It comes as some surprise that Bettye Crutcher’s raw take of her “There Is A God,” for example, may have even more jump in its step than the 1974 Staple classic.īut it is the never before heard originals that makes Written In Their Soul an essential piece of music history. Hearing rough takes on established classics like the Staples Singers’ “Respect Yourself” and Wilson Pickett’s “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)” brings plenty of fresh insights. That story is of a record label providing an ongoing space, creative ecosystem and infrastructure for some of the most profound popular American songwriting of the 20th century, much of which, as this collection demonstrates, the listening public has never even heard. There’s a much more profound story being told about the label in Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, a revelatory new 146-song set of previously unreleased demos from a crop of its many unheralded songwriters. The story of Stax records has long been smoothed over and sculpted into a neat bundle of Southern aphorism and marketing copy: The Memphis home of “Soul Man” and Shaft and the Staple Singers was the more authentic (insert adjective like “gritty” or “greasy” or “Southern-fried” here), counterpart to the pop-oriented Motown a rare space of multiracial utopia in a segregated Sixties South a locus, for Blacks in Memphis at the time, for the expressions and dreams of a better American future that lost its way in 1968 when those dreams vanished with the assassination of MLK.
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