs. For Jim, Elvis had not done the trick in the middle 1950s, and if his passion for Bob Wills had unwittingly introduced him to blues styles and roots, his conversion to black music had not come until 1959. In the wake of his lone studio success with the Veltones, Jim had shifted his radio dial. “You’re going to listen to the station that plays your records,” he says. “I listened to WDIA and WLOK and I became exposed to black music. When I heard a record called ‘What’d I Say’ by Ray Charles”—the sense of wonder remains in Jim’s voice decades after the fact—“I was baptized in soul music and I never looked back. When I heard that record it was like a lightning bolt hit me, something I never, never felt before. And that’s what I wanted to do, that’s where I wanted to go.” Jim was responding not only to the record’s exciting energy, but also to the deep sense of character that the artist imbued in the music. Like Bob Wills, Ray’s music was embossed with his personality. And that’s why Jim will always discover new talent—he’s not listening for what sounds hot, he’s listening for the individual. In 1960, Jim heard Ray’s new live record, In Person. “That really blew me away. Like the addict, that was the second fix and I was gone, hooked, never looked back from there.” His musical landscape was about to synchronize with his studio’s physical geography.

  Rufus reacquainted himself with Jim Stewart and introduced his daughter Carla. Jim showed them the studio that was still taking shape. With Chips Moman, he’d been honing the system, recording Royal Spades rehearsals. They’d gotten to where they could produce radio commercials, and, as Tally had already discovered, they were amenable to being a demo facility for the local professional talent. In addition to the R&B players, they still worked with some of the rockabilly cats, fishing around for something that sounded right. Jim knew about Rufus’s Sun hit, so when Rufus inquired about recording, it was music to Jim’s ears. “When you have a recording studio, you always have disc jockeys that come in,” says Estelle. “You want to take a chance on them because maybe they’ll play some of your other records.”

  Not long after—the very next day, by some accounts—Rufus was at Satellite with Carla, his piano-playing son Marvell (then eighteen years old), and Bob Tally’s band, featuring seventeen-year-old drummer Howard Grimes (who would later achieve fame on Al Green’s records as a member of the Hi Records rhythm section). “I had a little four-piece group and we took Rufus Thomas into the studio,” says Tally. “We had this tune we worked on, ‘Deep Down Inside,’ and we got it down so they would record it. And then they had to have another song for the flip side.”

  “Daddy had to stay right in the studio and write the other side,” Carla remembers. “Jim said, ‘Let’s cut—let’s keep going so we can get both sides.’ That’s Jim: ‘While we’re on a roll, let’s go.’”

  “Rufus,” says Estelle, “he always had a song.”

  This song would announce the new studio’s presence, and would introduce a young Booker T. Jones to his future career. “On this song Rufus was coming up with,” says Tally, “I had the rhythm to play a certain way. Do you remember a record called ‘Ooh Poo Pah Doo’? The feel of that rhythm is what I had them do.” Once the drums and bass found the groove, the others could fall in. Marvell was on the piano, so Tally played trumpet; he realized it would sound great with a baritone sax. The vocalist for Tally’s band, David Porter (soon to be one of Stax’s main songwriters), knew a baritone sax player. David was an eager and ambitious young man skipping a day of twelfth grade because he wasn’t going to miss the chance to be in a recording studio.

  “I was in eleventh-grade algebra class and David Porter comes with a hall pass and tells the teacher the band director wants to see me,” remembers Booker T. Jones. “David had been singing around the high school and in male vocal groups. We were friends. David had the keys to the bandmaster’s car—Mr. Martin would let David borrow it. It was a ’57 Plymouth, had a lot of pickup. The music-room key was on the same chain, and the baritone sax was in the same room as the bass I always borrowed. David said, ‘Go get your horn, we’re going over to the studio on McLemore.’ I had heard the music coming from behind the curtain while I
listened to hundreds of records in the store. I would hang around for hours, and I knew there was something going on back there, but I had never put my foot through the door. So down we went to get the baritone sax out of the instrument room and into the borrowed car and over to Satellite Records and through the door, and there I was.”

  “I knew he could play guitar and trombone and all of this,” says Tally, “so we gave him the baritone sax.”

