To say that Stax Records was a successful music label would be an understatement. Founded in 1957 by Jim Stewart, the company drew upon a mix of young, local talent, and by 1973, the label was one of the entertainment industry’s most influential producers of soul music, breaking acts such as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Sam & Dave, and many more. Now, audiences worldwide can experience its impact in the four-part docuseries titled STAX: SOULSVILLE U.S.A.
Directed by filmmaker Jamila Wignot, the upcoming documentary chronicles the group of creatives who made era-defining music, broke racial barriers, and left an enduring musical legacy in the process. Led by a collection of restored and remastered archival performance footage and intimate interviews with key players in the label’s remarkable history, the series will detail the humble origin story of Stax Records and pays tribute to its complex music library and the legendary artists that emerged from the renowned studio space.
While the documentary is focused on the rise of a legendary label, it also contains messages of perseverance that should resonate with countless viewers. “I think it’s important that this tells you not to feel as alone as you might in this moment right now,” Wignot says. “If you were feeling alone, if you were feeling like this has never happened before, you have this incredible story of people who did succeed in an incredible way to guide you. And I think that is always a reminder that’s powerful.”
In just under two decades, Stax had grown from a modest family-owned record store and studio in Memphis to a trailblazing global music label. Ahead of the premiere of STAX: SOULSVILLE U.S.A., Wignot spoke with ESSENCE about directing the series, the label’s influence, and some of the challenges she faced while putting together a project of this magnitude.
ESSENCE: At the Stax Museum in Memphis, TN, there’s a short documentary that’s shown prior to entering, how much of that did you pull from to help you with this particular documentary?
Jamila Wignot: We didn’t pull from it, although we ended up having to rely on some of the interviews that are featured in that documentary because the folks who are not around with us today to tell the story. So I believe the interview that they have in there is the same Isaac Hayes interview that we ended up using in our series. Certainly, the Estelle Axton interview that’s featured there, we got the full access to that. So what we had weren’t the segmented clips that were featured in that, we got the full raw interviews. So that was really helpful. But I think that museum film is really just a jumping off point for what is obviously a much more expansive story.
I think the museum does an incredible job of telling parts of the Stax story, and then the second chapter is a little less dug into, although I know they’re evaluating that today, meaning in our times right now.
How did you come to be involved with STAX: SOULSVILLE U.S.A.?
Thank you for asking. I keep telling people it’s a gift that was dropped into my lap. I have been for well over a decade now, friends with Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow who are the principals at Laylow Pictures, and we’ve known each other since we were just all young aspiring documentarians. And so he actually called me and said, “Hey, you want to have lunch? I want to talk to you about a project.” And we live within walking distance of each other. I walked to his house. I had Otis Redding playing on my phone. And I sat down and he said, “What do you think about doing a documentary on Stax Records? This company White Horse Pictures, a pretty significant production company out on the West Coast that’s done a lot of music documentary work. They’ve come to us and they want to find a director. And I thought of you.” And I was just like, “What?”
It was just a beautiful, serendipitous moment. And Otis was in my headphones that day because I’ve loved this music since the ’90s when people my age were able to re-access the catalog through DVD and all the efforts to revitalize the catalog that was happening at that time. So it was just dumb luck, great fortune.
Were there any challenges for you when you were retrieving the archival footage and actually putting this documentary together?
I think there were a lot. The Stax story has been told in some forms, so there was telling a fuller and more complete story. I think there was a lot of myth-making about particularly the early years and this utopic space that existed that I think certainly existed on an artistic level. I think there was an artistic utopia that was created, but it was one that required, it seemed to me in the early moments of research, some social contract to not discuss very important social histories that were happening. And so it was in the beginning, I was just confused as a 21st century Black person by the possibility that there was some sight of utopic, interracial harmony that existed. So I was wanting to be able to talk to these individuals in a really honest way and to unpack a lot of that.
The other challenge was just that unlike groups like, say, The Beatles, who have just as we know, endless hours of footage documenting so many aspects of their creative process, Stax invested itself so totally in the music-making and also just didn’t have the same means to promote itself the way that, say, a Motown did. And so there was less archival material to build the world of Stax in the early days. And so finding creative ways to harness archival approximates so that you could feel like you were in the record shop in those early years and get material. It was giving you a sense of the vibe and the flavor. Having to use archival in a more experiential way was a big challenge of those early years.
