June 5, 2023 Issue

Burkhard Bilger’s “Soul Survivors,” in this week’s issue, has a great subject – the reunion of the songwriters of a legendary Memphis recording studio forty-eight years after it went out of business. The studio’s name is Stax. The location of the reunion is the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, in Memphis. The reason for the reunion: to hear (and help identify) some of the music that Stax archivist, Cheryl Pawelski, has selected for a soon-to-be-released Stax demo collection. Bilger attends the reunion. He describes some of the songwriters. Here’s Deanie Parker:

Parker had swept in a few minutes earlier in black pants and a sunflower-yellow top, her shoulders wrapped in a jewel-toned silk scarf. Her hair was pure white and pulled back into a French roll, her round cheeks still unlined at seventy-six. “I’m responsible for the mood food,” she said. She took two bottles of strawberry Fanta from a shopping bag and plunked them on the table. “We’ll have to toast each other with red pop.”

He describes the session’s proceedings:

And so it went. Pawelski would play a demo, names would fly around the table—“David Porter!” “Byrd Burton!” “That’s Crop on the guitar!”—and a flood of reminiscences would follow. That jangly piano part must have been recorded in Studio C; it had an old brown upright in it. But that flabby bass sound was definitely from Studio B—it never had much bottom end. A high voice with a bit of a quaver came over the speakers, and suddenly it was as if Carl Smith, who wrote “Higher and Higher” and “Rescue Me,” was standing there in the room, with his oversized glasses and boyish grin. And that deep moan? It could only be Mack Rice, mouthing his improbable rhymes—thrown, gone, own, telephone. The longer they listened, the more the gallery around them seemed to fade, replaced by the dusky halls and echoing rooms of the old theatre. Every song was a memory palace, every instrument a key to a different door—though not always the same one for every listener.

Most memorably, he describes a Stax demo that no one at the session can identify:

The singer’s name wasn’t written down, and he never sang at Stax again. Pawelski suspected that the demo was taped at one of the “neighborhood auditions” that the studio held on Saturday afternoons, open to anyone with a song. “Was on a cold Saturday night and we just had a fight,” the singer began. “You walked out on me, knowing that you killed my heart with grief.” His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter. He sounded hopeless, abandoned, as if he knew that there was no point in begging, but he couldn’t help but do so. “Just walk on back,” he sang, and a pair of voices joined in to help carry the tune. “Walk on back. I don’t care how long it takes if you just walk on back.”

That “His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.