  Booker made the most of his opportunity. “Steve [Cropper] played guitar on that Rufus Thomas session,” says Booker. “I knew him because he was the clerk at the Satellite Record Shop. We didn’t have a lot of interaction [on the session] because I was behind a baffle [sound divider] with a little window. But he was the guy. Before I left, I made sure that Steve and Chips Moman knew that I could play piano.” Moman was recording the session. (Though Carla remembers Jim being there, he may not have arrived until the first song was nearly done; if Booker was being pulled out of class, Jim was likely still at the bank. Moman remembers playing the track for Jim that evening.)

  The new studio had its first record, the playful “’Cause I Love You,” a back-and-forth between Rufus and Carla, with great dynamic breaks for the piano and baritone sax. Rufus, always a little bit of a clown, is endearing as the man who wants his woman back; Carla sounds very adult (she’d been singing onstage with WDIA’s high school singing group, the Teen Town Singers), and the rhythm evokes the exchange between New Orleans and Memphis.

  “We didn’t sit down and say, ‘We’re going with black music,’” says Jim. “‘R&B’ was a foreign word to me. It happened quickly, but not in a manner that was conscious and direct.” The gears of the unimagined machine began to turn when calls came in to the record shop asking for this new song, “’Cause I Love You.” The calls indicated that people were hearing the song and that the store was becoming established in the neighborhood; they weren’t associating the song with the studio in the back, they were just hunting down something they wanted to own. “Locally, we sold four or five thousand records in a couple weeks’ time. We’d never sold that many records on anything.” Rufus’s job at WDIA gave the record a solid tie-in there. “It was so loose back then,” Jim continues. “There was no program director. It was about the friendship with the individual jocks. They played what they wanted to play—as long and as many times as they wanted to play it. It was not uncommon to hear a record played five times consecutively. It was easy to get exposure, especially with black radio. So between DIA and LOK, we broke the record locally. Then Rufus had contacts through the Sonderling Broadcasting chain—he sent the record to San Francisco, it started getting action.”

  Jim rode the wave as best he could, expanding his promotion outside the city limits. He found stations east of Memphis in Tennessee, others in nearby Mississippi and Alabama. “Some stations we’d just find the call letters and send the records out,” he says. He and Rufus hit the highway, delivering some in person, hoping the extra attention would be repaid. “So,” says Jim, “we had a local hit.”

  Small independent labels were an essential part of the record industry ecosystem. Able to mine talent in their neighborhoods, cities, and regions, these businesses may have had national aspirations, but they functioned on a local level. Recording a song that sounded like a hit was much easier than distributing enough of those records to make it sell like a hit. And more than one label went broke from a hit, going into debt to keep up with demand, then finding out that distributors who’d ordered all those records wouldn’t pay. The way up and out for the indie was through allying with an established national label. RCA and Columbia, for example, were machines that could readily sell millions of records—the new seven-inch 45s, twelve-inch LPs, and ten-inch 78s—not only in America but also across the globe. An indie would send the master tape of the song to the national label, and the national would incur the costs of manufacturing and distributing; in return, they’d take the lion’s share of the revenue, paying a royalty—10 to 15 percent—to the indie. Smaller labels—Chess in Chicago, Jewel in Shreveport, Dot near Nashville—beat the bushes to find local talent. In many instances, they were farm teams: Memphis’s Sun Records couldn’t keep up with Elvis’s popularity and sold his contract to RCA; Johnny Cash made his name on Sun, but made his money at Columbia.

  At Atlantic Records in New York City, Ahmet Ertegun and his brother Nesuhi, sons of America’s first ambassador from Turkey, began building a label that specialized in rhythm and blues. The more established labels didn’t believe the African-American market had enough disposable cash to warrant cultivating; Ahmet, along with his brother and partners Herb Abramson and Jerry Wexler, recognized that their burgeoning popularity was taking it into the white market (first through publishing—the original songs being covered by whites, then by the black artists breaking through). Paramount Records had begun because its parent company manufactured phonographs and it needed product to play; Warner Bros. Records began as an outlet for its movie stars and soundtracks. Atlantic began because it loved the music. As its success mounted—with Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner—Atlantic could afford to buy up smaller labels, or sign distribution contracts with them. Smaller and poorer than the major labels, its distribution network cobbled together like a patchwork, Atlantic became an indie that functioned on a national scale.

