Jim Stewart was a 28-year-old bank worker in Memphis, Tennessee, studying law in the evenings and playing his fiddle in a country music band at the weekends, when he and his older sister, Estelle Axton, started a record company in 1958.
Their first recordings were made in a borrowed garage, using a mono tape recorder. Within a few years Stax Records, named after the first two letters of their respective surnames, would be rivalling the success of Detroit’s Motown label with a string of hits including Booker T and the MGs’ Green Onions, Rufus Thomas’s Walking the Dog, Otis Redding’s Respect and Sam and Dave’s Hold On, I’m Coming.
