Director Jamila Wignot on Connecting Musical History to American History for HBO’s ‘STAX: Soulsville, USA’

Director Jamila Wignot’s STAX: Soulsville, USA, is one of the finest music documentary series I have ever seen. Hell, it’s one of the finest documentaries I’ve ever seen, period. Wignot and her team tell the story of the mighty STAX record label, which introduced such extraordinary artists to the world like Booker T. and the MG’s, Sam and Dave, Rufus and Carla Thomas, and of course, Isaac Hayes and Otis Redding. Had Wignot just stuck to the music, she would have created something wonderful. But she did not settle for wonderful. By connecting STAX’s place in musical history with the history of the times (the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and the tragedy that can come with capitalism) that was enveloping this small Memphis record label, Wignot has made an outstanding document that speaks to the times in which these extraordinary artists lived, but also to the times we live in today. In ways both good and bad, the same song plays on and on. 

As I began watching the series, I was less than 15 minutes in when I knew I had come across something special. I messaged my father-in-law, Carl Hauser, right around that 15-minute mark. Not only was this the music of his youth, he was also a contemporary of the musicians of that time. His band from New York City, The Druids of Stonehenge, had briefly been signed to a major label. Before that, The Druids once opened for Otis Redding. As the band left the stage, Otis stopped the Druids lead singer, David Budge, to tell him, “That was alright, young man. That was alright.” Let’s just say, Budge took that as a compliment.

I’ll never fully understand what it was like to be alive in the STAX era, hearing this remarkable music for the first time. But this series brings you as close as you can get to understanding what this music meant to those who fortunate enough to be there were there during this time of grand discovery.

This series is a dream to remember. 

Here is my conversation with the director of STAX: Soulsville, USA, Jamila Wignot.

Awards Daily: What made you decide to include the movement and the politics of the time within this specific story of a record label? 

Jamila Wignot: I came to this series because of a love of the music and knowing nothing of the full story of STAX, the label’s biography, nor the social context. I knew they were in Memphis and I knew the Lorraine Motel was there, so I knew something was happening around that time, but I really didn’t know that much about the backstory. As I started to dig into it, I think one of the questions I had was just, why does the music sound the way that it does? Why is it addressing the topics that it’s addressing? And even though a lot of the songs are love songs and fun dance songs, there was a sense to me that there’s a kind of energy and drive to it and a sound that felt very specific to a city. When I started, I was thinking why Memphis? And that kind of set me on to asking those questions about the social context. The other piece of it was that, of course, STAX is revered for being this real anomaly of an interracial label that happens at the sort of moment in which Jim Crow, which had lasted a full hundred years—was really being challenged by the modern day Civil Rights movement.

And so I kept wondering what that felt like for these musicians. And there was a sense from previous stories I’d read, a kind of general mythology around the label, that they just didn’t see color. And I just couldn’t see how that was possible. I live in 2024. I started making the film in 2020. We have the pandemic, we have George Floyd. How could they, at the height of all of the structures that were being challenged at that time, have been so colorblind? All of that raised a lot of questions and doubts for me. I began to explore that and it felt really important to see that yes, in many ways they were operating as an interracial organization and transgressing all kinds of social orders very naively and earnestly and sincerely. But it felt important that, to understand how radical and revolutionary an interracial label was, you had to set the context in which the music was made. Then the second half of the Stax story takes place in a very different social context as well. And I think Isaac Hayes is a different kind of musician and music maker than Otis Redding, and so what explains that and how Isaac Hayes presents himself, using those two as the sort of biggest points of the label, across the board. The Bar-Kays also clearly represent something happening. That’s why those questions came about. 

Awards Daily: It is a strange thought to think that Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton started this label with the intention of recording white country artists, and ended up becoming famous for the grittiest of Black music. Did it surprise you that Jim and Estelle were able to pivot like that? 

