The Intertwined History of Music and Race in America

To watch Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A. is to be an intimate witness to music and civil rights history. HBO Max’s four-part documentary series tells the dramatic tale of Stax Records, a legendary Memphis-based label whose ups and downs mirrored American race relations in the 1960s and beyond.

Founded in the late ‘50s by white siblings Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton to record country music, the label soon pivoted to the soul and R&B that the local kids who worked in Axton’s record store were listening to. Both the store and the label were an integrated oasis in a still-segregated South as protesters agitated and brave Black kids began attending white schools to enforce the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Through rarely and never-before-seen archival footage, home movies, and photographs, the Peabody-winning Stax takes viewers into the rooms where this magic happened, as Black and white musicians harmonized and improvised together and Black and white executives worked together to get their music to the masses. We hear about the spontaneous creation of the iconic instrumental “Green Onions”—with a fascinating side of the music theory that made it special—and the hasty naming of the band who made it, Booker T. and the M.G.s, only after they realized they had a hit on their hands. We’re there as a singer named Otis Redding shows up asking for an audition, and promptly blows everyone away with his emotional singing. As the story progresses, however, we also witness the ways that white executives at major labels repeatedly swindle control out from under Stax and its artists (with a strong assist from Stewart’s aversion to reading contracts). Stax ultimately filed for bankruptcy in the ‘70s, but not before recording legends such as Sam & Dave, as well as Isaac Hayes in his triumphant Hot Buttered Soul and Shaft soundtrack era. (It eventually revived as a re-issue label and with more recent artists including Angie Stone, Ben Harper, and Nikka Costa.)

Despite Stax’s origin story as a racial utopia, the series shows the ways that race could still divide coworkers. Stewart was shocked when he had to accompany the label’s first breakout star, Black singer Carla Thomas, to a meeting on an upper hotel floor via the freight elevator because she wasn’t allowed in the guest elevator. (Thomas, who was used to living in the South as a Black person, was less surprised.) Later, Booker T. Jones noted that his white colleagues didn’t ask him how he felt after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and in fact did not mention it at all. “I started to feel, deep down, that something was amiss,” he says. “They didn’t understand my daily life as a Black person.” He realized that “the close personal relationship I had with them didn’t exist outside of the studio.”

The story of Stax shows how complicated American race relations truly are, even among people with utopian beginnings and a vision of harmonious integration. And it’s a story that mirrors much of America’s ongoing reckoning among race, capitalism, and art.

Where to Watch: HBO Max