Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion
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Overview
The story of Stax Records unfolds like a Greek tragedy. A white brother and sister build a record company that becomes a monument to racial harmony in 1960’s segregated south Memphis. Their success is startling, and Stax soon defines an international sound. Then, after losses both business and personal, the siblings part, and the brother allies with a visionary African-American partner. Under integrated leadership, Stax explodes as a national player until, Icarus-like, they fall from great heights to a tragic demise. Everything is lost, and the sanctuary that flourished is ripped from the ground. A generation later, Stax is rebuilt brick by brick to once again bring music and opportunity to the people of Memphis.
Set in the world of 1960s and ’70s soul music, Respect Yourself is a story of epic heroes in a shady industry. It’s about music and musicians -- Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, and Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Stax’s interracial house band. It’s about a small independent company’s struggle to survive in a business world of burgeoning conglomerates. And always at the center of the story is Memphis, Tennessee, an explosive city struggling through heated, divisive years.
Told by one of our leading music chroniclers, Respect Yourself brings to life this treasured cultural institution and the city that created it.
The enduring artistic and cultural history of the legendary Memphis record label, by the premier authority on the subject.
The studio and record label that brought us Otis Redding: There are a handful of historically important American studios and labels whose names continue to resonate: Blue Note, Sun, Chess, and Stax.
Author authority: Robert Gordon is a Memphis native and has been writing about its music for 30 years. He’s been very involved in the Stax Record Museum, he wrote and produced a documentary on Stax for American Masters, and he’s the author of the seminal work on the Memphis music scene.
Stax recordings: All Stax recordings are available in popular box sets.
Dozens of new interviews, never-before-seen archival materials.
An inspiring story of an independent company fighting above its weight
A masterful storyteller, music historian Gordon artfully chronicles the rise and fall of one of America’s greatest music studios, situating the story of Stax within the cultural history of the 1960s in the South...Gordon deftly narrates the stories of the many musicians who called Stax home.
A compelling story, and Robert Gordon’s well placed to tell it.
...Gordon tells the Stax story - from it’s humble beginning to its heyday, to its bankruptcy, and to its present-day incarnation as the Stax Museum of American Soul Music - with expertise, feeling, and a sure hand.
Superb
An affectionate rumination.
Gordon gets the deep lowdown on the original rolling stone. A major feat of research and a fascinating read.
Respect Yourself is a prototypical American bootstrap story of poverty, race, music, money, and greed. But it is also a story of ‘shifting the paradigm, breaking the covenant, pursuing the dream...riffing, an economic jam session, a socioeconomic symphony...determined to reach the next eight bars.’
Meticulously researched... Gordon lays out the story of Stax in remarkable detail, tracing the label’s history from early stumbles to unimagined success to eventual collapse. He knows Memphis, and what Stax meant there, and he clearly loves the music and the people who made it…In 1972, the Staple Singers had a huge hit on Stax with ’I’ll Take You There,’ written and produced by Al Bell. With Respect Yourself, Robert Gordon does exactly that
His fluent prose and quotes from interviews keep the reader’s attention as he combines technical accounts of recording sessions with the unfolding of historical events in the African American community of Memphis.. . For anyone interested in independent record labels and their music in mid-20th-century America.
- Title: Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion
- Author: Robert Gordon
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 416
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781608194179, 9781608194162, 1608194167, 1608194175
- Resource ID: LLS:9781608194179
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:25:49Z
Robert Gordon has been writing about Memphis music and history for thirty years and is the author of It Came from Memphis, Can't Be Satisfied, The King on the Road, and The Elvis Treasures. He won a Grammy in 2011 for his liner notes to the Big Star box set Keep an Eye on the Sky. His film work includes producing and directing the documentary Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story for PBS's Great Performances. Gordon lives in Memphis.