Steve Cropper will tell you that when bands like his offhandedly integrated Booker T. and the MGs went into the Stax Records studio, there was no color. Out on the road? Well, that was a different story.
“There were times [of trouble],” Cropper admits in a newly posted Music Vault interview, “because we were two white guys and two black guys. We were just out there to play music, but a lot of people that had booked us had listened to our records and they didn’t know that it was a mixed group. A few things went down that we just sort of walked around.”
From the start, Stax was different — founded in the late 1950s by a bank teller and his sister, both white, in a predominantly African-American neighborhood’s old movie theater. And while the nation grappled with an emerging Civil Rights movement — Memphis, for instance, saw a municipal pool close rather than allow both blacks and whites — this label was regularly producing desegregated hits.
Still, once these sessions were over, the stars of Stax would emerge into a much more unforgiving landscape, and concessions had to be made — that is, until the world caught up with not just their sound, but their vision.
“We’d stay in hotels on the outskirts of town, rather than just barrelling through and saying ‘we’re going to brave this,'” Cropper adds. “We didn’t look for trouble, so we weren’t bothered by it. We were just victims of something that we had nothing to do with, actually.”
- Angell & Crane, “Himalayan Dial-Up” from ‘Angell & Crane’ (2024): Video Premiere - November 22, 2024
- Michael Attias, “Avrils” from ‘Quartet Music Vol. II- Kardamon Fall’ (2024): Streaming premiere - October 11, 2024
- Bryn Roberts, “Aloft” from ‘Aloft’ (2024): Video Premiere - September 20, 2024
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