Tag: Women in Music

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Joy Brown Wiener

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2024

STEADFASTNESS
for a woman with a lifetime of achievement:

Joy Brown Wiener

A hint at what was to come for Joy Brown Wiener was published in the Jackson, Tennessee  Sun, on May 7th, 1942.  A story about an event at the MacDowell Music Club noted that “Ethel Joy Brown, talented twelve-year old daughter of Mrs. Bates Brown, Memphis pianist and organist…will give a program of violin, cello and piano… Young Miss Brown is giving concerts preparing for her New York debut.”

Joy’s mother, Ethel had seen this coming, discovering that, at age four, her daughter had perfect pitch.  At seven Joy won a state competition, at nine a national competition.  At ten she debuted professionally at Memphis’ Goodwyn Institute.  By age fifteen Joy was the youngest member in the then sixty-six year history of the St. Louis Symphony. To continue her schooling, St. Mary’s Episcopal School arranged for Joy to take classes through Washington University. That same year she also studied at Juilliard in New York. While in New York, Joy performed at Carnegie Hall and before a Central Park crowd with the New York City Symphony Orchestra.   

At a time when her peers back home were learning to drive, Joy was touring Europe. She won a competition in Paris and performed on stages in London, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands.  She was invited to be part of the Italian Chamber Orchestra and was applauded by the Queen Mother of Belgium.  The Romanian composer and conductor George Enescu heard Joy perform and pronounced her “one of the most talented violinists of the younger generation.”

But, as sometimes happens, home called. Back in Memphis Joy completed a degree at Southwestern (now Rhodes).  In the spring of 1953, in the inaugural season of the Memphis Symphony, Joy was Concertmaster, a position she came to hold longer than any other woman in America.

Meanwhile, there was a man.  Russell Wiener had recently returned from Korea where he had served as a Navy dentist.  Music was Joy’s first love, so when Russell first proposed, Joy warned warned him: “You don’t know what it is to be married to a musician… I’ve done it all my life… if I couldn’t do it I wouldn’t be the person you wanted to marry.”

Marry they did, in 1956. They had two daughters Donna and Martha.  They shared a love of music, the arts and each other until Russell’s passing in 2015.  In 1992, the Governor of Tennessee acknowledged the Wieners as Patrons of the Arts.  

She calls her gifts a “God thing,” but it was never just music with Joy Brown Wiener.  She admired writer, musician, and missionary Albert Schweitzer, who believed that true Christianity should work towards a unity of faith and purpose.  She still follows that path.

In her decades with the Symphony Joy discovered a love for teaching and began to tour schools around Memphis, bringing classical music to young people.  At Lindenwood Christian Church, she volunteered to teach young people the singing of hymns, which led to many years of teaching Sunday School.

In her long life, Joy Brown Wiener has given selflessly.  Among the groups to which she has devoted time and energy are City Beautiful, the Symphony League, the Girl Scouts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Brooks Museum.   

But Joy never lost the thrill of performing.  She toured widely and became known to millions through the television series The Joy of Music.

1992 Joy Brown Wiener stepped away from the Memphis Symphony, not to retire but to focus more energy on teaching and mentoring promising young students. Today, eight of her students perform with the Memphis Youth Symphony. 

Joy says, “If you know how to do something your greatest pleasure is to pass it on to the next generation. When they get up and they can thrill an audience what more can you ask. That’s it!”

The importance of Joy Brown Wiener’s life was on display the day she turned ninety.  Joy’s daughter and a niece contacted fifteen of her young students. They secretly rehearsed then surprised her with a birthday performance. Former students from Boston, Atlanta, Jacksonville and Colorado traveled to Memphis that day to celebrate the woman who taught them so much and meant so much.          

Today please join us in celebrating the life, the steadfastness, the perfect pitch of Joy Brown Wiener.

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Estelle Axton

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2019

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Estelle Axton

Estelle Axton co-founded Stax Records with her brother, James Stewart. The name Stax itself is a combination of STewart and AXton. Stax became renowned as a leader in soul music, rivaling Detroit and the Motown sound in the 1960’s.

Born in Middleton, TN, Estelle began her career as a schoolteacher in Memphis, married Everett Axton, raised their two children at home for ten years, then worked as a teller in a bank.

When her brother needed money to develop a record company, she persuaded her husband they should remortgage their house and joined her brother as a full partner at the newly named Stax Records in 1959. Together they bought the old Capital Theater in an African-American neighborhood now known as Soulsville, and turned it into a recording studio and a record shop. Her brother ran the recording studio and she ran the Satellite Record Shop, which attracted local talent and provided money in sparse recording times.

“The shop was a workshop for Stax Records,” she explained. “When a record would hit on another label, we would discuss what made it sell.” Musicians recalled Estelle as the one who encouraged them and sometimes made her brother sign them up.

