SOUL SURVIVORS

A trove of unreleased songs reveals a hidden history of Stax.

- BURKHARD BILGER

It wasn’t the singing; it was the song. When Deanie Parker hit her last high note in the studio, and the band’s final chord faded behind her, the producer gave her a long, appraising look. She’d be great onstage, with those sugarplum features and defiant eyes, and that voice could knock down walls. “You sound good,” he said. “But if we’re going to cut a record, you’ve got to have your own song. A song that you created. We can’t introduce a new artist covering somebody else’s song.” Did she have any original material? Parker stared at him blankly for a moment, then shook her head.

No. But she could get some. Parker was seventeen. She had moved to Memphis a year earlier, in 1961, to live with her mother and stepfather, and was itching to get out of school and start performing. She was born in Mississippi but had spent most of her childhood with her aunt and uncle in Ironton, Ohio, a small town on the Kentucky border. Her grandfather had sent her there after her parents divorced, hoping that she could get a better education up north. Her aunt Velma was a church secretary and a part-time college student; her uncle James worked for the C. & O. Railway. They gave her piano lessons at a Catholic convent and elocution lessons at home. On Sunday afternoons, her aunt would take her to church teas and teach her proper etiquette—how to fold her white gloves in her purse and set her napkin on her lap. In Ironton, the races were allowed to mix a little. Churches and most social clubs were segregated, but Parker went to school with white kids and sometimes even played in their homes. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that there was no difference between them.