A label in a cinema
Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton founded Satellite Records in 1957 and moved it into the former Capitol Theatre on East McLemore Avenue around 1960. In September 1961 the label became Stax, from the first letters of their two surnames.
The house band
Booker T. & the M.G.’s formed in 1962 and played on nearly every Stax recording until about 1970. The museum’s recreation of Studio A shows the room where the band and the label’s artists recorded.
Highs and a sudden end
Otis Redding was the label’s biggest early star until his death in a plane crash in December 1967. Isaac Hayes’s album Hot Buttered Soul sold more than three million copies in 1969, and the Wattstax concert in August 1972 drew a crowd of more than 100,000. Stax was forced into bankruptcy in 1975 and closed in January 1976.



