Abstract
The Stax/Volt Revue is a central event in the history of the Stax record label and a key moment in the transatlantic appreciation of soul music. Punningly titled “Hit the Road, Stax,” the Revue was the first overseas trip for many of its participants. It played to sold-out audiences in many of United Kingdom’s major cities, plus Paris, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen and The Hague, between March 15 and April 8, 1967.1 The Revue offered the first opportunity for UK soul fans to see all the musicians behind the Stax label’s recent successes, including Booker T. and the MGs, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, and the label’s greatest singer, Otis Redding. It was not the first soul package tour to reach the United Kingdom—the Motortown Revue, showcasing Motown’s premier acts, played to a succession of disappointing audiences in 1965, for example—but it was at that point the most successful and significant.2 Significantly, it exerted a lasting impact on soul music fans in the United Kingdom, and deserves consideration as an important moment in the long history of African-American transatlantic cultural and political crossings.
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Notes
Rob Bowman, Soulsville: The Story of Stax Records (London: Books with Attitude, 1997), p. 118.
Norman Jopling, “America Hits Back with Tamla Motown Attack,” Record Mirror w/e March 20, 1965 pp. 6–7; Alan Stinton, “Motown Review,” Record Mirror w/e March 27, 1965, p. 13; Andy Gray, “The Sound of Motown,” New Musical Express (March 26, 1965), p. 9; Alan Smith, “Listen! In the Name of the Supremes,” NME (April 23, 1965), p. 12; Clive Richardson, Really Sayin’ Something: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor (New Romney: Bank House Books, 2010) pp. 21–28; Dave Godin, Motown’s UK representative, claims that there were more people on stage than in the audience at the Cardiff date. Jon Savage, “Dave Godin interview #1” February 11, 1995 at http://www.jonsav-age.com/compilations/godin-1/; Savage “Dave Godin interview #2,” July 1997 at http://www.jonsavage.com/compilations/godin-2/ (accessed November 4, 2010); Richard Williams, Obituary: Dave Godin Guardian October 20, 2004 at http://www.guardian .co.uk/news/2004/oct/20/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries (accessed November 4, 2010). See also Brian Fidler, email to author, February 10, 2011, author’s collection.
Roland Snellings, “Rhythm and Blues as a Weapon,” Liberator 5, 10 (October 1965) in Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 171.
Guy and Candie Carawan (eds), Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Movement (1968) collected in idem. (eds) Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through its Songs (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out, 1990). The songs include Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” (pp. 188–193); “People Get Ready,” “Never Too Much Love,” “Gonna Be A Meetin’ Over Yonder,” and “Keep on Pushing” by Curtis Mayfield (pp. 288– 293, 308–309); and adaptations of soul hits “Land of a Thousand Dances,” written by Chris Kenner, and Sam Cooke’s “It’s Got the Whole World Shakin,’” (pp. 296–297, 300–303).
See, for example, Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (London: UCL Press, 1998); Smith, Dancing; Joe Street, The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Waldo E. Martin, No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 44–81; Craig Werner, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York: Plume, 1998); Craig Werner, Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul (New York: Crown, 2004). There is also a significant body of work that links jazz to the politics of the 1960s. Key works include Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Pathfinder, 1970); Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Iain Anderson, This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Ingrid Monson, “Monk Meets SNCC,” Black Music Research Journal 19:2 (2000): 187–200;
Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007).
For the civil rights movement and the wider world, Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001);
James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
For the United Kingdom, Kennetta Hammond Perry, “‘Little Rock’ in Britain: Jim Crow’s Transatlantic Topographies,” Journal of British Studies 51 (2012): 155–177;
Joe Street, “Malcolm X, Smethwick and the Influence of the African American Freedom Struggle on British Race Relations in the 1960s,” Journal of Black Studies 38:6 (2008): 932–950;
Rosie E. Wild, “‘Black Was The Colour of Our Fight’: Black Power in Britain, 1955–1976” (PhD Thesis: University of Sheffield, 2008) and the articles in this volume.
Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) esp. pp. 137–167.
over the Atlantic with his right foot planted in Manhattan. This construction of the United States—the southern musicians who played key roles in making the album were sidelined in the album’s publicity, which explicitly identified Manhattan as a synecdoche for the United States—reinforces the informal abrogation of the South, and particularly southern working-class culture, in popular representations of the United States. Rod Stewart, Atlantic Crossing (New York: Atlantic LP, 1975).
David Cooper (ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) with
Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael Kwame Ture (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 572–581;
Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (London: Dennis Dobson, 1958), pp. 62, 64;
Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), pp. 227–228.
Phil Walden quoted in Dave Godin, “R&B and the Long Hot Summer,” Soul Music Magazine (March 1968) in Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage (eds), The Faber Book of Pop (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 324.
