
Soul Witness
For most of Stax Records’ initial run, from roughly 1961 to 1975, its headquarters on Memphis, Tennessee’s McLemore Avenue was the capitol building of southern soul. It wasn’t just a record label, but the headquarters of a creative movement: the place where an integrated (in multiple senses) cluster of artists and businesspeople created a new kind of popular music, sold it to the world, and tried to unite their divided community by example.
That’s a compelling story, and Robert Gordon’s well placed to tell it: He’s a historian of Memphis music, and the codirector of a 2007 PBS documentary