Origin Story · Volume 7

SOUL

The Assembly Line That Sang, and Who Owned What It Made, 1959–1972

Where it sits on the century

19151959–19722030

$14.99Paperback
about 118 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

This is the complete story of Motown and Stax soul in about three hours: two rival machines built from the same parts, in opposite designs. Detroit ran a salaried, uncredited house band — the Funk Brothers, nameless on every sleeve for eleven years — a Friday-morning quality-control meeting that voted on every release, and staff writers set deliberately in competition with one another. Memphis ran a racially integrated house band in a segregated city, built its arrangements by argument in the room with no charts, and tested finished records on the teenagers in the shop out front, watching their feet.

It takes the money seriously, because the machines ran on it. What ten dollars a song bought, and what a retainer withheld. The publishing company named after three children that quietly out-earned everything. The artist’s ledger that turned a founder of the Supremes into a release form and a headstone. The three writers who built five consecutive number ones and sued for twenty-two million. And the best fine-print story in the record business: a distribution agreement signed in trust and unread in 1965, whose boilerplate handed one company ownership of every master the other had ever made — discovered, three years later, at the stroke of somebody else’s merger.

And it answers the question most books about soul decline to ask: how it ended. In 1972 — with removal vans leaving Detroit for Los Angeles and a signature on a second fatal distribution deal. An ending of two systems, not of the music, which was at number one the same season.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually do — the bass line that answers the singer, the horns where Detroit would put strings, the half-beat of silence a Memphis arrangement leaves for the voice to step through.

Format: Paperback
Trim: 5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages: about 118
Chapters: 26 in five movements
Period: 1959–1972
Audiobook: 2h 48m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: Soul — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 8
THE BRITISH INVASIONthe students in the Motown revue audiences, sending the records back across the Atlantic with interest→Volume 15
FUNKthe rhythm section this book kept at its edges, promoted to author→Volume 16
DISCOthe Philadelphia machine at full orchestration, and what the dancefloor did with it→

Free to read · the opening

How volume 7 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 7 · SOULIntroduction

The Line

In 1955 a young man from Detroit’s east side took a job at the Lincoln-Mercury plant, fastening upholstery to car frames as they came past his station. The job paid, by his own account, around eighty-five dollars a week, and he hated it in the specific way an ambitious person hates work that uses none of what he is. But he watched the line. A bare metal frame entered the building at one end; a finished, painted, upholstered car rolled out the other; and in between, at station after station, somebody added exactly one thing, checked it, and passed it on. Nobody on that line was an artist. The line itself was the artist.

The young man was Berry Gordy, and what he did with that observation is half of this book. Within four years he had borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family’s savings fund and founded a record company in a converted house on a residential boulevard, and within ten he was running an operation in which a song entered one end of the building as a scrap of melody and left the other as a finished hit, written to order by staff writers in competition with one another, cut by a salaried house band whose names appeared nowhere on the record, tested at a Friday-morning meeting where the company voted on what shipped, and groomed for delivery by an in-house department that taught its teenage artists how to walk, sit, and answer an interviewer’s questions. He called the operation Hitsville. The trade papers called it an assembly line, and unlike almost everyone in industrial history who has been compared to an assembly line, Gordy took it as a compliment, because it was his idea.

Six hundred miles south, in a dead cinema in a Black neighbourhood of Memphis, a white bank clerk who played country fiddle and his older sister, who had mortgaged her house to buy a tape recorder, were building the opposite machine out of the same parts. Stax had a house band too (four men, two Black and two white, in a city where they could not legally have shared a lunch counter) and no meetings, no charts, no vote. An arrangement was whatever the four of them argued their way into in the room, in front of the singer, before the tape ran. Quality control was the record shop the sister ran at the front of the building: play the kids the tape, watch their feet, and if the feet moved, press it.

