Southern Soul

While Motown in Detroit polished soul into pop, a different school was developing further south. Stax Records, founded in Memphis in 1957, operated on exactly the opposite principle: the rawer the better, the more church the better, the more sweat the better. The integrated house band — Booker T. & the MGs on keyboards and rhythm, with the Mar-Keys horn section — provided a tight, punchy frame for artists including Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, and Carla Thomas.

Simultaneously, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, and FAME Studios nearby, attracted a different flow of artists to another integrated house band — the Swampers — whose feel for blues-rooted R&B gave Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic Records sessions their distinctive grit. “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” were all recorded in Muscle Shoals or nearby.

Both centers produced interracial working environments in the segregated South — a fact the musicians involved acknowledged but rarely broadcast for their own safety. The sound that came out was unified: horn-powered, rhythmically assertive, emotionally unguarded, and deeply rooted in the Black Southern church tradition that had been the source of soul all along.