The Stax sound: a musicological analysis

Abstract

In recent times there has been an encouraging increase in the musicological study of Western popular music by members of the academy. Both Richard Middleton and Alan Moore have published important books that are emphatic about the need for such study (Middleton 1990; Moore 1993). Also there have been a number of articles in a variety of journals over the past several years that have either addressed the need for, suggested various approaches to, or actually taken a musicological approach to one or another aspect of popular music (Foret 1991; Brackett 1992; Hawkins 1992; Moore 1992; Taylor 1992; Walser 1992; Middleton 1993). Despite this flurry of activity, as far as this author is aware, there has been no academic musicological work, other than Robert Walser's recent study of heavy metal (Walser 1993), that has attempted to ferret out the component parts of a given genre through an analysis of a sizable body of repertoire. There is an acute need for such work if popular music scholars are going to begin to understand in concrete terms what is meant by terms such as rock, soul, funk, Merseybeat and so on. This essay is an attempt to begin such a study for the genre of southern soul music as it was manifested by Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.