This book is about those two processes, and it wants to be precise at the start about what the machine is, because here the machine is not a piece of equipment. Soul’s machine is a process: the house band plus quality control, a standing group of salaried musicians who played on everything, and a system for deciding what was good enough to ship. Detroit and Memphis built rival versions of that process, arrived at from opposite directions, and the contrast between them is the spine of this book. It explains the records, which sound like the systems that made them. It explains the money, which flowed the way each system was owned. And it explains the ending, because a process, unlike a device, is made of people, and a thing made of people can be dismantled by a contract, a plane crash, a rifle shot on a motel balcony, or a removal van, and in the span of this book it was dismantled by all four.

The introduction runs on for another 5 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 26 chapters · about 118 pages · $14.99

Contents

26 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room4 chapters

1Eight Hundred Dollars on West Grand Boulevard
2The Cinema on McLemore Avenue
3Two Cities, Two Doors
4Who Was Actually in the Building

02The Machine5 chapters

5The Band on Salary
6The Head Arrangement
7The Friday Meeting
8The Writers’ Room
9The First Four Bars

03The Records6 chapters

101959–1962. The Corner Comes Indoors
111963–1965. The Sound of Young America
121966–1967. Two Peaks
13December and April
141968–1972. The Second Act
15The Records the Legend Skips

04The Money6 chapters

16What the House Paid
17The Artist’s Ledger
18Jobete, and the Writers Who Left
19The Fine Print
20What a Soul Record Actually Earned
21What the Records Earn Now

05The Ending5 chapters

22The Last Year in Detroit
23Memphis, After
24What It Became
25What the Story Leaves Out
26The Machine Was People

Free to read · reference

SOUL: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 25 entries, 1959–1972. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1957

Memphis (Jim Stewart founds Satellite Records, recording country and pop in a garage in Brunswick, Tennessee. Detroit) Reet Petite, the first of the Jackie Wilson hits co-written by Berry Gordy, whose royalty statements become the founding grievance of this book.

1958

Estelle Axton remortgages her house to buy Satellite an Ampex recorder. Gordy forms the publishing company Jobete, before the record company exists.

1959

12 January. The Ber-Berry Co-operative lends Berry Gordy eight hundred dollars; Tamla Records begins. Summer. Gordy buys 2648 West Grand Boulevard and hangs the Hitsville U.S.A. sign. Money (That’s What I Want) is cut with the receptionist as co-writer.

1960

Satellite moves into the Capitol Theatre on East McLemore Avenue, South Memphis; the record shop opens in the lobby. Rufus and Carla Thomas cut Cause I Love You; Atlantic licenses it, beginning the relationship. The Miracles’ Shop Around, re-cut after a three a.m. phone call, becomes Motown’s first million-seller.

1961

Satellite becomes Stax. The Mar-Keys’ Last Night reaches number three. Please Mr. Postman becomes Motown’s first pop number one.

1962

Summer. Green Onions, cut in session downtime by an integrated house band with a seventeen-year-old at the organ. October. Otis Redding, present as a driver, records These Arms of Mine in the session’s last half-hour. The first Motortown Revue tours the segregated South.

1963

Fingertips Pt. 2 makes a twelve-year-old the first artist to top the singles and album charts simultaneously. Heat Wave fixes the Holland-Dozier-Holland template. The Beatles record three Jobete songs in London; the mechanical royalties flow to Detroit.

1964

Summer, Where Did Our Love Go begins the Supremes’ run of five consecutive number ones. Mary Wells, at twenty-one, voids her minority contract and leaves. Dancing in the Street.

1965

My Girl reaches number one. Wilson Pickett and Steve Cropper write In the Midnight Hour at the Lorraine Motel. May, the formal Stax-Atlantic distribution agreement is signed, unread by one side, with a masters-ownership clause in the boilerplate. The Supremes play the Copacabana. Autumn, Stax closes its studio to outside productions; Atlantic moves Pickett to Muscle Shoals.

1966

Hold On, I’m Comin', Reach Out I’ll Be There, You Keep Me Hangin’ On, Knock on Wood, Try a Little Tenderness, both machines at peak output. Holland-Dozier-Holland’s productivity begins its contractual slowdown.