  In Memphis, Atlantic’s distributor was an entrepreneur named Robert “Buster” Williams. He’d fallen into the music business through the vending machine industry. First he sold peanuts at local football games in Enterprise, Mississippi; that led to snack machines, which took him to jukeboxes, and in short order he had a record-pressing plant, Plastic Products in Memphis, which sold records to his distributorship, Music Sales, which sold records to his jukebox company, Williams Distributing. He would make a profit three times on the same record (twice before it left the warehouse), and soon Buster was a ready friend for younger record entrepreneurs like Jim Stewart, extending easy credit on the condition that if any money came in, he’d be paid first—which was easy to enforce since Buster’s distribution company was collecting the proceeds that would go to Jim.

  Sales of Jim’s “’Cause I Love You” were brisk enough for the Music Sales staff to notice, and when an Atlantic Records promotions man came through, they brought it to his attention. In short order, Jim’s phone rang and on the other end was Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records. Wexler’s name may have meant little to Jim, but Atlantic’s name meant a lot—they were the company that released the Ray Charles lightning bolts! When Wexler identified himself as producer of Ray’s “What’d I Say,” Jim realized the call’s significance. “I didn’t know what label distribution was, or a production deal,” Jim says. “The royalty rate Wexler offered was so small that it’s unreal, but it was a start. And that was big time for me.” Atlantic paid Satellite $5,000; the exact nature of that five grand was not etched into the lines of the handshake, and its vagueness would later cause significant problems. One thing Atlantic definitely got for its money was the opportunity to pick up any future records with Rufus and Carla. They released that first one on the Atlantic subsidiary label Atco. The record’s success, the interaction with Wexler—Jim was bitten. “From there,” says Jim, “it just sort of mushroomed.”

  It all sounds very matter of course, but it can take years for this series of events to fall into place. There were record labels working out of garages and living rooms all across America, and many great songs never found their way up for air, so receiving a call from Wexler was a very big deal, and hearing him say you’d done something that he wanted a piece of was a significant indication that you were doing something right.

  Not that that made Jim’s work any easier. Jim was working his day job at the bank, nights and weekends at the studio, and also gigging in clubs. (Steve says Jim used to sit up nights and calculate royalties down to the penny.) Word about his facility was getting out—the room was large and the sound was good—so musicians would book time there to cut demos,
the small-change payment reverberating through the empty coffers. Someone might find an account and they’d cut a furniture commercial or radio spot of some kind for cheap. Chips, who was overseeing the studio while Jim was at work, ran deep in the music community and could pull together a jam session, and had an ear for pulling songs from rough ideas. “Usually it was just someone that would walk in,” Moman remembers. “That’s how David Porter came in. And William Bell. After school was out, Booker would come in wearing an ROTC uniform—him and David Porter. We’d just start recording. When Jim would get off in the evenings, I’d play him what I did that day.”

  When no one else was there, the Royal Spades were ready to make noise. “Hanging out there was like going to Disneyland every day,” says Don Nix, who often came in earlier than the other kids because he’d either skipped school or been kicked out. “What a education that was. If you didn’t do anything else, you stood in the record shop and listened to records. And every day was something new. Jim didn’t know anything about recording equipment, and I’m not sure that Chips knew that much—just enough to get a one-track machine and some microphones up and running, kind of hit-and-miss. There was a lot of recordings at Stax that never saw the light of day. They weren’t all hits, and some of them weren’t even records. But there was always somebody cutting something. You’re at the right place at the right time and the right stuff happened.”

  When Estelle opened her record counter, Steve Cropper quit his job at a grocery store to work for her. Steve was always more serious than the other guys in the Royal Spades; he was a natural leader, he had a tendency toward the staid and reserved, but like his bandmates, he liked his music loose and fun. He was attending college and may not have been anticipating a career in records, but he knew that working at Satellite kept him closer to the studio than the grocery did. “We didn’t get paid very much for playing music in those days,” Steve says, “and I had to eat. I talked to Miz Axton about working in the record shop, and my main reason for that was to be close to the studio—that’s what I wanted to do.”