“I doubt if there would have ever been a Stax Records without Estelle Axton.” – Booker T.
Robert Gordon, author of the exhaustive 2013 Stax biography “Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion,” describes the iconic soul label’s story as a Greek tragedy. That’s not quite right: It’s more like five or six. Fortunes and friendships gained and lost, family ties strained, tragic deaths…it’s all there.
My purpose here isn’t to recount that entire story. It’s been treated extensively in Gordon’s book as well as Rob Bowman’s “Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records” (1997), documentaries, numerous articles, and in physical form at the Stax Museum. My words here are to salute the woman who helped bring Stax Records into being, who nurtured it and was an equal partner – if not more – in making it more than anyone had dreamed: Estelle Axton, the woman who came to be known by artists and fans alike as “Lady A.”
Satellite: The Early Days
Stax got its start in 1957 as a country/pop label called Satellite, the brainchild of a fiddle-playing bank teller named Jim Stewart from Middleton, TN who wanted to get into the business as a producer in the mold of Sam Phillips. In need of a better tape recorder, Stewart approached his older sister Estelle to mortgage her family home. Estelle could sell sawdust to a lumber mill (Stewart would later call her the “damndest salesman he ever saw”), and somehow, she convinced her husband Everett go along. She put up an initial investment of $2500, a significant sum in those days, and in January 1959 bought out Stewart’s partners.
Mrs. Axton had long loved music. She’d sung soprano in the family gospel group and played the church organ back in Middleton. Later, she’d find an outlet for it that harnessed her entrepreneurial spirit: She had a side hustle at her teller job at Union Planters Bank, picking up records at local shops for co-workers and charging a small markup. She had an ear, not just for music, but for records and what made them work or not work. From the beginning, she could give Stewart feedback on the production aspect of his recordings.
Around 1959, encouraged by producer Chips Moman, Satellite recorded “Fool in Love” by an R&B group called the Veltones at its studio – an old garage in Brunswick, TN. Stewart started listening to the Black stations, hoping to hear “Fool in Love” and along the way heard Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.” It was a revelation. To Stewart and his sister, it was simple: Everyone was equal in the sight of God. Mrs. Axton remarked later that they didn’t see color, only talent. That may have been an optimistic take, but they always, from start to finish, walked the walk.
The Damndest Salesman
Shortly after this, Mrs. Axton refinanced again for another $4000 to help the business move to a racially mixed neighborhood in Memphis proper, into the former Capitol movie theater on McLemore Avenue. Mrs. Axton and her kids helped Stewart turn the auditorium into a studio, laying carpet, sewing sound-baffling drapes. Then she set her own plan in motion, opening a record shop, located in the old concession stand.
That record shop has become a centerpiece of the Stax legend. In the early days, it kept the tiny label afloat. And Mrs. Axton had the marketing savvy to boost that income. She hung speakers outside the shop to attract passerby and crafted a low-tech but effective loyalty program: She offered a free record for every 10 purchased and kept cards on file to track sales. She could check the cards when people came in and play songs she knew they’d like.
And it wasn’t just money coming in: the sales records were an invaluable source of marketing intelligence. “The shop was a workshop for Stax Records,” Mrs. Axton said later. “When a record would hit on another label, we would discuss what made it sell.” In the words of Deanie Parker, Mrs. Axton’s assistant and later director of publicity for the label, it was the “R&D division for Stax Records.”
“While the men were grandstanding and smiling, she was working, studying, and juggling all her responsibilities.”
Deanie Parker
As output grew, the store was a source of immediate feedback. When test pressings went to radio, they’d know the response at the cash register. And as Mrs. Axton said, “If I had one that several customers said, ‘Give me one of those too,’ I could tell them in the back, ‘Go ahead and press that one; it’ll sell.’ That’s why we were successful with nearly everything we put out for a few years – we tested them at home before we let them go.” The store went on to draw DJs, artists, promo men, and label reps who knew they could count on Mrs. Axton’s always honest and well-reasoned critiques of their product.
Booker T. would later say, “Most all our musical ideas and influences came out of that little record shop in the first couple of years. I can’t see Stax being what it was without the Satellite Record Shop and Estelle Axton saying, ‘Why don’t you guys try something like this?’“
In those days, Jim Stewart loved the record shop too and thought more record company execs would benefit from having access to one. “I used to spend Friday nights, Saturdays, Saturday nights in the record shop if we weren’t cutting. It was a great experience for me and one of the happiest times in my life, working behind the counter. I would spend as much time as I could in there.”
Why Don’t You Guys Try Something Like This?
In 1961, the company changed its name to STAX (STewart/AXton) in response to a copyright challenge, and Estelle Axton quit her job to run the record shop full time. In that first decade, STAX was a “family” company, but it racked up the hits, buoyed by a distribution deal with Atlantic Records, launching the careers of Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MGs, Sam and Dave, Johnnie Taylor, and Otis Redding. In 1966, the label branched into the blues with Albert King – he’d met Mrs. Axton in the record shop; she convinced Stewart to sign him and suggested the song “Laundromat Blues” for him.
