Stax and its affiliated record labels released 300 albums and 800 singles between 1959 and 1975, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Jim Stewart, the white Tennessee farm boy and fiddle player who co-founded the influential Stax Records with his sister in a Black, inner-city Memphis neighborhood and helped build the soulful “Memphis sound,” has died at age 92.
Stax fostered a raw sound born from Black church music, the blues and rock ‘n’ roll. It featured strong rhythm sections, powerful horn players, and singers who could be sexy and soulful in one tune, and loud and forceful in another. Stewart grew up on a farm in Middleton, Tennessee, before moving to Memphis to attend Memphis State University and joining a group called the Canyon Cowboys as a country music fiddler. He was recording country music in his wife’s uncle’s garage and working at a bank when he and his sister, Estelle Axton, founded the Satellite record label in 1957.
Booker T. and the M.G.s were racially mixed, as were the Memphis Horns, which backed many of Stax’s hits. In 1968, Stewart, Axton and Bell sold Stax to Gulf & Western in exchange for stock. Stewart and Bell repurchased the label in 1970. “He was hurt,” Axton told The Commercial Appeal for an Aug. 20, 1989, article on the history of Stax.
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