Jamila Wignot: I was really amazed by that. And I think what spoke to me was that Jim has a really independent spirit, like indie in the sense that we use it now, where he just loved music and wanted to make music. He loved the sounds that he loved and that came out of his gut and not out of something that was about being so wholly closed off from certain kinds of sounds, nor did it reflect any kind of market philosophy. Obviously you’re in business to make money. You don’t want to be putting out a bunch of stinkers, but I think he’s the kind of person who, when he heard something he loved, genuinely just followed that intuition. I think that spirit, that both Jim and Estelle shared, really emanated outward and then brought in people who also shared that idea of exploration, of collaboration, of discovering as you went. For me, as somebody who came out of an independent documentary space, it really spoke to me about the beauty and joy of that. I think that that’s a key ingredient. Being willing to take big swings and big risks explains so much of the success and the sound that came out of that label. 

Awards Daily: The importance of the record store that Estelle operated next to the recording studio fascinated me. It drew people in who were just buying records, and some of those customers actually ended up making records next door. Did that institution that has almost disappeared, the record store, did that resonate with you, too? That there was this organic regional/city-to-city aspect that doesn’t really exist anymore because everything’s available right away? 

Jamila Wignot: That is completely fascinating to me. Also, the importance of the physical object, the importance of having a space where that object gets sold and consumed and listened to, and that Estelle really ran a shop that Booker T. described in part of an interview that I think we didn’t end up featuring in the film, as more like a library. You would come in and you’d say hey, can I listen to this, and she put it on and then she’d chat with her consumer about it. And she kept these detailed records of what people liked and didn’t like, which both worked for her in terms of understanding her customer base, but also in terms of feeding information back to the studio as well. It’s a sad fact that this kind of regionalism did die away. And I think as a label what was so profound about STAX, even at the height, was that of course you had the Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes, and these big time acts but they also always had a group of highly regional folks. Al Bell understood, yeah I know that this isn’t going to get nationwide coverage, but I know that the people who lived here have moved there, and so I’ll get them to buy it. There’s a way that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can cover coast to coast with our big acts, but we can also feed these more regional flavors, this real diversity of taste, we can continue to do that, which works in two directions.

One is that you as the audience get to have a real diversity of sound that I feel starts to go away once majors take up and take over and then there’s a way that you have to produce. On the other hand, as an artist, you have a real opportunity. There’s this place where you can come in and they’re not going to say oh, you’ve got to do it this way because we did some market testing and we know they like people to wear this outfit and sing in this way and the sound is this thing. Stax was more led by we just like that sound and you have a unique way of doing that. And so we’ll take that and it’s okay, we know that this sound is really great in Philly. It’s not going to sell in New Orleans and it’s not going to sell in Harlem, but people in Philly really love it. Like they have the Astors as a doo-wop group that they continue to support. I think there’s a real richness that comes out of that. Interestingly, I think we’re back to that in many ways, the kind of crumbling. I think of it in a kind of mid 2000s way with the end of the big box bookstore–the Barnes and Nobles and the Borders. You scaled up so big that you lost any kind of unique quality. And then people went back to a regionalism.

Awards Daily: A lot of the artists at STAX had never really traveled before, and then going over to the UK, they really broke through in England and expanded their range by performing live and being played on a pirate radio station on a ship just beyond British waters. They also had this incredible personal cultural experience where they were treated so much differently, and better, than they were at home. What a unique back and forth that must have been. 

Jamila Wignot: I think it’s something that is very much a recurrent theme for particularly African American artists. You can look at jazz musicians, you can look at authors. Oftentimes African Americans have traveled to Europe and had more of an embrace and been freer to find themselves and explore their art. And so it wasn’t so shocking to me that that happened for STAX. I think what was interesting was the kind of wind in the sails that it created for them that I hadn’t quite anticipated, because while they were getting radio play in the United States, they weren’t breaking through to the thresholds that say a Motown is or a Sam Cooke, who had more “mass appeal,” but they were breaking through. But to see this embrace abroad, and for all of them as artists to feel like oh my god, here’s all these people singing our songs back to us.

As an artist, to know you’ve touched people in that way, is so profound. It was the realization of their dreams. I loved when Sam Moore talked about how, growing up, he wanted to be a preacher in the church and singing and getting people to go along. And then you see him taking those traditions and bringing that kind of cadence and sound and performance style, like a preacher, to these audiences in Europe and just being adored and mobbed for it. At the same time, I think there’s this lightning bolt, as articulated by Al Bell, that this idea that certain people don’t like certain kinds of music, is just bullshit. You’ve just got to get in front of people. Americans are going to love this music too if you let us get there. If the radio stations would open up a bit more, then the STAX sound would have permeated into marketplaces that the doubters didn’t believe. So they had  to figure out a way to do that, which of course they did. 

