Jim Stewart , a bank employee who moonlighted as a fiddle player in a country band, realized in the late 1950s that he was never going to hit the big time as a musician. The next best thing, he figured, was to become a record producer. With makeshift equipment and no training as an audio engineer, he launched his own Satellite label. The first two discs, a cloying country ballad and a rockabilly number, went nowhere. His sister Estelle Axton mortgaged her home to provide more capital, and they founded what became Stax Records, housed in a former movie theater in Memphis.

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