The Mar-Keys

The Mar-Keys, formed in 1958, were an American studio session band for Stax Records, in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1960s. As the first house band for the label, their backing music formed the foundation for the early 1960s Stax sound.

The group began as The Royal Spades while its members were in high school. They tried to get a record made for the local Satellite Records (the forerunner of Stax), unsuccessfully, even though the label was owned by the mother and uncle of the group's tenor sax player, Charles "Packy" Axton. When the band eventually made a record, Axton's mother, Estelle Axton, convinced them to change their name, and they became "The Mar-Keys". However, the live lineup of the Mar-Keys was not always the same as the band heard on the recordings.

Their first and most famous recording was the organ- and saxophone-driven single "Last Night", a number three hit nationally in the US in 1961. It sold over one million copies, earning certification as a gold disc. The lineup for this recording included Royal Spades Steve Cropper (normally a guitarist, here playing second keyboard), Packy Axton (sax), Wayne Jackson (trumpet), and Jerry Lee "Smoochy" Smith (main keyboards), augmented by horn players Floyd Newman and Gilbert Caple and others.

Singles and albums continued to appear under the Mar-Keys name throughout the 1960s, though none anywhere near as successful as "Last Night". The original all-white band continued to play live dates, but fairly quickly, in the studio, "The Mar-Keys" became a de facto name for the racially integrated Stax Records house band, which had a floating membership. The most frequent Mar-Keys studio players, subject to change from session to session, were:

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