The Stax story reads like a Greek tragedy, and Robert Gordon tells it as one. A white brother and sister found, in a poor Black neighbourhood of Memphis, a label that becomes a monument to racial integration — in the very years of the civil-rights movement. The home of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the MG's — the emblematic band, Black and white men playing together — and the Staple Singers. Then the national rise, the power, and finally the fall, ruinous and swift, down to bankruptcy and the demolition of the studio.
Gordon knows Memphis like few others and writes like a novelist: the book is driven by character, by voices, by contradictions. He tells soul not as an abstract phenomenon but as a human enterprise of real people, in a real city, at an explosive moment in history. And always in the background is America itself: segregation, King's assassination a few blocks from the studio, the shift from the integrationist dream to black power.
For anyone collecting soul and funk on vinyl, this is the book that gives depth to every Stax pressing: after reading it, those records are no longer just groove, they are fragments of an American story of hope and ruin. The definitive history of one of the most beloved labels there ever was.
