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Respect Yourself by Robert Gordon: book review



Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (2013) is the biography of a small, independent record company in Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1960s and 70s. It’s about the rise of soul music. It is also about racial harmony.

The book’s title, Respect Yourself, comes from the Stax Records 1971 hit by the Staple Singers.

Fiddler Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton owned Stax Records in Memphis. Inside Stax Records – the studio with an open-door policy – black and white musicians had been working together for the past five years, but Jim needed to promote the company. Al Bell, a well-known disc jockey, joined the company in 1965 as the national promotion director. Jim and Estelle were white; Al was black; the three of them brought Stax Records to prominence. 

Due to black and white segregation in the 1960s in the American south, ‘people who couldn’t publicly dine together were making beautiful music.’ Al said of these times, ‘The spirit that came from Jim and his sister Estelle Axton allowed all of us, black and white, to come off the streets, where you had segregation and the negative attitude, and come into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom, you had harmony, you had people working together.’

This is the story about the development and changes through the ups and downs at Stax Records – and the amazing talent and music that followed over the years from 1960-1975 – Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett, The Mad Lads, and a host more. 

It started with vinyl 45s with one song on each side – supplying records to Atlantic Records in New York – and then came the albums, generating more revenue than singles, and the introduction of studio musicians on a salary.  

After Martin Luther King’s murder in 1968, a change swept through America, Memphis and the music production industry. A corporate change swept through Stax Records. The music changed too – from soul to dance trance to disco. Stax became the symbol of opportunity.

This book is fascinating for its account of musical history, Stax and Motown soul music, and legendary musicians and songs, as well as the history of a business model (in good times and in challenging times – and when a small family business grows too large and loses its family). However, it is also the history of Memphis during fast-changing times. 













MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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