Awards Daily: I want to make sure we do get some Otis coverage in here because it’s astounding to think that he died at 26. He had such presence and authority, physical authority even. Then as an artist, he always knew what he wanted when he went into the studio. You see that play out in that very informal, living room setting, where he’s doing “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa” with the horn players and he’s cueing them and he’s rolling with it. I think I melted in my damn seat. It’s magic. When you were going through the footage that was available to you, when you saw that piece of footage, did you gasp? 

Jamila Wignot: Oh, yeah, and it’s funny because with my team, we had this embarrassment of riches and a really hard set of choices. Like what songs are we going to feature? I love that song. It’s so silly And I like that it’s non lyrical, but very emotive, but when we saw that there was footage in it, it earned its place because it’s illustrating something that was so much a part of the sort of final ingredient that came to STAX. When people think about the music that comes out of places like STAX and later Muscle Shoals and Criteria, it’s that idea that the horns are the background vocals. At STAX, that was because of finances. It’s a place that’s very DIY and the thing that should count them out, they somehow figure out a way to get over. We can’t actually afford background vocalists, so we’ll just do it with the horns. And that kind of comes together best through Otis Redding. And yeah, he is my gateway to STAX. If you’ve seen previous interviews, I had a high school boyfriend who used to make me little mixtapes with Otis Redding songs on them. And that was how I discovered STAX. I can’t believe that “These Arms of Mine” drops in ‘62 and he is dead by ‘67. So when you think about Otis Redding’s songs that you love and how prolific he was, there’s so many CDs available or your Spotify playlist, or however you consume music. In five years, he produced all that music. Just extraordinary. So driven and yes, so wise beyond his years. When I first started getting into him, I was like wait a minute, what do you mean he died when he was 26? I would’ve thought he was 45. He just has a worldliness about his voice and the way he approaches a song that was far beyond his years. 

Awards Daily: I think there was a part of me that thought after Otis died, STAX was diminished. I mean maybe diminished by losing him, but not diminished as a force. I didn’t realize that STAX actually continued to grow and stay powerful after losing Otis. I guess your mind just doesn’t always keep track of the timeline. And then, like you said, Isaac and Otis are, in a way, bookends to the wide success of STAX. Isaac is so different from Otis, but he’s bringing something similar in this full grown mature energy. 

Jamila Wignot: I think the first chapter of STAX’s story, up through ‘66 gets so much love, those songs are in so many movies, particularly from the 80’s. It’s very interesting to look back and think the Brat Pack films are littered with soul music from the era, The Big Chill, Top Gun has “Dock of the Bay.” That music became really cherished and valued and found its foothold. I think the latter chapter of STAX’s sound got eclipsed, but in fact, the label was more successful in that second stage. They were selling millions of records more than they ever had in the time that Otis was there. If you think about somebody like Isaac Hayes, he burst onto the scene as a solo artist with Hot Buttered Soul, but he came up through the ranks, if you will, at STAX. He starts as a backing musician and eventually works his way to producer so there’s a rich history of the STAX sound that he knows so well, and also his own desire as an artist to go beyond that. And again, another time where he says, but can I do it the way that I want? And yes, out of a crisis moment, do whatever the hell you want, we need music! But think about that, this spirit of trial and error and going with intuition. I’m sure that comes out of necessity, but I think in many cases STAX is emblematic of necessity being the mother of invention.

Awards Daily: While we all know Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, we don’t necessarily think about it having happened in Memphis. But when you place it in context with the growth of STAX and what that meant at that moment, to have this incredible tragedy and an amazing success converge like that in one city. When you decided to include the King assassination, you had to have thought that “my series has got to earn this inclusion,” and I certainly think that it does. How difficult was it to bring in such a heavy event when you’re also celebrating art? 