Together with her brother she was involved in finding and promoting the careers of artists such as Rufus and Carla Thomas, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Booker T & the MGs, and Isaac Hayes, who said of her:
“Estelle was a very generous woman. She was generous with her time, with her counsel, with her advice. I think she was responsible for the racial harmony at Stax. Mrs. Axton, you didn’t feel any back-off from her, no differentiation that you were black and she was white. . . Being in a town where that attitude was plentiful, she just made you feel secure. She was like a mother to us all.”
The musicians and singers at Stax called her “Lady A.”

“Were it not for her, there’s no way Stax could have become what it became,” said David Porter, a songwriting powerhouse who wrote many Stax hits, such as Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man,” and “Hold On, I’m Coming.” “She had a positive spirit toward the acts in that community and any young kids who came in there with aspirations. There’s no way that Stax could have become Stax without the positive energy that this lady contributed,” he said.

After leaving Stax Records in 1970, she founded the Memphis Songwriters Association and co-founded the Memphis Music Association, which became the umbrella organization for all Memphis music.

The Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened in 2003, and she lived to see it, dying in 2004 at age 85. In 2007 she herself was posthumously awarded a Grammys Trustee Award, given to “individuals who, during their careers in music, have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording.”

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Marion Keisker

Women of Achievement
2001

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Marion Keisker

Until her death in 1989 at the age of 72, Marion Keisker blazed a trail for women in many fields, including broadcasting, theater, writing, the military and women’s rights.

In the 1950s, while working as an assistant to the owner/producer of Memphis Recording Service and Sun Records, Sam Phillips, she was the one who had first contact with Elvis Presley when he came to record a song for his mother. “Call this kid Elvis,” she told Phillips, “I’m telling you, Sam, he’s got something.” The rest is history.

Her broadcasting career includes 10 years (1945-55) at the top of the ratings with her WREC radio show Meet Kitty Kelly. At one time, she was responsible for daily programs on every radio station in the city. Hers was the first voice heard on WHER, the first all-female radio station in the country, where she read the news from 1955 to 1957.

Shortly thereafter, Marion joined the Air Force with direct commission as a captain. After training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, she was assigned to Vance AFB in Enid, Oklahoma, where she was the only woman officer (other than nurses). In January of 1959, she was transferred to Ramstein AFB in Germany, overseeing the largest armed forces television station in the world. Next, she served as the only woman line officer at Patrick AFB in Florida. She retired in 1969 as a major and returned to Memphis.

It was then that she became deeply involved in the women’s movement. As founder and president of the Memphis Chapter of NOW from 1973 to 1974, Marion led the fight to “de-sex” the classified ads in local newspapers so jobs would no longer be classified by gender. Promoting the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar, she said, “They finally gave us our money, now let’s show them its effect on the economy.” Through her membership in the Women’s Media Group, she fought discrimination against women in the media.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she became known for her theater/broadcasting work. She was voted the city’s Best Actress three times. She also led the “Shy Persons Club” and organized to keep Prairie Home Companion on WKNO.

Always on watch, Marion’s frequent letters to the editor of local newspapers often spotlighted incidents of discrimination against women. In one such letter printed in 1986 in The Commercial Appeal, Marion responded to the issue of a lax attitude toward sex discrimination saying, “… gains are accepted as the norm by those who benefit from them. Those who grow weary in the fight for equality (i.e. justice) relax. Progress slows or is reversed.”

Marion Keisker’s spirited service to the community and steadfast crusade for equal rights has benefited all women of Memphis and Shelby County. Her call to remain diligent is a strong reminder that the fight is not over.

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Lucie Campbell

Women of Achievement
1998

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Lucie Campbell

Lucie Campbell, the youngest of 11 children, was born to former slaves in Mississippi in 1885. Following her father’s death, Lucie’s mother moved the family to Memphis. Lucie graduated as the 1899 valedictorian from Kortrecht High School, which was later renamed Booker T. Washington High School. She returned there to teach until her retirement.

Lucie served five years as president of the Negro Teachers Association and was vice president at-large of the American Teachers Association. In 1916, she was one of nine founding members of the Baptist Training Union Congress of the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc. Shortly after its inception, she became the national music director. She was a self-taught musician who composed more than 80 hymns, many of which she did not copyright until 1950. The majority of her compositions were given to the Baptist denomination and helped to create and maintain an atmosphere of religious fervor and optimism necessary to keep the convention intact.

In 1943, she was invited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to attend a conference in Washington on Negro Child Welfare. She was a member of the National Policy Planning Commission of the National Education Association in 1946. Lucie was considered an accomplished and dynamic orator and was a popular women’s day speaker. Like many black professional women of her time, she devoted much of her life to others. She married the Rev. C.B. Williams of Nashville in 1960 and died there in 1973 following a brief illness.

Lucie Campbell is one of many African-Americans, and few Memphians, featured in the exhibit, “Wade in the Water: African-American Sacred Music Traditions,” which was at the National Civil Rights Museum. This exhibit, organized by the National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibit Service, opened in Washington, D.C., and traveled to more than a dozen U.S. cities.

