'The Last Soul Company'
New book tells story of Malaco Records
MEMPHIS – For over half a century Jackson, Mississippi-based label Malaco Records has been an undeniable force in Black music. With a roster of R&B kings (Little Milton, Bobby “Blue” Bland), soulblues masters (Johnnie Taylor, Denise Lasalle) and gospel greats (The Jackson Southernaires, The Soul Stirrers), Malaco’s catalog has been an essential repository of African American musical history — and continues to connect with contemporary audiences via high-profile hip-hop samples by artists like Drake and Kanye West.
And yet, outside of a small fiercely loyal fanbase and a handful of music aficionados, the label remains relatively unknown in the wider world. A new illustrated book, titled “The Last Soul Company: The Story of Malaco Records,” seeks to give the label its proper due.
“When I tell people Malaco has been around for 50 years, when I tell them it’s the longest-running independent label in American music history, and it’s the world’s biggest Black gospel label, they’re like, ‘Really?’ ” says Rob Bowman, author of “The Last Soul Company.”
Founded by partners Tommy Couch Sr., Wolf Stephenson and Mitchell Malouf in the late 1960s, during the course of its 50-plus-year history Malaco has existed in various forms: first as a booking agency, then a recording studio, then home to a hot house band, and ultimately a record label that has flirted with and found success across a number of genres from soul-blues to gospel.
Like the other Southern institutions it was modeled after — namely Stax Records in Memphis and FAME in Muscle Shoals — Bowman notes that Malaco “by sheer logic, is a story that shouldn’t have happened.”
Bowman is no stranger to telling such tales. A longtime professor of ethnomusicology at York University in Toronto, he spent several years in the Bluff City in the 1980s, eventually getting his PH.D. at the University of Memphis. In 1997 he published the first history of Stax Records, “Soulsville U.S.A.”, a landmark study of the label.
In the late-‘90s, Bowman was asked to pen liner notes for a Malaco 30th anniversary box set, a project largely documenting the label’s history in secular music (he also started work on notes for a companion box on the company’s gospel work, which never materialized). His Grammynominated essay recounted the history of the label to that point — but a few years ago, Malaco co-founder Tommy Couch Sr., reached out to Bowman again, with the idea for a lavish coffee table book that would tell the complete story of Malaco as part of the company’s 50th anniversary celebration.
Bowman recalls that the first time he ever interviewed Couch, the label head famously observed that Malaco “makes black music for Black people.”
From soul-blues to gospel
For much of its early history, Malaco would record artists like Mississippi Fred Mcdowell, King Floyd and Jean Knight and license its material to bigger companies and major labels. The Malaco house band — anchored by Carson Whitsett and Larry Addison on keyboards, James Robertson on drums, Ray Griffin on bass and Dino Zimmerman on guitar — was in demand unit in the early ‘70s, recording with the likes of The Pointer Sisters, Rufus Thomas and Paul Simon.
But as studio bookings dried up and tastes changed in R&B into the mid-‘70s, Malaco struggled — with co-founder Mitch Malouf leaving the company; eventually executive Stewart Madison would take his place among the owners.
The company was scuffling along into the early ‘80s, a period where the tiny label suddenly found itself home to a slew of veteran soul and blues acts who’d fallen out of favor with the mainstream.
“All those soul-blues artists Malaco signed — Little Milton, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Johnnie Taylor — they were all anachronisms at that point. The only reason they signed with this small company in Jackson, Mississippi, is because none of them could get a deal anywhere else,” says Bowman.
In 1982, Malaco released “Down Home Blues,” a record by journeyman Texas singer Z.Z. Hill. The record proved to be a massive hit — it stayed on the Billboard charts for the next two years — and ushered in a soulblues boom for the label.
But by the early-‘90s the soulblues boom was fading. “That audience became older and consumed less,” says Bowman, “the mom and pop record stores that had been the bedrock of Malaco’s business, were going out of business, and the radio climate changed.”
Fortunately, for Malaco, they’d already been building a parallel success in the gospel world. In the mid-‘70s, they’d begun signing old gospel quartets, groups that had flourished on defunct labels like Peacock and Nashboro. “Malaco, as they did with the soulblues artists, picks up all these quartets that no longer have a home — The Jackson Southernaires, The Soul Stirrers,” says Bowman. “Nobody wants them, but Malaco will work with them. The success of the gospel acts spawns a whole new era for Malaco.”
In the late-‘80s, Malaco found itself at the forefront of another gospel trend: mass choirs. In 1988, the company released an album by Jackson’s Mississippi Mass Choir. The album would become the No. #1 spiritual record in the country, spend 45 weeks on the Billboard charts, and become the largest selling album in gospel history to that point.
Digitally ‘ahead of its time’
Over the last two decades, as the internet and the digital revolution has upended record sales and traditional labels, Malaco has continued to thrive.
Malaco’s digital presence, especially on Youtube, is staggering. “They are continually digitizing and uploading thousands of tracks,” says Bowman. “They put them all up for free. But they make their money on samples.”
Among those who’ve sampled Malaco and Malaco-owned music include Drake (”Furthest Thing”), DJ Khaled featuring Nipsey Hussle (”Higher”), John Legend and Rick Ross (”Who Do We Think We Are”), 2 Chainz (”Threat 2 Society”), Wale (”Sue Me”) and Kanye West (”God Is”), among many others.
For Bowman, the essence of the Malaco story is the company’s constant evolution and reinvention. “Serendipity and adaptability are probably the two key words when you talk about Malaco,” he says. “That’s how they’ve survived for 50 years, and why they’re well positioned for the next 50.”