"It's the sound I wanted to hear," Mitchell simply states. And just as Elvis inspired all those young rockabilly cats to make their way to 706 Union Ave., the success of Al Green swelled the ranks of Hi artists to include the great Otis Clay, Syl Johnson and O.V. Wright.

But Al Green and Ann Peebles remained Hi's marquee stars. When Green's spiritual crisis hit in 1976, and he began to devote himself to gospel music, the future of Hi didn't look good. In 1977, the label (along with the remnants of Stax) was sold to Al Bennett, a former president of Liberty Records who'd begun his own label, Cream. Mitchell stayed on under contract, but by 1979, he too had left. With the end of the Seventies, Hi was no longer a force of any kind in the Memphis R&B scene.

But the story doesn't end there. Reissue programs were begun. Motown was given rights to issue the classic Hi sides in the Eighties, but all that came out was a few Al Green albums. England's Demon Records did a far better job of mining the vaults.

But on this side of the pond, Hi was in danger of becoming one of the great forgotten labels. Enter Bennett's daughter, Adalah Bennett Shaw, who'd started in the) music business at 15, working for her dad when he was still running Liberty Records. After her dad passed away in 1989, legal problems over the estate left her with almost nothing, not even the family farm in Arkansas.

"I said you've got one asset left," she recalls. "So I just kind of dug it out of the mothballs, and there we went." After getting out of a distribution deal Hi had with Motown, Shaw began reissuing the classic Hi sides, on a thorough, well-annotated series of albums, through a license agreement with EMI/Special Projects on The Right Stuff label in the U.S.A. & Canada.

Aided by such high-profile Hi fans as director Quentin Tarantino, who used Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" so effectively in Pulp Fiction, Hi had a new life in the Nineties and extended to television shows like Ally McBeal and commercial endorsements

"It amazes me that so many people, kids born in the Eighties, who have no connection to Hi's early days, still go out and buy Al Green and that alluring sound of Memphis music, of which Hi and its artists and musicians were a legendary part," says Shaw. 

Today the Hi sound is alive and well. It lives on in concert performances by almost all the label's stars -- Al Green, Ann Peebles, Otis Clay, Syl Johnson (whose daughter Syleena is a rising R&B star in her own right) and Hi Rhythm, all of whom continue to thrill audiences around the world. And thanks to people like Shaw, all those great original Hi records are available in a store near you. 

Hi Records was a hit factory that is as healthy today as it ever was --constantly repackaged and reissued -- an inspiration to new generations of musicians and fans.

Written by Larry Nager