Jamila Wignot: It’s funny because, if you look at my resume, I’ve done quite a few films about American history and African American history. And so I had a little bit of an oh, do we have to do the death of MLK as I was approaching the story. I hadn’t interviewed the people yet, so I was hearing their own experiences about it firsthand. I felt for the first time like the King assassination has transcended the specificity of Memphis and become this kind of national tragedy. Here were people who were intimately connected to that moment and tethered to the fact that this was a man who was doing something that would have benefited their lives. So they’re both desperately in need of his vision to take hold and to have success. The Civil Rights movement being successful for them would have benefited them tremendously, and then it happens at this hotel that they all used to hang out at. Once we knew that there was a social aspect to the story, there was obviously a political aspect that was specific to our characters, and then there was just the fact of it happening in Memphis that was very specific to them, it felt really necessary. I think the other thing was that later in our process, we realized we actually have to introduce King also as a character very early on in the first episode so that he’s there as a presence that stands in so that, storytelling wise, it pays off. That’s something about this backstory that I found revelatory as well as they really are in step with and reflecting the highs and lows of that period in terms of our social and racial history. So there was a way that we could map STAX’s own story onto the story of the nation where it wasn’t inorganic and it wasn’t forced. It just was true to the label. 

Awards Daily: You had referenced earlier a naïveté that Jim and Estelle had. In the history of especially ‘50s and ‘60s music, what usually happens is artists like Little Richard get taken advantage of by white people who have more power and understand the industry better. I’m not trying to say that Al Bell is like those people, but Al Bell understood the industry and music a lot better than Jim and Estelle did and their naïveté led to a power struggle that actually redounded to STAX’s benefit in terms of growing the label. I don’t want to make There is a fascinating sort of inverse relationship to what you’re typically hearing about: like Little Richard having to perform until he’s in his 70s, 200 nights a year, because he didn’t make any money off of “Tutti Frutti.” Did it strike you that this music that was very much made by black people, there was an interracial band but the sound of it was for black people, started with white folks and then a black man had to come in to bring it to the next level? 

Jamila Wignot: I think that’s fair. I think that Al Bell had a much more expansive vision than Jim Stewart did, because I think they’re animated by different things. I think Jim wanted to be modestly successful and then he was fine with that and he would have happily kept STAX as a kind of indie label. Eventually, he does decide he wants to sell. Which does put Al Bell in the bind of having to find somebody bigger to partner with to keep it going. I think Al Bell’s driven by a couple things. One, he’s just much more business savvy and he thinks that the label can be better and bigger. He’s also a black man who thinks why can’t black people have an ownership stake in the economics of this country? And I think he really believed, and it wasn’t a false belief if you look at what was happening for black people economically in Memphis, because this label, at the point that Al Bell takes over, became the fifth largest record producing center in the globe.

That’s because of a bunch of different labels that are there, but a huge part of that is because of STAX. So there’s evidence for Al that I can change the fortunes of my community and of the city I’m from, if we keep doing this music thing well. And I think he really has a kind of corporate and a social vision, and I think that’s above and beyond what Jim had ever envisioned. I love this moment in episode four when they’re contemplating going to Wattstax and they’re going to put on this massive free concert. And like, how the hell are they going to do it? And Jim just says Al really believed he had to do something for the black community, and I supported him in that. All this virtue signaling and trying to be good allies and all this stuff, and there’s Jim just saying it. He was a true ally. I think Al Bell underestimated the music industry and underestimated racism in Memphis because STAX had so much success. We end episode three where we do because this is undeniable. This is an unstoppable force. What could take us out?

Awards Daily: For a long time, there has been this idea that if you get Black people to congregate somewhere, terrible things are going to happen. I think a really good example of that is when Malcolm X, the movie by Spike Lee, was released, there was this idea that there were going to be shootouts at the movie theater, which never happened. Wattstax reflects that. The biggest problem they had was a guy who was a little too excited and ran on the field. It showed that without a major authoritarian police presence, if you give people a place to just feel joy they will act accordingly for the most part. 

Jamila Wignot: That’s right. It doesn’t take much, but to say to the community in that moment, which Rufus Thomas does so well—nobody could have handled that crowd better, but he’s just like this guy’s being a knucklehead. Let’s just come on. You got to get off the field. And there’s a way to do that doesn’t have to be about terror and fear. This group just grabs him in this loving embrace. And that’s exactly what it is. It’s come on fool, we got to keep this thing going. You’re messing up our day, and there’s quiet ways that can happen. That’s hilarious. I had forgotten about the Malcolm X thing, but yes, very similar. 

