Taking off again

A pivotal year for a record label, and a city, as seen through the prism of 72 singles released half a century ago. By

BARELY HAD Stax, Memphis and soul music in general fully absorbed the loss of Otis Redding in December 1967, than Martin Luther King was assassinated in the city in April 1968, in the hotel where Stax songwriters, black and white together, conjured hits. Riots flared, further undermining the city’s parlous race relations outside the label. As if those two hammer blows were not enough, Stax’s distribution deal with Atlantic came to an end, its fine print spelling out that the invaluable back catalogue was now owned by the New York label and Stax’s main act postRedding, Sam & Dave, also reverted to their parent label. Potentially fatal to Stax, these tragic and damaging setbacks did not stifle or even dim the quality of music made there in ’68 – by coincidence Motown were also stuttering from Detroit riots and their contemporaneous loss of the Holland-DozierHolland hit machine. On the first of the five discs encompassing Stax’s 72 singles of 1968, Otis and Sam & Dave sign off, but Eddie Floyd, William Bell and Johnnie Taylor step up; on disc two, Isaac Hayes debuts, and would become Stax’s commercial saviour as he grew from studio keysman to Black Moses. Floyd (with Big Bird) and Bell (on B-side Tribute To A King) honoured Otis, while the label assimilated the politically charged times into statement 45s as The Staple Singers hardened the gospel-folk of their Epic years into socially engaged soul-protest on Long Walk To DC, commemorating MLK’s March on Washington, his passing, and civil rights’ increasing militancy. Their redemptive The Ghetto b/w the optimistic Got To Be Some Changes Made is social protest that is without anger, but steadfast. Stax again tried to expand from its soul-pop constituency into country (eg, locally popular rockabilly/country singer Billy Lee Riley, who in ’68 also recorded as Daaron Lee); jazz (Eddie Henderson); rock (Delaney & Bonnie, Southwest F.O.B.); soul-pop (Linda Lyndell) and, most successfully, blues (Albert King). But irrefutably, soul was the message: William Bell’s poignant I Forgot To Be Your Lover and, with Judy Clay, Private Number; Eddie Floyd’s more exuberant I Never Found A Girl (To Love Me Like You Do); underrated harmonisers such as The Mad Lads and The Epsilons. Just as Otis had grown from the soil that cultivated Little Richard, Johnnie Taylor was a shoot from the Sam Cooke gospel tree, and ’68 established this exceptional gospel-blues voice as Stax’s next true soul man: I Ain’t Particular, Who’s Making Love, Take Care Of Your Homework, all sound advice from the Soul Philosopher. Memphis had burned, but for a while, Stax stayed cool.