Guralnick, Sweet p. 46; Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (London: Little Brown, 2005), pp. 512–513, 540–541, 607–608;
Greil Marcus, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 39–42, in which Marcus asserts that Cooke’s is the (infinitely) superior song. Franklin’s cover of “Respect” was recorded on February 14, 1967. Liner notes, Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (Los Angeles: Atlantic CD reissue, 1995; originally Atlantic LP, 1967).
Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 697–701, 706, 730–738; Bowman, Soulsville pp. 19–20, 14 4.
“Dr. King Leads Chicago Peace Rally” New York Times March 26, 1967 p. 44; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 239–241.
Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 244; Bowman, Soulsville, pp. 202–203, 269–270. Note King’s “Where Do We Go From Here?” address to the SCLC, August 16, 1967 in James M. Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper, 1986), p. 246. The Wattstax litany can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWIFtVpaIPI (accessed May 23, 2011) and is on Wattstax: The Living Word (Stax LP, 1972; Atlantic CD, 2008). Jackson’s poem was also famously performed on a 1971 edition of Sesame Street, viewable at http://www .sesamestreet.org/video_player/-/pgpv/videoplayer/0/072cb03c-0329–429c-b6f6 – 502bcac4a946 (accessed May 23, 2011). The Eyes on the Prize documentary series episode “The Promised Land (1967–1968)” includes audio footage of Jackson and a crowd repeating the litany over images of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. The images and audio are not synchronized, however, and the credits do not reveal the source of the audio. Paul Stekkler, Jacqueline Shearer (producers, writers, directors), Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement “The Promised Land (1967–1968)” episode (PBS DVD, 2006).
Benjamin W. Heineman, Jr., The Politics of the Powerless: A Study of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 1, 16–20; Street, “Malcolm X”; Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Little, Brown, 2006), pp. 661–663;
Stan Taylor, The National Front in English Politics (London: MacMillan, 1982), pp. 17, 18;
Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1991 edition), pp. 60, 210–211;
Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 90;
Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Press, 2001), pp. 48, 51, 53, 55, 58, 74–89, 122–124. Despite writer Johnny Speight’s protestations, the extent to which Till Death’s audience was laughing with rather than at Garnett’s racism remains moot. Note
Gavin Schaffer, “Till Death Us Do Part and the BBC: Racial Politics and the British Working Classes, 1965–1965,” Journal of Contemporary History 45 (2010): 465–467, 470–471, 474.
Bowman, Soulsville, pp. 116, 118–121; Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Reprint. (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 312; Telephone interview with Phil Saxe, February 11, 2011; telephone interview with Melv Kaye, February 3, 2011, transcripts in author’s collection. Recordings of the tour are available on three CDs: The Stax/Volt Revue: Volume One—Live in London (Atlantic LP, 1967 or CD, 1991); The Stax/Volt Revue: Volume Two—Live in Paris (Atlantic LP, 1967 or CD, 1991); The Stax/Volt Revue: Volume Three: Live in Europe—Hit the Road Stax (Atlantic L P, 1967 or CD, 1992). The Oslo show was filmed by Norwegian television and is currently available on the Stax-Volt Revue DVD (Universal, 2007). It gives a flavor of the intensity of the performances, and particularly of the ease with which Sam and Dave and Otis Redding manipulate their audiences.
Simon Frith, The Sociology of Rock (London: Constable, 1978) pp. 138, 141, 146; Ulf Lindbert, Gestur Gudmundsson, Morten Michelsen, Hans Weisethauent, Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-Headed Cruisers (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 17–18. Copies of Disc and New Musical Express for 1967 were not available.
Frith, Sociology, p. 152; Dick Bradley, Understanding Rock ’n’ Roll: Popular Music in Britain, 1955–1964 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 90. A prime example of the relationship between the press offices and the papers is the case of The Monkees. The band was plastered over the pages of Record Mirror throughout 1967, in support of various releases, and coverage far exceeded that of any of the band’s contemporaries including The Beatles, whose releases in 1967 included Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the “Magical Mystery Tour” EP, and the singles “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever,” “All You Need is Love,” and “Hello Goodbye/I am the Walrus,” which were amongst the band’s most significant records.
Ronald Radano, Lying Up A Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 42 (see also p. 257).
These individuals included Animals vocalist Eric Burdon and Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman. Neil A. Wynn, “‘Why I Sing the Blues’: African American Culture in the Transatlantic World” in idem. (ed.), Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), p. 15. Note Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice” in Image—Music—Text: Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 179–189. See, for example, John Storey, Cultural pp. 123–126 for the application of Barthes to twentieth-century popular music.
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© 2015 Robin D. G. Kelley and Stephen Tuck
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Street, J. (2015). Stax, Subcultures, and Civil Rights: Young Britain and the Politics of Soul Music in the 1960s. In: The Other Special Relationship. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392701_8
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