Awards Daily: As I had referenced before, usually the stories are white people taking black people’s music, and then Al Bell’s situation where he was able to, increase the ambition and success of STAX. But then he actually became a victim of the same sort of thing. CBS Records partnering with STAX and then not distributing the records and painting Al as a criminal, when there was no basis to it. But you don’t need the basis. All you need is for the allegations to be prolonged to reduce somebody’s strength in the industry. And that is how STAX died, because people took it from them because their interest wasn’t in the art. It was in the commerce. 

Jamila Wignot: I think that’s a very succinct way to put it. It’s just the story of American capitalism, which I still find perplexing on some level. We start episode four the way we do with this parable where Al knows what he’s up against because he understands this paradox of American business, which is when you get too big, somebody is going to try to buy you, copy you or break you. But then how do you tell somebody stop dreaming, because that’s what this asks of Al Bell. I am a bit more team Jim personally. I’m like, let’s just keep it small. I just don’t have that kind of faith and ambition. I don’t think I would have swung that big. What’s so funny about this country is that this is the story we celebrate. Jeff Bezos failed over and over and over again, a decade of failure, and now there’s Amazon! Or these stories typically of white men who fail and fail, but then they have that one great idea and it shoots them into the stratosphere. Al Bell is in that class of people. I’m just going to keep dreaming until my dream pays off. I think it was the wrong time in our society for that dream. He was going up against forces who were much bigger and had more capital to spend and didn’t believe in the vision that he believed in.

We don’t know what would have happened if Clive Davis could have stayed the course, the story might’ve ended the same way, we can’t run the experiment in reverse. And then married with the irony of all irony is that the very banking institution that they were  a part of is in the same bind and it’s very “too big to fail.” It reminded me so much of 2007 and these banks being saved and individuals being left to their own devices. It’s that kind of story that plays out for STAX as well. It raises lots of questions about our value system and what we cherish. What to me is heartbreaking is that this laboratory of experimentation went away. The city of Memphis has done a great job of building things up around it in its place. That idea of being Booker T and knowing hey, I am a musician and I don’t have to find my way to New York or find my way to LA or find my way to Chicago anymore. I just go up the street and can hang out in a studio and lay down some stuff and oh my God, maybe we’ll lay down something that’s going to be good enough to be a great record. And then it’s “Green Onions”. It’s just like the magic of that is what I think was really destroyed. 

Awards Daily: To your point about Al Bell, shouldn’t he have had the same right that Jeff Bezos had? That’s what was taken from him. I remember writing this quote down from the film, “To destroy art like that, that’s a sin.” 

Jamila Wignot: Bobby Manuel said that. He played with Isaac Hayes. What a soulful guy. I think that’s it. I kept saying there are some people who might say oh, but the legacy lived on, the catalog survived, we still have the music. Of course that matters so much. When we are all long and gone, hopefully aliens will come and they will discover this music and start rocking out to it in space. But he said I just thought about all the music that could have been. It’s that kind of thing that I really think people have to remember and I think it was important to end this series in a place where you were holding both those truths together. There is this incredible body of work and thank God it survived and people are caring for it and keeping it alive. But also let’s not forget this other part of the story, which is another way that I think this country has to reckon with its history. 

Awards Daily: The show rightly received and deserved two Emmy nominations: one for a series and one for sound. My father-in-law said he felt like he was hearing the music for the first time again because of how high quality the sound was. He said “I was listening to this music on 45s through shitty speakers when I was a kid. And now I hear it this way and all of a sudden, the music’s even better than I thought it was.” Did that strike you because of the quality of the sound in the show? 

