The Venue is pleased to announce PART II of it's ROCK TALK FREE LECTURE SERIES - The Rise and Fall of Stax Records: Memphis Soul and the music industry at the epicenter of the civil rights movement of the 1960s

DOORS OPEN 2 PM

PRESENTATION BEGINS: 3:00. NO TICKET REQUIRED.

DESCRIPTION: Bank teller and amateur country fiddler Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton (Whose joined last names would give Stax its label) opened Satellite Records in a garage in Memphis, TN in 1957.  Two years later, Satellite Records and the newly formed Stax Recording Company, moved to a vacant movie theater at the corner of College and MacLemore in predominantly African-American South Memphis.  Neighborhood kids, Beale Street musicians, and very soon, the biggest stars in Soul would make musical history there. As an integrated recording studio in the segregationist South, Stax led a musical revolution and the “Stax Sound” would launch the careers of Booker T. & The MGs, Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding and many others.  This presentation will examine the meteoric rise and the inevitable fall of Stax as a result of bad business deals, unchecked expansion, predatory banks, the rising tension of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

PRESENTED BY:  Dr. Mark W. Plummer, Associate Professor of Music, Aurora University