Stax, Subcultures, and Civil Rights: Young Britain and the Politics of Soul Music in the 1960s

Abstract

The Stax/Volt Revue is a central event in the history of the Stax record label and a key moment in the transatlantic appreciation of soul music. Punningly titled “Hit the Road, Stax,” the Revue was the first overseas trip for many of its participants. It played to sold-out audiences in many of United Kingdom’s major cities, plus Paris, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen and The Hague, between March 15 and April 8, 1967.1 The Revue offered the first opportunity for UK soul fans to see all the musicians behind the Stax label’s recent successes, including Booker T. and the MGs, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, and the label’s greatest singer, Otis Redding. It was not the first soul package tour to reach the United Kingdom—the Motortown Revue, showcasing Motown’s premier acts, played to a succession of disappointing audiences in 1965, for example—but it was at that point the most successful and significant.2 Significantly, it exerted a lasting impact on soul music fans in the United Kingdom, and deserves consideration as an important moment in the long history of African-American transatlantic cultural and political crossings.