Over the course of 15 years, a producer listened to nearly 2,000 hours of music to find hundreds of demos from the legendary label Stax—a buried treasure of soul.
. For Black women in an industry as cutthroat and unforgiving as music, success required more than talent and luck. It required sheer, unwavering drive.Parker wasn’t that single-minded. She enrolled in business classes at Memphis State University, worked part time in the studio’s record store—the nerve center of Stax, where Estelle Axton played demos and new singles for customers and tracked their shifting tastes—and eventually established the Stax publicity department.
Graves paused the song and scrolled back through the spectrogram. He zoomed in on a jagged section where he’d heard a click—a frequency spike between five hundred and a thousand hertz—and smoothed it down. One click gone, a thousand more to go. Tall, fine-boned, and pale, with rose-gold spectacles and a tuft of blond hair, Graves worked with delicate, unhurried precision.
“ ‘Demo’ stands for ‘demonstration,’ ” Pawelski said. “This is not going to sound like it was made last week.” Yet most of the recordings were startlingly clear. The rock and folk demos that I was used to hearing were mostly home recordings. The singer strummed a guitar, or played some chords on a piano, and mumbled a few cryptic lines into a cassette deck. These were nothing like that. All but a few of the demos were professionally recorded, in the same studios as the official Stax releases.
Pawelski walked past us on her way to the archive—she’d spent the day there, looking for photographs of the songwriters. “We just saw you partying with Janis Joplin,” she told Parker. Parker laughed and fell in behind her, along with Thigpen. “I couldn’t keep up!” she said, “When I heard about the after-party? That wasn’t my pay grade.” The pictures that Pawelski had found were mostly black-and-white, with an occasional Kodachrome thrown in.
The songwriters took their seats around a conference table in the museum’s main gallery. Parker, Thigpen, and Manuel sat next to a video feed of William Bell, at his home in Atlanta, wearing shades and a black baseball cap. Pawelski was beside Robert Gordon, the author of the 2013 book “Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion.” Gordon and Parker would be writing the demo collection’s liner notes together.
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