1967

February. Aretha Franklin cuts Respect in New York for Atlantic. June. Otis Redding and the Stax band play Monterey. July. Detroit burns; the word soul on shopfronts becomes Soul Man. October. Atlantic is sold to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts for seventeen and a half million dollars; Gladys Knight’s Grapevine becomes Motown’s biggest seller to date. Florence Ballard is removed from the Supremes. 10 December, the plane goes down in Lake Monona: Otis Redding, twenty-six, and four teenage Bar-Kays.

1968

March. (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay becomes the first posthumous number one in American chart history. 4 April. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, a mile from Stax. May, Stax discovers the 1965 clause’s meaning, breaks with Atlantic, loses its catalogue and Sam and Dave, and sells itself to Gulf+Western. Motown sues Holland-Dozier-Holland; they countersue for twenty-two million dollars. Autumn, Who’s Making Love proves the rebuilt Stax can live; Marvin Gaye’s Grapevine begins seven weeks at number one.

1969

May, the Soul Explosion: some twenty-seven albums at once, Hot Buttered Soul among them. The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back, built by the deliberately anonymous Corporation. Benny Benjamin dies in Detroit.

1970

Bell and Stewart buy Stax back from Gulf+Western. Tammi Terrell dies at twenty-four.

1971

What’s Going On, released over the founder’s misgivings, credits the Funk Brothers by name after eleven years. Theme from Shaft reaches number one. Stevie Wonder turns twenty-one, collects his trust, and returns with lawyers and his own publishing.

1972

April. Isaac Hayes wins the Academy Award for Theme from Shaft. Spring. I’ll Take You There, number one, cut in Alabama. June. Motown moves its headquarters to Los Angeles. 20 August. Wattstax at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a dollar a ticket. October. Lady Sings the Blues opens; Stax signs its distribution agreement with CBS, with a six-million-dollar advance. December. Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone at number one. The span of this book closes.
After the span, compressed because endings have paperwork.

1973

Clive Davis is fired at CBS; the Stax-CBS relationship sours. Paul Williams of the Temptations dies at thirty-four.

1975

Al Jackson Jr. is shot dead at home, unsolved; involuntary bankruptcy proceedings open against Stax in December.

1976

12 January, seventeen years to the day after the eight-hundred-dollar loan, Stax is padlocked by court order; Al Bell is acquitted of all charges in August; Florence Ballard dies in February, aged thirty-two.

1983

James Jamerson dies at forty-seven.

1988

Motown Records is sold for sixty-one million dollars; Jobete is retained, and sold separately a decade later at a valuation in the hundreds of millions.

1989

The McLemore Avenue building is demolished.

2002–2004

The Funk Brothers documentary, the Grammy awards, and the lifetime-achievement recognition, thirty years after the vans left.

2003

the Stax Museum of American Soul Music opens in a replica of the studio, with a music academy attached.

Free to read · where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

A general caution for this volume: the two companies at its centre are among the most memoirised institutions in popular music, and most of the founding scenes (the three a.m. recut, the borrowed valet’s audition, the bathroom-door title, the note on the studio door) rest on participants’ own tellings, given years or decades later, sometimes varying between tellings by the same person. This book identifies such accounts as personal tellings where they carry weight alone, and the reader should extend that caution generally: the era’s principals were, among their other gifts, superb narrators of themselves.

The two houses. Rob Bowman, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, the essential scholarly history of the Memphis company, built on decades of interviews, and the backbone of this book’s Stax chronology, personnel and finances. Robert Gordon, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, for the company’s social history and its ending. Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, the standard account of the southern soul world, Stax’s orbit and the Atlantic connection. Nelson George, Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound, and Gerald Posner, Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power, for the Detroit company’s business history; George is the source most alert to the contract and publishing mechanics this book leans on in Movement Four.

Memoirs by principals, all to be read as interested accounts: Berry Gordy, To Be Loved, the founder’s own telling of the loan, the plant, the Friday meetings and the move west, and the source identified in the text wherever an account is his alone; Smokey Robinson, Smokey: Inside My Life; Booker T. Jones, Time Is Tight; Steve Cropper’s extensive interview record in the trade and musicians’ press; Mary Wilson, Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme; Martha Reeves, Dancing in the Street; Raynoma Gordy Singleton, Berry, Me, and Motown; Otis Williams (with Patricia Romanowski), Temptations; Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, the source for Wexler’s own account of the Stax contract clause, identified as such in the fine-print chapter.

