The Ertegun brothers were joined by Jerry Wexler, son of a German-Czech immigrant window washer, who started as a journalist, changed the label race music to rhythm and blues while working for Billboard, and then moved into record production with Atlantic in 1953.
Tom Dowd was, of all things, a nuclear physicist whose career path was curtailed after World War Two because he couldn’t complete his doctorate. His alma mater was still teaching pre-war physics, so Tom ended up in a studio, engineering at first, then building recording desks, producing sessions and mixing some of the all-time great recordings.
At first Stax operated as Satellite Records, founded in 1957 by Jim Stewart, and worked out of a garage, recording country music. To avoid confusion with another operation named Satellite, the name was changed in 1961, Stax being a synthesis of Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton. Around the same time the label moved to the Capitol Theatre, at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, a predominantly African-American neighbourhood.
Stewart, a country fiddler, had little interest in R&B, but Estelle’s son Charles, a.k.a. Packy played sax and parlayed his uncle’s recording studio as an entree to a band led by Steve Cropper that morphed, on the back of an instrumental hit called Last Night into The Mar-Keys.
The people at Stax came to the music from an entirely different perspective. Where Motown was aimed squarely at mainstream America, Stax took the course it did more or less by accident.
Money, and the making of large quantities of it, was a motivation, but these people managed to turn a hobby into an income stream.
While Berry Gordy and company were looking for a way out of the ghetto, these guys found themselves in a position where the ghetto was a major element in what was a more or less unanticipated success story.
Jim Stewart ran the recording side of things in the theatre, while Estelle sold records out of the old refreshment stand. Given the demographic of the neighbourhood a move into R&B was, more or less inevitable.