Mrs. Axton’s instinctive feel for songwriting and for what made a hit helped her take on the role of a sort of den mother to the label’s writers. Many was the record, such as Steve Cropper’s and Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” and the Mar-Keys “Last Night” that Stewart didn’t see the potential of but became hits after Mrs. Axton used her persuasive skills to get them released. She believed in David Porter when no one else did, playing him records by Bachrach-David and Holland-Dozier-Holland and coaching him into the co-writer of “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Comin.” Today, he’s in the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 100 Songwriters of All Time. He said later, “Were it not for her, there’s no way Stax could have become what it became.”
She had a flair for promotion, too. She built relationships with DJs and worked with the top R&B jock in L.A., Magnificent Montague, to put together a tour of the label’s top acts in that city to helped break Stax into the West Coast market.
It was probably inevitable that there would be tension between Stewart and Axton. They were brother and sister, but Estelle was 12 years Jim’s senior and had in fact been his elementary school teacher. There were other family issues at play (mostly surrounding the role of her troubled son, Packy, saxophonist for the Mar-Keys, for whom she had a blind spot) but no matter how many times she’d offer good advice, it was met with resistance. Said Deanie Parker, “(Jim) would be a typical little brother. ‘Oh, Estelle, you don’t know, how can you know what you’re talking about?“ He would write off her talent as being limited to novelty records: “My sister has a lot of ideas. She’s got a great ear for certain kinds of records, especially a left-field record.” It seems odd, given that he was so progressive with respect to hiring women for key roles in the company. But with the friction as a day-to-day fact, the story’s ending may have been written at the start.
The End of the Good Old Days
Whatever the dynamic between the siblings, the label they’d built was thriving as a regional player. But in 1967, a plane crash claimed the life of Otis Redding. Atlantic was bought by Warner Brothers, and it turned out that the fine print on that distribution deal gave Atlantic sole ownership of the STAX masters. (Atlantic head Jerry Wexler insisted to his grave that he didn’t know about the clause.) Sam and Dave’s contract also reverted to Atlantic. The assassination of MLK tore the city apart and corroded the racial harmony that had reigned at the label. STAX had to start over again, almost from scratch.
It was Al Bell’s moment. A former DJ and promoter from Arkansas, Bell had been brought on board back in 1965 as director of promotions. The move had been championed by Mrs. Axton, who knew the label needed to take this aspect of the business seriously to get to the next level. Or as Stewart put it, “My sister kept screaming that we needed somebody to promote our product.” Bell had big plans, and it didn’t take long before his influence eclipsed not only hers, but also Stewart’s. As Randle Catron, a staff songwriter, put it, “…everybody was coming to Al and they would just say that Jim was not the man.”
Worn out from the small return on his sweat equity, Stewart had Bell broker a deal selling Stax to Paramount, a division of Gulf & Western. At the time of the sale, Stewart wanted to give Bell 20 percent of the stock, but Mrs. Axton made sure Steve Cropper was taken care of, knowing he’d started working for her at the store and had been there longer than Bell. She knew the value not just of money, but of service and relationships.
So Stax went corporate. Now, people were brought in instead of up.
Bell wanted more. More everything. More space. More offices for all the new people. His eye fell on the record store. “We kept the record shop open until it became a nuisance factor,” said Stewart. Mrs. Axton moved the store across the street and then sold it for Packy to run. It quickly went out of business. There’s some debate over whether its former space actually became offices or a fountain.
“She was the heart and soul of that whole place. No doubt about it. She had more ideas and she had more pulse on her finger on what was going on in the community.”
Steve Cropper
Given that everything had been an uphill battle for her, her stay at the company was probably doomed from the start. Bell’s cousin was brought in as head of Stax’s Department of Statistics and Market Analysis.
As Gordon describes it, “Estelle had become something as radical as the racial activists: a female wielding power in a world not perceived as her own. She did not have the same authority as her brother but she exerted the same influence. She got records released, she made decisions about cash flow and salaries and affected the course of business…her achievements were now considered quaint.”
Always astute, Mrs. Axton saw the writing on the wall. As Bell remembered it, things were “having a really profound effect on Miz Axton’s attitude and her spirit.” She said later, “I approached them to sell my part and get out of it. If I can’t have a hand in the decision making, I don’t want no part of it.” Faced with a choice between Bell and his sister, Stewart chose Bell.
In July, 1969, the two parties holed up with their lawyers in separate rooms in a suite at Memphis’ Holiday Inn Rivermont. When they walked out, Stewart and Bell were co-owners of Stax, and Estelle Axton received $490,000 plus $25,000 per year for four years. (The payments continued after that time, for reasons she never knew for sure). She remains the only former owner of Stax to have made money on the venture. She invested in an apartment complex that generated income for her for some time afterward.