Lucie Campbell made great contributions to a collective struggle. She was a committed and inspirational teacher, both in the academic and arts fields. She did critical community work within her profession that aimed to improve opportunities for teachers and students. She worked diligently to inspire people and to shape a musical tradition that spoke to the spiritual side of a people doing the daily and necessary work of resisting oppression, building family and community institutions that would enable them to take the struggle to another level, and openly challenge a system of inequality and injustice.

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Joyce Cobb

Women of Achievement
2002

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Joyce Cobb

Joyce Cobb is one of the best known and most-loved of performing Memphis musicians. She is an essential part of our musical fabric, contributing blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, folk and just plain good music to our community. Her name brings to mind a big smile, huge voice, quality in musicianship and depth in delivery. She’s carved out her place in the music profession as a performer, teacher and donator of her talent.

Joyce first performed in her grandmother’s church in Okmulgee, Oklahoma – and she never forgot the warm response she received from the audience. She grew up listening to her parents’ excellent collection of jazz and classical music. But it was in her high school’s girls’ choir that she got her real start. Director Sister Mary de Lassis uncovered in Joyce a passion for singing that continues today.

In Nashville, Joyce worked for WSM radio and TV for six years and opened at the Opry. She came to Memphis in 1976, lured by a contract with a Stax Records subsidiary but Stax folded shortly after her arrival. She worked for a month at the Holiday Inn and there met Wayne Crook and Warren Wagner. In talking with them she realized that her dream included songwriting, so she signed with their company, Shoe Productions. Her first song, “Dig the Gold,” was about the poorly paid black gold miners of South Africa. The song earned a number 42 spot in Billboard magazine.

Joyce has run her own Beale Street jazz club and has toured nationally. She has won four Premier Player Awards for Best Female Singer from the Memphis chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. She has recorded on several labels including RCA and Cream Records. In 1997 she hosted Beale Street Caravan, a nationally syndicated radio program highlighting the music of the Delta. She received Memphis Arts Council funding for the dynamic live program Beale Street Saturday Night, focusing on Memphis music. She has taught at the University of Memphis and the Community Music School.

Joyce has volunteered with WEVL radio for more than 20 years. She has served on the program committee, currently serves on the board and hosts several shows. All this time, she’s been writing songs, sometimes spending as much as 12-15 hours a day in the studio. She now has 30 to 40 songs to her credit.

Her biggest challenge has been to continue writing and performing her own material, but she has begun producing a CD on which she sings her own songs. Throughout her career, Joyce Cobb has shown initiative in music, business and education.

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Cordell Jackson

Women of Achievement
2001

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Cordell Jackson

“I consider myself an inventor,” says internationally acclaimed rock ’n’ roll guitarist Cordell Jackson. “I’m just richly blessed with ideas … I have now more than ever. If I think of it, I do it.” Initiative has been the driving force behind this colorful music pioneer since her childhood in Pontotoc, Mississippi. Inspired by her musical father, Cordell began learning at age 12 to play piano, bass, mandolin, banjo, harmonica and the guitar. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes, ‘Little girls don’t play guitar,’ they thought. I looked right at ’em and said, ‘I do.’”

And play she did. In 1943, she graduated from high school and moved to Memphis. In 1946, she purchased her own recording equipment. During this same period of time she met and married William Jackson Jr. and went on to become the country’s first female recording engineer. She was the first woman to write, sing, accompany, record, engineer, produce and manufacture her first record. Cordell also became one
of the first women to start her own record label, Moon Records, in 1956.

During the next few decades, Cordell continued to pursue her love of music and to distribute her Moon Records products to 48 states and 35 countries. One night during the 1960s, Cordell was in the audience at a fundraiser where Alex Chilton and Tav Falco were playing. To Cordell’s surprise, they were playing her music instrumentally. When Falco later told her it was “new wave from London,” she informed him it was hers and invited him to hear her recordings.

But it was writer-producer Celia McRee who truly cast the spotlight on Cordell. In 1985, Celia brought Cordell to New York for the New Music Seminar. While there, she joined old friend Tav Falco on stage at the Lone Star Club. “I started playing, and they stood up in one swoop, like a gust of wind,” says Cordell. History was being made again, and Cordell was a star.

Soon after, Cordell had an award-winning video in the New York Film Festival and on MTV, and then was featured in New York’s Interview magazine. And things haven’t slowed down. She’s been named Memphis Musician of the Year, Memphis Songwriter of the Year, honored by Who’s Who of World Women, and been included in the Smithsonian Institution, the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum in Memphis, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Cordell also has made numerous television appearances, including 1992’s award-winning Budweiser commercial with famed guitarist Brian Setzer. She’s currently writing a book, The Brighter Sides and My Music, and recently completed work on a movie, Wayne County Rambling, which will feature one of her songs, “Jazz Fried.” In addition to her ongoing recording career, she found new success as an accomplished artist and has sold paintings to collectors in London, Japan, Stockholm and across the U.S. In Memphis, her work can be seen in Jay Etkins’ Gallery.