When “Last Night” went to the top of the R & B charts in 1961, the white Memphis high school band went out on the road. Black audiences were shocked to discover the band’s racial makeup. Wayne Jackson recalls: “We worked the chitlin circuit—black—that’s why there weren’t any publicity pictures of the group. One place in Texas I remember in particular, we rolled up and they were barbecuing a goat, and you could stand on one side of this club and look through the cracks in the wall to the cotton patch on the other side, and they didn’t believe we were the Mar-Keys. ‘You can’t be the MarKeys!’ ‘Well, we are,’ we said. ‘Here’s our agent’s number; you can call him.’ Well, at first they were a little hostile. This was before integration, you know, before a lot of things. But then, when we started playing, they loved us.”
While Cropper, Dunn, and Jackson were developing their intimate knowledge of the black musical world, black singers were nurturing the multiracial audience for Southern soul. Even as the white South went to war to maintain the racial purity of its college classrooms, the fraternities of Ole Miss and the University of Alabama encouraged what amounted to cultural miscegenation. Solomon Burke, Percy Sledge, and Otis Redding were among the soul artists who joined salacious novelty acts like Doug Clark and His Hot Nuts and the Thirteen Screaming Niggers as regulars on the fraternity circuit. Rufus Thomas, the grand old man of Memphis soul, fondly remembers playing the college circuit: “I must have played every fraternity house there was in the South. When we played Ole Miss, they’d send the girls home at midnight, and then we’d tell nasty jokes and all that stuff. Oh, man, we used to have some good times down there in Oxford. When something was coming, some kind of show, I mean, they’d build themselves up to it, and then, when we got there, they were ready for it. I’d rather play those audiences than for any other.”
Not everyone involved with the scene sounds as upbeat about its racial elements as Thomas or Jackson. Sam Moore of Sam and Dave isn’t alone in his belief that Stax—at least before black executive Al Bell became a major figure in 1965—amounted to a new kind of plantation where the black singers did the work while the white management made the decisions. White drummer Jim Dickinson underlines the tension between the music’s challenge to racial boundaries and the situation outside the studio: “The Memphis sound is something that’s produced by a group of social misfits in a dark room in the middle of the night. It’s not committees, it’s not bankers, not disc jockeys. Every attempt to organize the Memphis music community has been a failure, as righteously it should be. The diametric opposition, the racial collision, the redneck versus the ghetto black is what it is all about, and it can’t be brought together. If it could, there wouldn’t be any music.”
Even if it failed to resolve the oppositions, Memphis music certainly helped develop an audience that was at least interested in listening to the arguments. Along with the chitlin and fraternity circuits, radio played a crucial role in the changes that took place in American pop music during the postwar years. As late as 1945, radio DJ’ing remained an all-white occupation. In 1947, Ebony magazine could identify only sixteen black DJs among the three thousand with regular shows, noting that most of those had been hired in the last couple of years. Memphis-based WDIA played a major role in changing that picture. Unsuccessful in the white market and perhaps inspired by the popularity of Sonny Boy Williamson’s King Biscuit Blues Show, which was broadcast through the mid-South on KFFA from Helena, Arkansas, WDIA switched to an all-black format in 1948. A year later, all the DJs on WDIA were black. Combining gospel, blues, and jazz with what black cultural historian Nelson George calls its role as “bulletin board” for black Memphis, WDIA’s fifty-thousand-watt transmitter carried the voices of DJs B. B. King and Rufus Thomas into over a million black homes.
And who knows how many white ones. If the material that went out on WDIA was black, the picture on the receiving end was more complicated. There’s a consensus among the pioneer black DJs that whites constituted at least half their audience, especially during the nighttime hours. The implications for the development of American popular music in the fifties and sixties were immense. Previous generations of white children encountered relatively segregated musical worlds. To get access to the types of black music that were considered too rough or dangerous for crossover audiences required some serious effort. But when “white” radio stations began imitating the successful black formats, blues- and gospel-based sounds could be heard in even the most remote corners of America.
Still, teenagers growing up in the mid-South had an advantage over those in Nebraska, for example, because they could follow up on what they’d heard by riding that well-worn path from the small-town South to Memphis. The Southern soul they helped create differed clearly from the sounds created by black musicians working in the more intensely segregated musical environments of Detroit and Chicago. Memphis soul grew out of a much freer, improvisational process.
The typical Stax session involved building a record out of scraps of lyrics, the idea for a melody, a few chord changes. The MGs, sometimes supplemented by the Memphis Horns, would lay down a groove, talk about what worked and what didn’t, incorporate the resulting changes in another version, and repeat the process until they were ready to cut a record. Perhaps the most striking difference between Stax and Motown is the recognition given to the Memphis musicians. From “Last Night” through “Green Onions” and “Memphis Soul Stew,” instrumentals played a crucial role in Stax’s image. Stax production style gave equal weight to instrumental and vocal tracks, emphasizing distinct voices rather than a wall of sound. When the Stax-Volt Revue toured Europe, Booker T. and the MGs played their own set before backing up the headliner singers. In England, Cropper received almost as much attention from the press as Otis Redding or Sam Moore.
Many Southern soul classics incorporate “mistakes” that Motown would have edited out. The horn section on “Hold On, I’m Coming” gets lost on the second chorus. On Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” the horn section is hopelessly out of tune. Peter Guralnick reports that when Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler bought the rights to distribute the single, he specified that he wanted to remaster it in New York; the Atlantic producers spent several weeks working with the master tape. When the song hit the charts, Wexler called Quin Ivy, who had produced the original session, and said: “Aren’t you glad you recut it?” Ivy replied, “Jerry, you used the original, out-of-tune horns and all.”
There’s a temptation to reduce sixties soul music to a competition between Memphis and Detroit for the hearts, minds, and dollars of young America. You can set it up as a paradox: the interracial Memphis scene asserts an uncompromising blackness while the almost-all-black Motown studious play to the taste of the white marketplace. Stax singer William Bell expressed the core diference when he said, “We were basically raw energy, raw emotion. Motown was more slick, more polish.” Variations on this approach, which usually treat Chicago as an outpost of Detroit when not ignoring it altogether, circulate freely through many histories of rock and soul.
But they don’t have much to do with the truth. Call and response provides a more accurate framework than “battle to the death.” For all the differences between the musical approaches of Memphis, Detroit, and Chicago, the musicians associated with each location expressed support and admiration for the “other side.” David Porter acknowledged that he and Hayes modeled Sam and Dave’s hits on a formula they learned from the Temptations’ “Don’t Look Back”: “Part of what eventually evolved into the magic of Hayes and Porter’s writing was my study of the Motown catalogue. That was an ongoing process.” Down the road in Muscle Shoals, Penn and Fritts were doing the same thing. As Penn said, “We’d play a Temptations record, we’d write a Temptations song.”
Curtis Mayfield echod Porter’s sentiments: “It wasn’t really a rivalry. Those guys at Motown were just so much admired and they were so big, there was no need. The best I could do was learn something from them. What with Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, they had fantastic writers over there and all you could do was admire those folks for the contribution they made to America.” Carla Thomas considered Mayfield one of the “most beautiful guitar players in the world.” Mayfield’s