R.I.P.: Jim Stewart, Founder of Stax Records

Jim Stewart (1930-2022)

The Stax Museum of American Soul Music has announced the passing of Jim Stewart, the founder of Stax Records. 

Jim Stewart

Stewart died peacefully surrounded by his family, and will be missed by millions of music fans around the world as one of the great pioneers of soul music and an architect of the Memphis Sound. He was 92 years old.

Born July 29, 1930 in the small farming town of Middleton, TN, Stewart left his family’s farm at age 18 to attend then-Memphis State University. He brought with him two very important things: the fiddle he had practiced playing for years when he wasn’t in school or working in the fields, and the notion that he was going to get into the music business. The fiddle didn’t earn him a living and he worked first at Sears Roebuck and then as a bank teller while playing around town with various bands in the evenings. But that notion to get into the music business kept at him. And he kept at it.

Inspired by Sam Phillips’ success at Sun Records with artists like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Stewart began recording country artists on a tape machine in his wife’s uncle’s two-car garage in the mid-1950s and founded a record company named Satellite in 1957.   A year later his sister Estelle Axton mortgaged her home in Memphis to help him buy some recording equipment and joined him in the venture. 

Soon thereafter, he met Memphis DJ Rufus Thomas, who came to Stewart’s new studio. Thomas recorded a song, “Cause I Love You,” with his 16-year old daughter Carla Thomas. The song was a regional hit, brought in some much-needed revenue, and Stewart gave up country music, focusing only on this new rhythm-and-blues music about which he previously knew very little . As he has said on many occasions about the revelation, “It was like a blind man who could suddenly see.”