Jamila Wignot: Absolutely. Gratefully the labels that we collaborated with gave us access to the final tracks, the master recordings, the stems of everything. Once we got the stems of Isaac Hayes music in, I’m talking like “Walk On By” or “Shaft,”32 stems and one mic was just for a tambourine, just a separate mic. The sound guy went wild once he knew he had all these tracks accessible to him. Being able to play with that, being able to articulate that through the visual scene, sometimes you’re in the studio and it becomes more of a studio sound. This is the genius of my mixers at Harbor. Other times you’re in a room, so we gave that experience. We were really able to modulate that. But there was a day that we went into the mix and it was the piece of archival footage that we had of Isaac Hayes singing “Walk On By” and it’s got fringe and his background vocalists are there and they were able to clean that audio tape, because we’re working with old archive. We walked in and they hit play and we were literally bathed in his voice. We were in Isaac’s voice. We were not listening to music. We were in the sound and they played the scene and we’re like okay, that’s great. Can you please play it one more time? When I set out to make this series, I was thinking of how long documentaries take to make. Series take so long to make, but for that time of my life, I am going to just basically live in this sonic universe, and what a gift. And then the story is so much bigger than all of that. But yeah, I really couldn’t believe it, hearing the tracks of Otis singing the demo of “Dock of the Bay” and hearing him laugh and there’s so much. It’s just so rich and mind blowing.

Awards Daily: I remember the first time I listened to Isaac Hayes on a good set of headphones. It was like I was taken someplace else. I felt like I was leaving my body almost because there is a deepness, a great well of sound and you pick up things that you can’t hear when there’s arbitrary noise around you. It astounded me just to listen to it. I felt like I could have closed my eyes during times when I was watching this and gotten a ton out of it, not just from the conversations, but just from hearing the music in a different way. 

Jamila Wignot: The editors that I worked with were such excellent music editors and again the sound department. I’m rooting for us all, but I’m very much rooting for them because they deserve all the kudos. And that’s exactly right. I used to live in a different neighborhood and I would walk to my train ride, and the walk was the exact length of “Walk On By” and so I put my headphones in and listened to it and it was like it transformed the experience of my walk. You know how you can then isolate how you want to hear just by your mind? Like focusing on the baseline, you focus on that baseline, and you hear James Alexander plucking away, and then you want to hear just the drums. It’s amazing all the different ingredients and players who come together. And again, all of them being trained up in this one studio. I think about that, this music is born from a community of people. So if you love all of that richness and expansiveness of sound, by the time we get to an Isaac Hayes, it’s like what you’re loving is baby James Alexander, learning to play his bass and playing with Otis Redding, ans Isaac subbing in for Booker T sometimes or playing a piano line with Otis and everybody coming in every day and working on their craft, but doing it together like hey, what do you think of this man? Nothing done in isolation. Isaac is picking up stuff from all of his players. He’s taking a lot of ideas and then out comes this great sound. So I think that’s the other piece of it that’s really inspiring to me, this idea of what’s possible through the collective. 

Awards Daily: Even though I’ve been doing this for a while now, I have avoided becoming cynical, but when you do consume a lot of film and television, it does get a little bit harder to be knocked off your feet. This absolutely knocked me off my feet. I can only imagine how proud you are to have seen this series through, elevated it, and to be able to say, for the rest of your life, I did that thing.

Jamila Wignot: Yes, it’s very funny. This is extremely flattering and I don’t take compliments very well. I’m like yes, talk to my team, talk to my team. (Laughs). No, I’m extremely proud. Before we screened the series for anybody in public, we actually were able to show it to the STAX participants and that moment was really the thing. I went on this journey with them promising that I would do the story justice and then thinking, Oh, fuck, I hope I can do the story justice. I felt this way with my previous film Ailey, but the scale of this is even bigger. When you’re working on something about artists, the film has to achieve the same level of power. That’s really hard and it took us a very long time and I have lots and lots of people to say thank you to. I think for me the collaborative spirit, the naivete, the going for broke, the audacity of the whole enterprise, those were early things I really wanted to come through and the celebration of these people that I got to interview, but also those that I got to show through archive. I just wanted the world to embrace them all again, because they contributed so much to our culture. So yeah, I am very proud. People are like what are you going to do next? I’m like just slow down. I don’t know. But I feel so lucky that this is the kind of work that I get to make especially now when I think there is so much cynicism in filmmaking. I’m very grateful to have the story out there and supported the way it has been. 

STAX: Soulsville, USA can be viewed now on HBO/MAX.