The Rock n Roll Curmudgeon Rides Again
Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos
Craft Recordings
You could always swear allegiance to the sound of Stax: the heart ‘n soul, the purity of real people singing real. Like Otis, the sharecropper’s son and part time well digger. The high school girl from the Memphis projects Carla Thomas and her tap dancing dad Rufus. A guitar player, in this case Steve Cropper, who acquired his first guitar via mail order when he was fourteen. Child prodigy keyboardist Booker T. Jones. From the cotton fields of Mississippi, Roebucks ‘Pops’ Staples and his children, including his youngest, Mavis Staples, rose to world renown.
Though Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos took nearly twenty years to reach fruition, this had to be a dream deep dive for Grammy winning producer Cheryl Pawleski and her crack research team. Digging through the Stax vaults and digging every damn minute of it too, I’ll bet. Who the hell wouldn’t? The provenance of this project is a long and winding one which Pawleski discusses in greater detail (and finer language than I) in the beautiful 65-page booklet that adorns and illuminates this invaluable chapter of the American story.
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Defying the nature of our expectations that everything can’t be right, these one hundred and forty-seven tracks, (a callous word given the emotional engines behind these songs) with all but one of them previously unheard and believed lost to the sands that swallow us all are that damn good! The affirming gospel pull of The Staples “Tip of The Mountain,” written by Bettye Crutcher (whose CV hasn’t started yet) and Marvell Thomas (Carla’s older brother.) The loping, bluesy harmony of Issac Hayes and David Porter’s“You Make a Strong Girl Weak” performed by one of few Stax girl groups, Jeanne & the Darlings. Eddie (“Knock On Wood”) Floyd and Cropper sculpting from thin air “You Can’t Win With A Losing Hand,” the deliriously good, Fats Domino styled blues pop roller “Mister Fix It,” and the acoustic strum of Floyd’s aching, church tinged “I’ll Always Have Faith In You.” Let’s call out Crutcher again for “Third Child” a pot boiler of a tune if ever there was one and her “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” inspired “People Come Out of Your Shell.”
Now that’s just Disc One. There are fourteen other works of art that I’ve haven’t mentioned. So you can see how long this review could be if I followed my wilder impulses for hyperbole, oh wows!, and long winded gyrations of language and grammar. Which I won’t so you’re all welcome.
Written during wartime (which seems to be the case for most things humans create) Disc Two kicks in with “Get Up About Yourself” Homer Banks’ urgent call to action with Cropper and either the MGs, the Mar-Keys, or the Bar-Kays alongside him keeping the groove soul tight and holding steady for “We The People.” In between anthems, Banks’ delivers that shit-sure hit single “If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Want To Be Right)” The driving “Do The Sweetback” by the barely known March Wind, offers up words for generations to live by: You got to do what the women-folk like / get the hump out your back, sweetback. There’s more. But as I promised about brevity—
Disc Three eases in via Crutcher’s continued genius — “We Got Love On Our Side,”
and the r’n b scorcher “Sugar Daddy.” Mack Rice, (who wrote “Mustang Sally” btw) scores
big with “That’s What Friends Are For” (no not the Burt Bacharach / Carole Sager / Dionne Warwick one) but this way groovier, life wiser one. One of Stax’s last gasps at the charts before falling in on itself in ‘75, Shirley Brown’s sultry ’74 smash, “Woman To Woman” is heard here sexy by the writer Henry Thigpen. If Rice’s “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin” doesn’t top the Christmas song requests list this year, then there truly is no justice in this mean ol’ world.
And so it goes . . . eighty eight more works of art that, for whatever reason, fell short of the songs we can’t forget — “These Arms of Mine,” “Dock of the Bay;” “Time Is Tight,” “Soul Man,” “Who’s Makin’ Love;” etc. Carla’s pleading “Don’t Let The Love Light Leave.” Deanie Parker (who cooked for all at McLemore Ave and ran the front desk) lovers’ blues “I’ve Got No Time To Lose.” Floyd’s original “634-5789 (Soulsville, USA.)” Rice’s jammin’ “Everybody’s Hustling” and “Without You.” Parker and Rice come clean on “Nobody Wants To Get Old.”
Cropper and Floyd doing the Everly’s with “Looks Like Another Hot Summer.” Crutcher’s
“Let’s Get Down To Business” would sound right at home on Carole King’s “Tapestry.”
People ought to keep their mouths shut sometimes Rice advises in the all out, Wilson Pickett-like shouter “Just Too Right To Be Wrong.” Sung by Crutcher and written by Banks, Crutcher, and Raymond Jackson, known collectively as the We Three, the feminist anthem “Too Much Sugar For A Dime” resonates as universally now as then. Maybe even more so now given our right wing lean towards Gilead.
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So let’s call it there and leave the rest of the glorious music for you to discover and dance to on your own. But keep the shades open for your neighbor to see because this is music to share, not isolate in ear buds. Sure, there were other marquee names: Sam and Dave, Little Milton, Albert King. But not all those names wrote the songs, and that’s whereWritten In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, all seven beautiful discs of it, seizes the day and seizes your heart.
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Mike Jurkovic is a prolific poet, writer and reviewer and a frequent contributor to Lightwood. He heads CAPS (Calling All Poets) a reading series live and on zoom and CAPS small press. Read more of this writing by going to our Search Button and entering his name.
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