In April 2001, roughly 3,000 people gathered at what should never have become a vacant lot at the corner of East McLemore Avenue and College Street in South Memphis, the former site of Stax Records. 

There that day to break ground for what was to become the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Stax Music Academy was Isaac Hayes, one of the soul label’s signature stars. There was Steve Cropper, the ace guitarist and songwriter at the center of so much of the label’s sound. There was Rufus Thomas, who tied Memphis music together like no one else, from the heyday of Beale Street blues to Sun and Stax both. 

And there was Pat Mitchell Worley in the crowd.

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She was just Pat Mitchell then, before she married actor, musician and filmmaker Billie Worley, a wedding performed onstage at Beale’s New Daisy Theater, with attendees flashing Ticketmaster-printed slips for entry and an all-star band of friends providing a soundtrack, and before their daughter Violette, now a Stax Music Academy student and senior at Crosstown High, was born. 

Then, Mitchell was the 30-year-old director of communications at the Memphis-based Blues Foundation, in the crowd at the urging of a mentor from a previous job, Deanie Parker. 

Parker, who had served Stax in roles ranging from singer and songwriter to publicist, was a seasoned Memphis executive returning to be the first president and CEO of the newly formed Soulsville, Inc. 

Now, a generation later, Parker’s young charge is taking the reins of the job Parker began. Mitchell Worley was named president and CEO of Soulsville in late July, taking over the position from the departing Richard Greenwald.

“I honestly never thought I would be CEO of Soulsville,” says Mitchell Worley, 51. “I remember the groundbreaking, which Deanie had made me come to.”

“That’s probably true,” Parker says now, with a laugh. “I don’t remember that I made her go. But I’m very capable of that.”

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As Mitchell Worley watched the museum and academy grow, she envisioned a communications job similar to her post at the Blues Foundation, one telling the story of Soulsville, rising anew from the ashes of a previous generation’s neglect. A few years after the groundbreaking, somebody asked her what her dream job was, and she said she’d want to work at Stax. 

Now, amid a career that has seen her engaged in music in just about every way except performing — and after working for some of the city’s most venerable arts-related nonprofits — Mitchell Worley has become the first woman since Parker to guide Soulsville. (Parker held the post until 2007, returning again for an interim stint in 2009-2010.)

Parker admits she would not quite have seen this coming in the mid-'90s, when she was the assistant director of the Memphis in May International Festival and Mitchell Worley was just beginning her own career at the organization’s reception desk. 

“What I remember about Pat is that she was a typical youngster at that time. I used to talk to her and shake my head and think, this young woman does not have a serious bone in her body. In a way, I admired her free-spirited behavior,” says Parker. 

“She went to bed thinking about and woke up singing about Memphis music. ”

Deanie Parker,
Former president and CEO of Soulsville, Inc. 

“(But) she went to bed thinking about and woke up singing about Memphis music and other genres of music that appealed to her. She had the ability to move among all kinds of people and she embraced diversity in Memphis without any reservations,” Parker says. 

Now, after subsequent stops in communications and development positions with the Blues Foundation, ArtsMemphis, the Memphis Music Foundation and other organizations, Mitchell Worley and her staff (Jeff Kollath is museum executive director) will guide the Stax Museum of American Soul Museum through its looming 20th anniversary year, re-examining how the Stax story speaks to ongoing fault lines in American life. This 20th anniversary will likely coincide with a major HBO documentary series currently in production and set to bring a renewed spotlight on a record label synonymous with its neighborhood.

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Mitchell Worley will continue to guide the Stax Music Academy, for which she was most recently director (Isaac Daniel is stepping into that role), as it continues to broaden its work beyond performance into more avenues of music and entertainment career development. 

And these two pillars now work alongside a third, the grade 6-12 Soulsville Charter School, which shares a campus and facilities with the music academy, all anchoring a historic neighborhood. (The Soulsville Foundation formed the charter for the school. Mitchell Worley sits on the school’s board.)

A quintessential Memphis story

Perhaps few are as well-suited for this job in 2022. 

