Stax Writers Celebrate Release of 'Written in Their Soul" Box Set

Stax Writers Celebrate Release of Written in Their Soul Box Set
by Tim Dillinger

This past Friday evening (June 23rd), soul music lovers converged upon the Stax Museum of American Soul to celebrate the release of Craft Recordings’ 7-disc, 146 track box set, Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos. With a few hundred observers, Stax songwriters Deanie Parker, Henderson Thigpen and Bobby Manuel, Stax recording artists and songwriters William Bell and Eddie Floyd and project producer Cheryl Pawelski talked in depth about the label’s relationship with and cultivation of its writers. “Demos are the essence of a song. It’s such a vulnerable place to be. It’s just you and the recorder. I want to thank everybody on this panel for allowing us to hear this material,” said Pawelski.

From L to R: Eddie Floyd, Cheryl Pawelski, Bobby Manuel, Henderson Thigpen

Central to that cultivation was Stax’ Satellite Record Shop which was run by Estelle Axton, who co-owned Stax with her brother Jim Stewart. Axton utilized the shop to study the components of hit songs—which customers would come in to purchase—and she simultaneously collected musical profiles of the customers, to best know what kinds of records to suggest to them. “She enjoyed sharing with us the ingredients from her perspective about what made a record a hit versus one that was a flop,” remembers Deanie Parker, writer of compositions for Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, and Mable John among others, who saw Axton’s knowledge and the record shop as the starting place for many of the writers. “She gave us all a solid foundation in Satellite Record Shop and if you were fortunate enough to master that and get your foot in Studio A with Jim Stewart and some of the artists, demonstrate that you had the talent to become a veteran writer, then you were moving up through the ranks, continuing your education.”

Artists like William Bell (composer of his own 1961 hit “You Don’t Miss Your Water”) and Eddie Floyd (who co-wrote “Knock On Wood” with Stax guitarist Steve Cropper) also feature significantly on the set with their demos of songs that went on to be recorded by Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, The Staple Singers and Johnnie Taylor. Unlike the younger writers, Floyd already had two number one records under his belt with this group The Falcons when he arrived at Stax, but found the energy there similar to what he experienced on the road with his contemporaries. He explains, “When I came to Memphis [by way of Carla Thomas], all the artists would help each other when we would do a song. I could get [one of them] to do backgrounds. We actually got Johnnie Taylor on one of them! So, it was very easy when I arrived here. Jim Stewart asked me if I would come down and be a writer every other month, so that’s what I did for the first year.”

Panel moderator, author Robert Gordon, astutely explained that the box set “shines a light where the light often does not shine, behind the scenes to the composer.” Written in Their Soul gives listeners the opportunity to peer into the creative process and hear some of Stax’s biggest hits, like The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself,” Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman,” and Luther Ingran’s “If Loving You Is Wrong,” in their infancy before they were delivered to the artists. “Woman To Woman” co-writer Henderson Thigpen’s demo of the tune may be the box set’s central recording, a stunning example of the writer’s commitment to the story. Thigpen famously took the day off from his job unloading trucks to coach Brown in delivering the song’s introductory rap. “If you didn’t talk in a certain way,” he expounds, “Barbara might hang up on you! Shirley was a real singer, so she had to talk it with a certain tone, a certain calmness, so I missed work that night and didn’t get paid! It was important that she do it right–that’s why I ended up singing the song because if I had brought a real singer, they’d have sung it…and I acted the song out. The only thing I still have a problem with is that it doesn’t have a phone ringing [at the beginning]!”

Written in Their Soul also serves as a tribute to writers like the late Homer Banks, Mack Rice and Bettye Crutcher, key components to the core of writers at Stax. “I wouldn’t have a Stax catalog if it wasn’t for Bettye,” asserts Bobby Manuel, who came to the label initially as an engineer. “Everything I did here, mainly, was with her. She would pull me out of sessions and that’s when I started really learning how to hone my craft and start writing songs. I’m so grateful to her for what she did for me.”

The panel universally acknowledged the weight that Homer Banks, who wrote hits like Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love” and Luther Ingram’s “If Loving You Is Wrong,” brought to the label as a songwriter. “Homer would write for days on a song. You’d think, ‘Man, let’s go cut it tomorrow,’ but you see him three weeks later re-working those lyrics. He was our poet here at Stax,” Manuel says. “Homer was special. He could do things with words I’m still trying to do,” agrees Henderson Thigpen. “Homer sang gospel originally,” remembered his childhood friend William Bell. “But he was a prolific lyricist/songwriter that had his finger on the pulse of what the ordinary blue collar worker, the common man, did. The way he phrased a lyric, you couldn’t help but love it.” Deanie Parker adds, “Homer Banks was an extraordinarily exceptional writer and Homer Banks was an exceptional person.”

Parker closed the evening by imploring the audience to support the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Written In Their Soul. “Cheryl Pawelski being bold enough to go back into that vault, persisting and listening to what we did forty years ago is amazing. If Memphis is your home, you should really feel good because this is evidence of the depth, the global appeal and the appreciation and musical creativity of Memphis Tennessee. I encourage you to keep your arms around this effort because this belongs to us. This is our tradition. This is our culture. It’s not black, it’s not white. It was a diverse effort which was most unusual for Memphis until recently.”

Ultimately, the songwriters hope that Written in Their Soul reminds the next generation of the importance of story and the magic of collaboration at a time when popular music seems far removed from what they created. Henderson Thigpen reminded the audience, “It’s easy to make words rhyme. But at the time, we didn’t have videos and naked girls in videos. That’s why I don’t have much respect for R&B music [today] because R&B music now isn’t even R&B, really. It’s what you put between the rhymes that makes [a song] work.” Deanie Parker added, “It is crucial that we continue to embrace the music for which we are known all over the world and have been for five centuries now and pass it on to the next generation. The competition for the attention of the children today is fierce. They think that they are performing music. This is music.”

Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos is available for purchase on Amazon.com and all digital music stores.

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