The musicians. Allan Slutsky ("Dr. Licks"), Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson, and the 2002 documentary of the same title, the principal witnesses for the Funk Brothers’ pay, working conditions, anonymity and late recognition; their claims are identified in the text as the musicians’ own accounts where no company documentation corroborates them.

Biography. Jonathan Gould, Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, and Mark Ribowsky’s Redding and Supremes biographies; Peter Benjaminson, The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, the source, with the underlying court records, for the settlement figure and the malpractice litigation described in the artist’s-ledger chapter; David Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye.

The business record. The Holland-Dozier-Holland litigation (Motown’s 1968 breach action and the countersuit) was reported extensively in the trade press (Billboard and Cash Box) and is summarised in George and Posner; the settlements are not public and the text says so. The Stax-Atlantic distribution agreement of 1965 has never been published in full; this book’s account rests on the participants’ consistent later tellings (Stewart’s interviews, Wexler’s memoir) and on Bowman’s and Gordon’s documentary reconstructions, and its limits are stated in the chapter. The CBS agreement, the Union Planters litigation, Al Bell’s 1976 acquittal and the 1975–76 bankruptcy proceedings are matters of court and press record, per Bowman and Gordon. Motown’s sale figures (1988, and the later Jobete transactions) are from contemporary financial press reporting. Black Enterprise magazine’s company listings for Motown’s standing among Black-owned businesses.

Chart positions and dates throughout are from the Billboard listings of the period (Hot 100 and the R&B chart under its changing names) via the standard compendia (Whitburn); UK positions from the Official Charts Company. Grammy and Academy Award records from the awarding bodies’ own archives.

Where figures are disputed, session fees and retainers at both houses, the exact royalty rates in early artist contracts, the price Gulf+Western paid and received back, the size of the Ballard settlement’s remainder after legal fees, the wording and negotiation history of the 1965 Stax-Atlantic agreement, who contributed what to arrangements built by consensus, the text gives the range or the standard account and says whose account it is. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record, and in a book about who got paid, they are frequently the point.

What this book does not do

This book is about singers and it will not quote a single one of them. Here is why.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute, and song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. A book that quotes a little is a book making a legal judgement it cannot check. So this one quotes none, and instead does the harder and more interesting thing, which is to tell you what these records actually do, what the bass is playing, where the horns come in, which beat the snare lands on and how late, and why a record made in Memphis breathes differently from a record made in Detroit inside its first four bars.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

And it cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening to it on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Soul. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

In a music this dependent on a singer, not quoting the singer is a genuine loss, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What the rule leaves room for is the thing almost nobody writes about at length (two factories, their payrolls, their house bands and their books) as the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where it came from, what made it possible, which records mattered and why, who got paid, who did not, and how it ended, which in this volume is not the death of a music but the dismantling of the two systems that manufactured it, in the same twelve months, for opposite reasons.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism · MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Soul & R 'n B · MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-90623-887-0
Audiobook ISBN: 979-8-90623-888-7
Paperback ISBN: not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 7 about?

The Assembly Line That Sang, and Who Owned What It Made, 1959–1972. In January 1959 a Detroit family savings club heard a loan application from one of its own: a twenty-nine-year-old former boxer and failed record-shop owner who had watched the assembly line at the Lincoln-Mercury plant and wanted to build one that made records. The family lent him eight hundred dollars. The same season, six hundred miles south, a Memphis bank clerk and his sister — who had mortgaged her house to buy a tape recorder — were moving their little label into a dead cinema in a Black neighbourhood, with a record shop in the lobby.

What years does SOUL cover?

1959–1972. The volume is numbered 7 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made SOUL possible?

The house band and quality control. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 28,000 words: 26 chapters across five movements, roughly 115 minutes’ reading, 118 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 48m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 25 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy SOUL in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 118 pages, and it never goes out of print.