It’s not just that Mitchell Worley has built the requisite resume since her first career steps in the shadow of Parker and then-MIM director Cynthia Ham. It’s that, like Parker, she has the deep Memphis background and palpable passion for the mission.

Mitchell Worley’s father, Herman, is a product of South Memphis, growing up on Wicks Avenue, not far from Stax, and matriculating at Booker T. Washington High School alongside members of the Bar-Kays.

“He played saxophone,” says Mitchell-Worley. “I asked him once why he stopped playing, and he said, you’ve heard of the people I went to school with. Those guys are bad. I knew I wasn’t that good.” 

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Mitchell’s mother, Ethel Sengstacke, moved to Memphis as a teenager, when the energy of the Civil Rights movement was intense. Sengstacke’s father had been dispatched to run the Tri-State Defender, a local extension of the Chicago Defender, the venerable Black newspaper founded by Sengstacke’s family. 

Mitchell Worley remembers hearing stories of her mother being tear-gassed during the 1968 sanitation strike marches and running back to the Tri-State Defender offices for safety. 

Even before Mitchell Worley was born, Parker knew her grandparents. 

“Her grandmother was feeding the sanitation workers and motivating people to keep on pushing,” says Parker. “Ms. Mattie Sengstacke was genuinely in the trenches.”

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Mitchell Worley grew up attending St. Andrews AME Church in the Soulsville neighborhood, splitting time between South Memphis and East Memphis after her parents divorced. But by the time she was a teenager, this almost literal child of civil rights and soul was also becoming one of Memphis’ most prominent and perhaps unlikely metalheads.

Before a stint as a hard rock DJ for Flinn Broadcasting in the mid-'90s, Mitchell Worley got her start writing band profiles for local and national publications, focusing mostly on metal bands. (“I still love metal,” she says.)

And some of these bands would seek her out when they came through town.

Thus was born the “Pat Mitchell Unofficial Tour of Memphis,” where Mitchell Worley, as early as age 19, would give visiting musicians her sense of the city, which included several Soulsville-area landmarks: Elmwood Cemetery and the Four Way restaurant, the long-gone Boss Ugly Bob’s record store and the house where Aretha Franklin was born. And the only recently empty lot where Stax once stood. (The original Stax was demolished in 1989. The museum was built on its footprint.)

While still with Flinn, Mitchell Worley helped launch an all-blues station and then started at the Blues Foundation, first working on the syndicated “Beale Street Caravan” show before taking on marketing and communications for the whole foundation.

“When I was working at the radio station, I stopped being a denier of everything my parents and grandparents liked and just embraced it,” she says. “So to be at the Blues Foundation when John Lee Hooker and B.B. King and Rufus Thomas were still with us? I’m not easily starstruck. But I remember I lost it with Etta James. I remember walking into a room and it was B.B., Rufus and Ike Turner standing together. And what do you say? It’s one thing to be in those moments. It’s another thing to totally recognize them.”

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At the Blues Foundation, not long after the Soulsville groundbreaking, Mitchell Worley found herself as interim director and she was a candidate for the permanent job. But she wasn’t ready yet. 

“It was a crazy time. New Orleans was trying to get the Blues Foundation. Other cities were trying to attract it. And I was 31 years old,” she says. “I was totally not ready for that position. I was in charge of all the public programs, the communications, the magazines, all that stuff. But at the executive level, I didn’t really have the experience.” 

As Mitchell Worley now ascends to the top job at another of Memphis’ signature music organizations, she’s kept a piece of those Blues Foundation roots with her. She has continued to co-host “Beale Street Caravan” for more than 20 years, through several job changes. (Her co-host now is Jared Boyd, program director of Crosstown radio station WYXR.) She’s excited for a new season about to begin. 

