How do you follow up an essential document like this year's comprehensive Wattstax box set? If you're Craft Recordings, you plan a trip deep into the unheard history of the legendary Memphis label, through dozens of demos released for the first time anywhere. Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos is an impressive 7CD anthology including 146 demo versions of enduring Stax hits and fan favorites, songs written by label songwriters that ended up elsewhere as well as a number of songs
One of the greatest music festivals of the '70s is getting celebrated with an exhaustive array of reissues in 2023: Wattstax, the multi-dimensional Los Angeles celebration of soul, funk, blues and gospel courtesy of Stax Records. A half-century after the premiere of a Golden Globe-nominated documentary on the star-studded 1972 event, Craft Recordings, custodian of the Stax catalogue, will release the most definitive looks at Wattstax, most recently addressed in a 3CD box set in 2003 that took
Vinyl Me Please is at it again! Following their celebrations of Blue Note, Motown, and Ghostly International, the subscription service is set to release a new volume of their acclaimed VMP Anthology Series. This time, they're shining a light on the history of Stax Records. As with previous volumes, The Story of Stax Records will be told in four chapters. The eight albums included in the box will be wrapped in "secrecy sleeves" that can be unveiled at specific points in the journey. Though
Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay," the first Stax single of 1968, should have been a new beginning for the artist and label. Instead, the posthumous release ushered in a tumultuous year for the Memphis institution. The death of Redding and members of The Bar-Kays on December 10, 1967 was a tremendous loss for Stax and popular culture, but no one could have predicted the upheaval that would affect Stax and the city of Memphis in the following twelve months. That time has just
There have been several reissues this year celebrating the 50th anniversary of individual projects released in 1968. But Craft Recordings has announced a box set which celebrates an entire year's worth of material with Stax '68: A Memphis Story, due on October 19. This 5-CD set contains the A- and B-sides of every single released under the Stax Records banner in 1968, including the company's sub-labels, for a total of 120 tracks. Some tracks are by soul legends like Isaac Hayes, The Staple