While Soul music fans may debate the merits of Stax Records vs. Motown, the Soulsville Foundation has announced a 2024 Black History Month production to take a new look at things, titled “Stax Meets Motown.”

For this online production, the Stax Music Academy takes a high school field trip from Detroit to Memphis to visit the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. While the students are at the museum, they visit the Stax Music Academy next door. Both are located at the original site of Stax Records, in the South Memphis community known as Soulsville, USA. We witness a “mashup of songs and sounds that embark on glory days from Memphis and Detroit.”

Viewers will hear such familiar songs as hits recorded by Rufus Thomas, Otis Redding, Johnnie Taylor, Diana Ross & The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson Five, Sam & Dave, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Turell, the Bar-Kays, and dozens of others.

Stax Music Academy Executive Director Isaac Daniel says:

This year’s show is a lively comparison of Stax and Motown. Think of it as the best of both worlds of music from the 1960s and 1970s.

Current Stax Music Academy student Anaya Murray wrote the Black History Month show script. She is an accomplished filmmaker, writer, and director with diverse experience in the film industry.

One of the show’s main stars is an 11th-grade Stax Music Academy student named Rickey Fondren, whom CNN recently interviewed about his acting role with the Tennessee Shakespeare Company and other acting jobs.

Stax Music Academy covering "Get Up and Get Down" by The Dramatics. From the 2022 BHM Production. from Stax Music Academy on Vimeo.

Stax Meets Motown will be free to all viewers and begin in February 2024. It is created by young people for other young people.

It comes with companion study guides that delve a little deeper into the Civil Rights Movement that was happening in the 1960s and 1970s. The study guides deal with everything from Black radio to race, the recording industry, fashion, and the Detroit Riots of 1967.

There are contributions in the study guide from Patricia Wilson Aden, President & CEO of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance; Jared Boyd, co-host of Beale Street Caravan and program director at WYXR radio; Scott Baretta, an instructor of sociology at the University of Mississippi and head consultant for the B.B. King Museum and Cultural Center, and musician and teaching artist Victor Sawyer.