Sophia Michaels
The musical legacy of legendary soul label Stax Records will be explored in a limited edition eight-LP box set from record subscription service Vinyl Me, Please.
VMP Anthology: The Story of Stax Records features eight albums from the Memphis label’s golden period of 1957 to 1975, with LPs from Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Booker T and the M.G.’s, Isaac Hayes and more part of the curated collection. Each album in the box set has been pressed onto 180-gram vinyl.
The Story of Stax Records follows Vinyl Me, Please’s previous 2019 explorations of Blue Note Records, The Women of Motown and electronic music label Ghostly International.
Like those previous anthologies, The Story of Stax Records will be accompanied by a six-part exclusive podcast about the history of Stax Records and the records in the anthology; the podcast features interviews with Booker T. Jones, William Bell, Steve Cropper and journalist Robert Gordon, who also wrote the box set’s extensive liner notes.
VMP Editorial Director and Stax podcast host Andrew Winistorfer said in a statement: “Stax Records altered the history of American music, and created an entire generation of new superstars from a tiny theater on E. McLemore St. in Memphis, and getting to work with their incredible catalog to create this anthology box set has been a real honor for us. It almost felt like an inevitablity for us to do this: After our Blue Note and Motown anthologies, the most requested box set we’ve had is for us to do one on Stax, since we have a track record with doing amazing work with the Stax catalog for various Records of the Month in our past. These eight albums, in their own small way, chart the voyage of Stax Records from a label based in a garage to arguably the most important soul label of all time.”
The Stax box set, limited to 1,000 copies, is available to order now through Vinyl Me, Please’s site.
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