In 1961, amateur fiddle player Jim Stewart and his sister, Estelle Axton, proprietor of Satellite Record Shop, launched a record company in Memphis, Tenn. Jim had an ear for music; Estelle knew what would sell. Soon, musicians like Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn--the core of Booker T and the MGs--began recording for Stax, and the label, founded by two white middle class siblings, took off on a 15-year run feeding the musical soul of black America.
While Robert Gordon's (author of the Muddy Waters biography Can't Be Satisfied) documentary film (also titled Respect Yourself) is full of great Stax music, his book provides much more detail about the label's history, along with the role of the notoriously segregated Memphis in the civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in the city in 1968, Stax recording star Otis Redding had just died; soon after, the company's distribution relationship with Atlantic Records ended and it lost the rights to its backlog of hit records.
Al Bell, a former DJ, began rebuilding the Stax catalogue, a process that accelerated after he bought out Estelle. With breakout singer Isaac Hayes, early Stax stars Eddie Floyd and Rufus Thomas still around, and the newly signed Staples Singers topping pop charts, Bell got a distribution deal for Stax with Columbia, but the business ultimately unraveled in a series of lawsuits and financial scandals.
In Respect Yourself, Gordon chronicles the exciting rise and ugly fall of his hometown music giant with a historian's rigor, a journalist's persistence, a filmmaker's scope and a musician's swing. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.