Blog 3

When discussing the civil rights movement, often time we ignore the fact that most African Americans blurred the lines of such an organization while understanding the movement without categorization. One facilitator is the popular music of the time: soul. Soul music demonstrates what the civil rights movement meant to artists, activists, and ordinary citizens. Music in general, and soul music in particular, serves as a dynamic topic of study for the civil rights movement because it was so many things to so many people. Soul music meant economic empowerment, black creative expression, an integrated creative endeavor, articulation of civil rights goals, and entertainment. What is more, soul meant any combination of these ideas to any number of people at any given point in time. Music functioned as a primary expression of distaste for the problems of the world at the time, empowering others to make a change. Because of its power to stir the body and spirit of black and white Americans through the 1960s, and because of its refusal to fall within the either-or binaries of method, gender, or politics, soul music offers the historian the opportunity to break down the constructed binaries of the civil rights movement and seek a deeper understanding of the movement and the people who created it. Soul music, like the civil rights movement for which it provided the soundtrack, did not exist as a national phenomenon, but as a series of local and regional developments. One could choose to conduct a study of soul as it related to civil rights in any number of key cities, including Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, or Los Angeles, but the first place to begin this work is right here in our home of Memphis, Tennessee.

Located at the northern end of the Mississippi Delta, this crossroads of American geography and culture fostered a wealth of musical innovation. Memphis stood as a unique location for both civil rights and music history. As a local civil rights venue, the city served as the quintessential example of the southern urban phenomenon of urbanization and tradition; Memphians struggled with competing desires for modernization and tradition, and witnessed both intentional and unintentional blending of high and low class cultures as well as black and white societies. As one of the most important sites in American music history, local Memphians as well as migrants from Mississippi, Chicago, or Detroit shaped a legacy blending Delta blues, southern gospel, and rural country into a now-legendary genre of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and southern soul. While Memphis served as home to a number of outstanding studios that created a variety of popular music, Stax Records stood above the rest as the most visible, cohesive, and successful company throughout the 1960s. Therefore, Stax’s (and Memphis’) important role in both civil rights and music history makes it a useful and fascinating location to begin the work of integrating music into the civil rights conversation.

The brilliant Professor Hughes elaborated on the history of music in our city and it’s importance to the civil rights conversation. He identified the oversimplification of the soul narrative: music lost race, and it was an equal opportunity for black and white artists in the city. This is a facet of the large (and very wrong) narrative the civil rights movement plays out in our country. Stax was a such a civil rights icon because it was a good place to work, there was no white supremacy, but was still not an integrated utopia as Booker T. and the M.G.’s lead on. The group of two white men and two black men was the face of the studio because it masked the racial tension that was still widely felt. People wanted to see progress of equality, so they gave the people what they wanted to see, but the battle for equality in the music industry was far from over.