Interestingly, the deal also contained a non-compete clause. The quaint lady with only an ear for novelty records was locked out of the business for five years.
The Cracks Appear
After her exit, Stax marched on under its new corporate banner. Sessions continued in shifts to produce the album output needed to storm the charts again. Disgruntled veterans could the hear the decline in quality, records like “Theme from ‘Shaft’” notwithstanding. But it paid for Stewart to install a wood-paneled office with a leopard-print bar, and for Bell, Stewart, and Cropper to buy homes (Stewart’s sat on 50 acres and had four pools, a tennis court, and a party house). A former bank teller, Stewart had always played it safe with company money (he’d notoriously passed on buying the contract of an up-and-coming singer named Aretha Franklin) but now Stax borrowed left and right to fuel expansion. Booker T. and Cropper – the label’s soul — left in 1969 and 1970, respectively.
It’s all so predictable. Bell bought out a disillusioned Stewart in 1972, the company made a bad deal with CBS, and the creditors started knocking. In an odd replay of history, Stewart mortgaged his home in an effort to buy back in and help, but Stax went into Chapter 11 in 1975. Stewart lost everything. You need a scorecard to keep track of all the buyouts and maneuverings since then, but Stax currently exists on metaphorical paper as a reissue label. The theater-turned-studio was sold for $10. It fell into neglect and was torn down in 1989. (A recreated studio now stands on the spot as the Stax Records Museum of American Soul Music.)
One Last Spin of the Wheel
While all this was playing out, Estelle Axton quietly waited out her non-compete clause and then re-entered the music business. With another female veteran of the Memphis record label scene, Cordell Jackson, she co-founded the Memphis Music Association, and in 1973 founded the Memphis Songwriters Association.
Meanwhile, she had created another record label, Fretone (named for her daughter Doris FREderick and son Packy AxTON). In 1976, she proved that she did indeed have an ear for an offbeat hit when she released a novelty song by a Memphis DJ named Rick Dees called “Disco Duck.” She cut a distribution deal with Robert Stigwood’s RSO label and watched the record sell two million copies in a matter of months. Say what you want about it, it was a hit. You can argue that it takes an even sharper pair of ears, and a gambler’s soul, to take a chance on a record like that. For Mrs. Axton, it was vindication: “I got back into the business,” she said, “because I had to prove to myself that I knew a little bit more about music than I’d ever been given credit for.”
It was her last big record. She’d spent a lot to get it, and when the funds came in, she sold the apartment complex and lived for herself, spending lavishly on luxury items: furniture, furs. Maybe her business sense deserted her, maybe she deserted it. Her husband had passed away in 1984, and she spent her last years working as a cafeteria hostess, doting on her customers. She passed away at age 85 on February 25, 2004.
Lady A.’s Legacy
To this day, there is boundless love on her name, both in Memphis and among music writers celebrating her spirit and contributions. The industry to which she gave so much has belatedly shown her some too: In 2007, as an individual, she received the Grammy Trustees Award, “presented by vote of the Recording Academy’s National Trustees to individuals who, during their careers in music, have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording.” In 2012, she was inducted, along with her brother, into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.
In 2002, Jim Stewart received the Ahmet Ertegun Award, inducting him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His page on the Hall’s website shows him with Bell; the text opens with “Jim Stewart built Stax Records with the explosively talented ensemble of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes and more.” It closes with “As producer, engineer, businessman and mentor, Jim Stewart was at the center of it all.” In between, it does say that he “…convinced his sister Estelle Axton to take out a second mortgage on her home to finance a label.”
Stewart’s granddaughter Jennifer accepted, reading a letter from him on his behalf. It mentioned neither his sister nor Al Bell. (Like Mrs. Axton, Al Bell has not received induction, one of very few awards he hasn’t received). The speeches were by Steve Cropper and Sam Moore. Cropper mentioned Mrs. Axton only as a co-founder of the label. In contrast, Moore spoke only of his abiding affection for her, and how no one should forget her.
The Right Thing to Do
Every day, fans express their view that something the Rock Hall has done or not done is “wrong.” It’s wrong that X,Y,or Z isn’t inducted and wrong that rap acts are in before any number of guitar/drum/bass bands. In some cases – many cases – you can make that argument. But rarely can you point to something in the Hall’s history that by any measure, is so clearly, egregiously wrong.
But it can be fixed. Not in time for Estelle Axton to see it, but maybe her daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be pleased. It’s easily done, too: Create a four- or five-minute package using footage of Stax acts, audio from her interviews, and run it. Steve Cropper and Sam Moore are getting up there, but as of now they’re still with us; maybe they’d say a few words. Don’t worry about how it affects the show, just do it. Because it’s the right thing to do. Now.
Iconic Rock Talk Show 