Malaco Records: Inside 'The Last Soul Company'

If Southern Soul has a corporate cradle, it sits in Jackson, Mississippi, under a single name: Malaco Records. They call themselves 'The Last Soul Company,' and for once the marketing is just the truth.

By the early 1980s the blues had been written off commercially. Then in 1982 Malaco released Z.Z. Hill's 'Down Home Blues.' It detonated among Black audiences, reportedly charting for nearly two years and becoming one of the best-selling blues records of its era. Overnight, the industry's assumption that there was no money in the blues was proven dead wrong, and the modern genre had its commercial cornerstone.

Malaco followed it with Little Milton's 'The Blues Is Alright' in 1984, the song that still names the genre's biggest touring package today, and signed a murderer's row of soul-blues royalty: Bobby 'Blue' Bland, Denise LaSalle, Latimore, Tyrone Davis, and Johnnie Taylor, whose 1996 album 'Good Love!' became the biggest seller in the label's history.

Every King George stream and every sold-out trail ride traces back, in part, to a label in Mississippi that refused to believe this music was finished. Understand Malaco and you understand why Southern Soul never died.