“I never gave up ‘Beale Street Caravan,’” says Mitchell Worley. “I love to turn people onto new music, of course. But the other piece is being able to give a little bit more than just the music. Music does not exist on its own. It’s created, like all art, as a response to something. There’s a saying that music sounds like a place. And so much of the music you hear here and throughout the Delta, sounds like here. Just like if you go to Iceland and hear Bjork, she sounds like Iceland. I think that ‘Beale Street Caravan’ gives you a glimpse into our local music scene and it says ,‘Come to my town.’

“I really do, every day, think how do we put Memphis more on the map.”

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The beat goes on

And now Mitchell Worley steps into an even bigger platform for that mission. 

“She has an awesome responsibility there with three distinct programs under that Soulsville Foundation umbrella,” says Parker. “She’s got a museum that is a major global attraction. She’s got the Stax Music Academy, which is charged with the responsibility of preserving the style of music that was created in Soulsville, and she has the responsibility of working hand-in-hand with the school. Not to mention the fact that it’s a nonprofit organization. That is a hell of an undertaking.” 

For Mitchell Worley, the mission starts with what made Stax so special to begin with: That it was rooted in a real neighborhood and its people. 

“It’s really the relationships between students, the staff at the museum and the teachers,” says Mitchell Worley. “You read books about Stax Records and the relationships. Those people were together. They knew each other’s families. They were engaged together in a lot of different ways, and I think that’s still the story here.”

That means Soulsville Charter School and Stax Music Academy alumni working both in classrooms and in offices. It means the children of staffers involved in the programs. It means bringing people through the doors — whether as students or museum visitors — and sending them back out a little different. 

“We always say at Stax that our goal for the kids is that they’re soul communicators. That they can talk and share their stories and make others see how they can make a difference,” says Mitchell Worley.

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It should be a big year on the Soulsville campus. As with any other school, this will be the most “normal” year at Soulsville Charter School since COVID began. The enrollment in the Stax Music Academy is also climbing back to normal after COVID. 

And at the museum, a new lobby and gift shop will debut in January for the 20th anniversary year in 2023, with programming around the anniversary expected to be announced next month. 

These physical updates will also be the beginning of what might be a gradual update of the museum’s permanent exhibit, one in which tweaks to the material, perspective and interactivity of the exhibit are all under consideration. 

“Within those tenets of Stax’s story — women and minority ownership, entrepreneurship, the creativity itself — you can look at lots of things,” Mitchell Worley says. “In a post-George Floyd, post-#MeToo environment, there are some things we can talk about and we can put an emphasis on that may not have gotten the same amount of attention before. But there is also talk of what, in terms of technology, we might want to upgrade.”

Striving for more contemporary resonance at the museum is mirrored in the work at the Academy, which has turned to a broader focus on music and entertainment careers. 

“The Stax Music Academy is about more than performance,” Mitchell Worley says. “It’s also about the behind-the-scenes pieces. The production department, learning to be engineers or videographers. Working with outside organizations to get students experience outside of our bubble. A lot of people have been to the museum or they’ve seen the Academy perform, but they think of it as it was 10 years ago. And there are a number of things that have changed.”

Much hasn’t though.

“Stax,” as a place on East McLemore Avenue, is a different thing than it was in the 1960s and 1970s but remains a major anchor of a historic neighborhood, one that’s faced different and in some ways greater challenges in the decades since the label’s initial mid-'70s demise. 

“We have really been more intentional on how we interact with the neighborhood,” Mitchell Worley says. “The neighborhood association has had meetings here. We had a neighborhood party in the parking lot for back to school. We’ve hosted vaccinations, food bank pickups. How can we use the space to provide some things that people in the neighborhood need? That’s top of mind for us. How do we interact in a way that’s meaningful? That’s part of what we do. We don’t just sit in this neighborhood. We’re in this neighborhood.”

And the biggest part of that is bringing the wider world to Soulsville and sending Soulsville — it’s people, especially — out to the wider world. 

“The weekend before I started, I had a little panic attack. The legacy of Stax Records as it stands in Memphis, Tennessee, right now, is on me and my team,” says Mitchell Worley. “I understood completely the importance of this place to this city, and then after that little panic attac, I thought, What are we going to do next to keep Memphis on the map?”