Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion Kindle

Another Kindle pass on in the occasional series where the site makes the most out of the amazon "look inside" to provide some heads up reading on both old and new books available on kindle, thanks to member roburt (john s) for highlighting this one

Here's the soul source heads up read...

Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion

Published: November 12, 2013

Author: Robert Gordon

The story of Stax Records unfolds like a Greek tragedy. A white brother and sister build a monument to racial harmony in blighted south Memphis during the civil rights movement. Their success soon pits the siblings against each other, and the brother abandons his sister for a visionary African-American partner. Under integrated leadership, Stax explodes as a national player until, Icarus-like, the heights they achieve result in their tragic demise. They fall, losing everything, and the sanctuary they created is torn to the ground. A generation later, Stax is rebuilt brick by brick and is once again transforming disenfranchised youth into stellar young musicians.

Excerpt: Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion

CUTTING HEADS AND HAIR

1957—1959

Jim Stewart sat in his barber's chair. Jim's hair was short, his face boyish and scrubbed clean. He wore thick-rimmed glasses and a necktie, his jacket on the barber's coat hook. It was 1957 and Jim was twenty-seven years old, working in a bank and taking business classes at night on the GI Bill, with an eye toward becoming a lawyer. He played fiddle in a country swing band on weekends.

Within ten years, this man would be responsible for some of the most soulful, swinging, and hip music ever made. Black people – of which he presently knew approximately none – would be his closest associates. The Beatles, to be unleashed in just a few years, would reach the height of their popularity, and in the thick of Beatlemania, the Beatles would phone Jim Stewart and ask if they could record at his studio. In ten years,

Jim would have a hep goatee and his hair would be much longer than it was before he sat down for this trim. But in this barber's chair, 1957, there was no indication any of that would, or could, happen.