American music: A river runs through it

Heartland rhythms
The river was witness to the early lives of musicians from the American heartland. Jazz titan Miles Davis was raised a dentist's son in East St. Louis, Ill.; Chuck Berry, perhaps rock's first great songwriter, was born in St. Louis, Mo.

John Hartford, the singer-songwriter whose thoughtful ballads and story-songs formed a bluegrass counterpoint to the edginess of ’60s rock, was a transplant — born in New York — but grew up near the river, in St. Louis. Hartford, who got his first job on a riverboat, performed with bluegrass bands in Missouri and Illinois. His musical versatility made him popular; his country-pop standard “Gentle on My Mind” was recorded by stars from Glen Campbell (it was one of his first big hits) to Aretha Franklin.

Hartford, who died in June 2001, recorded with artists from Vassar Clements to the Byrds, and moved across the country from Nashville to Los Angeles. But Hartford never lost his love for the river, its music or its personalities; one of his later, Grammy-winning albums, "Mark Twang," combined his original style with traditional folk and bluegrass, music indigenous to the region near the river that sustained him.

Soul and Stax
Soul music, that staple sound of the ’60s, was nurtured by the river, perhaps nowhere better than at Stax Records, a small but fiercely inventive record label born in Memphis.

The company, founded in 1959, hit its stride in the mid- to late ’60s with hits from Joe Tex, Rufus Thomas, Albert King, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes and the incomparable Otis Redding.

‘Some of the rap artists and the songs they sample verify that the music they created at Stax Records is timeless.’ — DEANIE PARKER President, Stax Museum of American Soul Music

After many changes in musical tastes and reversals of financial fortune in its later years, Stax went bankrupt in late 1975, though recordings under the Stax name have been licensed for release in the years since.

But Memphis never forgot Stax. In May 2003 the Stax Museum of American Soul Music was opened at 926 East McLemore Ave., — a 17,000-square-foot facility built on the site of the old Stax studios, containing more than 2,000 artifacts and exhibits and a film library.

For Deanie Parker, museum president and executive director, the Mississippi River's presence opened the door to “a cross-pollination of music and expressions of ideas,” one she says continues today.

“It's very important to understand not only what was captured in the walls of that building at 926 East McLemore,” she said. “Some of the rap artists and the songs they sample verify that the music they created at Stax Records is timeless. It's still influencing the musical styles and tastes of musicians, artists, writers and producers today.”

‘A part of your flesh’
For Parker, who worked at Stax as a teenager in the ’60s, the music’s never vacated her life; its presence, like the river that borders her city and runs through her country, remains something indelible.

‘When you grow up in the environment where that was created, it becomes a part of your flesh, of your very being. That's the way that music is with me.’ — DEANIE PARKER

“I heard Albert King guitar lines and Steve Cropper and horn riffs by Otis Redding and the Memphis Horns,” she said, “and I heard the stylings of Isaac Hayes and David Porter.... When you grow up in the environment where that was created, it becomes a part of your flesh, of your very being. That's the way that music is with me.”

“I worked there from 1961 to 1975, doing almost anything there was to do there that was legal,” Parker said of her own soulful résumé. She tried to be a recording artist but eventually found other opportunities in the administrative side. She helped start the label's first publicity department, dabbled in promotion and artist relations, and even sang occasional supporting vocals.

“I backed up Carla Thomas!” she said with a pride you hear through the phone.

The hothouse on East McLemore
“At the time I was at Stax, we were in our own little world within a very hostile city,” Parker said of her time in the hothouse on East McLemore. “The organization was totally integrated among the executive staff — ownership, the creative team, musicians and artists from top to bottom,” she said. “We were enjoying the privilege of working together....

“No idea was ever suppressed,” she said. “We were all encouraged to think out of the box. It became a natural way of thinking or behaving. We pushed that to the limit, and that's what was so exhilarating about it.”

But it was no panacea. “All this was going on amid bigger things throughout the nation,” Parker said. One of those bigger things occurred on April 4, 1968 — the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the city's Lorraine Hotel, about two miles from the Stax studios. Outside her soulful oasis, she noted, “the difference was as night is to day.”

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