There were many record companies that have risen and fallen throughout the years. How do you think Stax was able to grow from that small family-owned business in Memphis to the global powerhouse that it became?
I think that it was a matter of maybe a little bit of an innocence and naivete of, “you know when you don’t know what you don’t know,” so you just kind of go out and do it your own way? I think there was a lot of that, particularly in the early years. I think there’s an incredible amount of determination and willpower that happened at the moment that Mr. Al Bell enters the picture, and he just, come hell or high water won’t be stopped. He’s a man of such deep faith and such deep belief. If he believes in something, he puts 190000% into it. And so I think when you have that kind of engine driving you all the time and pushing you to do more and reach higher and better, that’s part of it.
And I think there’s also just something where, there’s a couple of bites that keep coming up for me, which is Carla Thomas saying, “I knew who I was. I was a music person.” And Al Bell realizing, all of them realizing in Europe like, “Oh, wait a minute. It’s not that people can’t like our music. The music industry is just not letting us get access to people.” And so there’s a way in which it’s a group of individuals who just had a profound sense of self, and they weren’t going to let all the ways that the world tries to tell you, “No, you can’t, this door is closed,” they just weren’t going to let that be a part of their story. They weren’t going to be limited by the limitations that were put on them. And so I think it’s that just fierce determination that’s guiding the company at all times.
I also think that Stax also had a very diverse roster, not just the talent, but its leadership as well. What type of influence do you think the label had on the civil rights movement and race relations in general during that time?
That’s such an interesting question. I think it’s a label that is making music that’s in lockstep with those moments. So it’s not that maybe the label’s music is influencing the movement in quite the same way, but it’s a mirror of the social phenomenon that’s happening. So you think of a song like “Soul Man,” that was a huge surprising story to me because on the face of it’s maybe a song about a lover. But to know that it really emerges out of Isaac Hayes and David Porter looking at what’s happening in the world, looking at the rebellions of Detroit and seeing this word “soul” that is a source of pride and a source of dignity and a source of who you really are as a people and deciding to make a song that honors that.
You may not have money and you may not have the flyest car, and you may come from the middle of nowhere, but you are going to be okay because of, again, who are you on the inside. And so I think that it was very much in that moment reflecting those values. And as the movement evolves and grows and changes, they are people who live in that time. And so their music accordingly expresses those same kinds of themes.
Can you talk to me about how much of the film will focus on Wattstax and how impactful that event was during that time?
So the last episode is not evenly split, but it spends as much time as we could in Wattstax without actually just showing the film. But importantly, I think there’s a film that exists that gives you the experience of the concert. But what we were able to do and what was so important to me was show the behind-the-scenes on that. Because in the same way that the concert is this benefit to the community, the actual structural process of the making of Wattstax is also our reflection of that. So they make a point, Larry Shaw was adamant that there actually be people of color behind the camera and in front of the camera. They were going to go into the community, and they knew they were going to have this documentary component to it. And it was like, who better to tell their own story than the people who live in this community?
So they hired a bunch of young recent grads out of UCLA, the members of what is now called the LA Rebellion, and those were the people who went out and documented that. And that became not just a reason that I think the experience of watching Wattstax feels the way it does, it’s people within the community showcasing their own community, but also became a stepping stone for all of those people who went on and were able to have careers in the movie industry, which we were able to highlight. Photographers who went on to have careers in the movie industry, sound engineers who went on to have careers. And so there’s a real ethos about the Stax enterprise that is reflected in that. And then, my goodness, we had a 45-minute version of Wattstax at one point. There’s a balance to be found and not getting too swept up in what the concert itself does because there’s just so many incredible moments.
Why do you feel it’s so important that the world knows the story of Stax Records?
I think it speaks to part of what I was saying early in this interview, which is just this idea of I think we are once again confronting a moment where the world is telling people on the margins, let’s just broadly call it that, yes, Black people, but plenty of other people are being told that they’re not human. It’s dehumanizing those people, that they don’t have the same entitlements to freedoms that they should have, that they don’t have the right to exist, that they should change, that they should alter themselves. And I think there’s a universal aspect to this story that is about not letting the world tell you no.
And even though in the Stax story, of course, it’s a tragic story, it doesn’t always work out, and we are constantly fighting those battles. And so I think there is a universal quality to the story that speaks to anybody who’s living on the margins and being told, “You don’t have a right to exist,” when in fact—yes, you do. And always bet on yourself.