Stax Records Week could not go on without Otis Redding. Granted, too many people have made the mistake of using Redding as a catch-all symbol for all of the great moments in Soul music; but at the same time, whenever that aching, smoky-sweet voice pours out of a set of speakers, anyone can understand why this mistake is so often made. Otis Redding sang with a resonant loneliness that can still capture any listener and both soothe and plummet them to emotional depths few …

If it’s been said once, it’s been said a thousand times (and that’s just by us in the last week): the soul music of the 1960s and early ’70s, and the raw Memphis soul of prime Stax/Volt in particular, is the bridge which connects the African American blues and gospel traditions with the all-consuming force of heavy funk. But to read that statement as some kind of dry, academic fact is one thing; to actually hear it in action is decidedly another. Listening to …

Whenever the average music listener thinks of a man named King associated with the blues, it’s always B.B. gracefully brandishing his Lucille. And there’s not really a problem with that, B.B. King is the living king of modern blues, after all, but if ever there was a blues King who deserved to be noticed, it’s another man named Albert.
Albert King’s unique guitar style makes him perhaps the most distinctive guitarist of the blues pantheon; he was a left-handed guitar player who never restrung his …

Little Milton’s pseudonym hardly does him justice. The blues, R&B and soul performer’s voice is by no means little. That rasp, that deep voice of a man done wrong, is all too available to nestle up to on the Stax Records release of his songs. Not only does the Mississippi native’s voice melt in your ears, but the former James Milton Campbell has been strumming away on the guitar since the age of 12. Three years later, he was picking up paid gigs at …

Johnnie Taylor may be largely unknown now, but his influence is far-reaching, helping to form the sound of artists such as Otis Redding, Al Green, and Sam & Dave. For Taylor’s Stax Profiles collection, former News frontman Huey Lewis has compiled some of the best selections from the singer’s nearly six-decade career, covering a wide range of the genres in which Taylor experimented: R&B, blues, soul, and disco, among others.
Taylor was discovered by Sam Cooke in the early 1950s, and would later replace …

As our Stax tribute week plows on, it becomes even more conspicuous that Stax was a label full of legends, soul masters and trend setters. The most cursory trip through the Stax catalogue yields the usual characters: Otis Redding, Albert King, Wilson Pickett… you can probably fill in the rest. And the thing that bound these artists together, bundled them up into an identity and place in history under the banner of Stax, was the sound of the recordings themselves. Yeah, …

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but here it is: I, like many music listeners, spent far too many years believing Eddie Floyd’s classic, “Knock on Wood,” was recorded by Wilson Pickett. Now hold on for a second; before you accuse me of a lack of R&B credibility and storm away, the fact is, my embarrassingly long-lived mistake wasn’t too far off the mark.
Anchored by a hard-driving horn refrain and that chunky, funky Steve Cropper guitar, “Knock on Wood” is a dead ringer for …

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but here it is: I, like many music listeners, spent far too many years believing Eddie Floyd’s classic, “Knock on Wood,” was recorded by Wilson Pickett. Now hold on for a second; before you accuse me of a lack of R&B credibility and storm away, the fact is, my embarrassingly long-lived mistake wasn’t too far off the mark.
Anchored by a hard-driving horn refrain and that chunky, funky Steve Cropper guitar, “Knock on Wood” is a dead ringer for …