HBO's 'STAX: Soulsville U.S.A.' recounts triumph, tragedy of legendary Memphis soul label

The new documentary series "STAX: Soulsville U.S.A.," about the iconic Memphis record label, is a story of groundbreaking music, hard truths and unhappy endings. The series concludes, not with an upbeat epilogue noting the launch of the Stax Museum, the success of Stax Music Academy and Soulsville Charter School, but with the original studio razed, an empty lot serving as a painful reminder of what once thrived in the heart of South Memphis.

“I wanted us to wrestle with two truths,” says the documentary’s director, Jamila Wignot. “There’s the beauty and the legacy of the music, and there’s the fact that it wasn’t allowed to live on. To me, it was important to hold both of those, because that’s the honest story.”

Wignot’s take on the Stax story will air as a four-part series on HBO, with two episodes on May 20 and two on May 21. The documentary series will also be available to stream on Max.

For Wignot — a Brooklyn-based director and producer, whose credits include a 2021 doc on African American dance pioneer Alvin Ailey — the project plays “as a big social history as well as a musical one.”

"STAX: Soulsville U.S.A." covers the basic facts, charting the rise and fall of the record label, founded in the late ‘50s by banker and country fiddler Jim Stewart, and his sister Estelle Axton, who would tap the talents of a core of young South Memphis neighborhood kids to make its records: Booker T. Jones, William Bell, David Porter and Isaac Hayes, among them. A remarkable contingent of artists — from Otis Redding to Sam and Dave and The Staple Singers — would come to define the Stax sound, as the company, later led by former disc jockey Al Bell, became a soul institution through the 1960s until its demise in 1975.

Producers approached Wignot in late 2019 about serving as the director of a Stax doc project. As a longtime fan of the label’s music, Wignot found herself further captivated by the company’s story and the bigger implications of that tale, “I was amazed to really understand the larger landscape that the Stax [story] affords,” she says.

While there have been numerous attempts to chronicle the the Stax story in books, audio documentaries and most notably, a 2007 feature film directed by Academy Award winner Morgan Neville and Memphian Robert Gordon, Wignot says the multi-part, multi-hour series format of the new doc offered the ability to explore the label’s many highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies with a unique level of detail.

“We always knew it needed to be a series to fully tell the story,” says Wignot. “Once I started doing the research it became very clear you had to understand the context out of which this music emerges, and making something that wasn’t [sufficiently] expansive was just going to rush the story. More space would allow for more and deeper storytelling.”

Wignot first came to Memphis in February 2020 to meet with some of the principals in the Stax story. “Which is the normal courtship process of any documentary,” says Wignot, who notes that not everyone was immediately on board. “A lot of the key players wanted to feel trust — to trust [me]. Almost like, we’re not going to share our stories without that.”

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and resulting delays in getting the project started, allowed Wignot time “do more relationship building, which is why I think the interviews in the documentary feel as honest and forthcoming as they are.”

The documentary series features new sit-down sessions with Stax label executives Bell, Stewart and Deanie Parker, as well as musicians and singers like Steve Cropper, Booker T. Jones, David Porter and Carla Thomas, filmed variously in Memphis, Nashville, Los Angeles and other locations. Wignot conducted long interviews — in Bell’s case 16 hours over the course of two days — in order to  get past the rote version of the Stax history that the participants have told for decades. “By doing longer interviews you can get to deeper place,” says Wignot, “which I think we did.”

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In many ways, Wignot’s version on the Stax story questions the long-held notion that the integrated record company was always an idealized utopia in the midst of the turbulent racial climate of the ‘60s South. “There’s so much light and love and mythmaking about that first chapter of Stax,” says Wignot. “Because it is so much what we want to believe about ourselves, as people, as a country — this interracial collaboration that came together in spite of the odds and they all loved each other and there were no problems. I kept running into that myth, and as a Black person living in the 21st century I was skeptical.”

Additionally, Wignot’s documentary puts a greater emphasis on the second era of Stax, when the company — by then led by Black executive Bell — became increasingly socio-politically aware, as well as more musically and commercially ambitious.

“Music writers and fans love the simple, authentic — for lack of a better term — Black sound of the early years [of Stax] but there isn’t as much love shown to the latter part, and the more expansive vision that Mr. Bell had,” she says. “[He] wasn’t just interested in being a label that does one thing. He felt like, ‘CBS doesn’t have to do one thing — why do I have to?’” Wignot adds that Bell faced heavy scrutiny from the industry as a result, “like we don’t need you doing orchestral sounds, we definitely don’t need you doing country, or doing pop. But Al Bell was really rejecting that.”

Wignot notes that many of the Stax artists and executives she spoke to — most of them in their 70s and 80s — are still coming to terms with the history they were a part of. “In a lot of ways, they’re wrestling with the reality of their lives from that time, even now,” she says.

“But what I admire most about all of these people is they really have a deep sense of who they were. Carla Thomas in episode one says, ‘I know who I was — I was a music person.’ They all had a deep-rooted understanding of who they were and what they were trying to achieve, of their artistic voice and how they were following their intuition — that was the same for Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. They were following their love and following their passion and saying to hell with the naysayers.”

Ultimately, Wignot believes the documentary and the Stax story offers a “really beautiful lesson about what is possible when you are open to possibility, as opposed to allowing the limitation to cloud your vision. It’s an inspiration in that way.”

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'STAX: Soulsville U.S.A.'

Directed by Jamila Wignot

Airing from 8-10 p.m. (Central) on May 20 and 21 on HBO

All four episodes will also be available for streaming on May 20 on Max.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: STAX: Soulsville U.S.A.: Director Jamila Wignot talks new documentary