The “Great Performance” presentation “Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings) offers a parable of musical triumph overshadowed by tragedies of the personal, political and financial sort. It’s a tale of talent, race and opportunity. Ultimately, it’s the familiar struggle between business and music in which business triumphs in the most callous and depressing fashion.

A humble Memphis record company founded in the late 1950s in an old movie theater, Stax would discover and record some of the greatest names in R&B, soul and funk, including Booker T and the MGs, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Staples Singers and Wilson Pickett.

Given the entrenched segregation of the times, the white owners of the label were blind to any color other than green. Black and white musicians played, ate and recorded together and considered the Stax family an oasis of harmony in troubled times. We see clips of recording talent relaxing at the city’s Lorraine Motel.

But their optimism was mixed with a dangerous naivete. Only after a triumphant tour of Europe did many Stax artists consider themselves stars anywhere outside of Memphis. Then, in short order, Redding was killed in a plane crash.

A bad contract with Atlantic Records all but stripped Stax of its entire catalog. In 1968, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel shattered the company’s aura of racial harmony. Threats of extortion and murder from local criminals forced the company to hire “muscle” from New York, leaving some in the Stax family to feel like prisoners of their “protectors.”

The record label would rebound in the early 1970s, culminating in the Wattstax Concert and the rise of Hayes, a former Stax songwriter who won an Oscar for his classic “Shaft” movie score. But another botched deal with a major record label and a change in banking policies would put Stax in a fatal financial bind.

“Respect” is filled with dozens of interviews and classic concert and recording-studio footage of songs including “Green Onions,” “Soul Man,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” “Who’s Making Love,” “Walk on By,” “Shaft” and “Respect Yourself,” among others.

It’s a must-see for music fans and students of American pop culture. It recalls a simpler time, when mom-and-pop record companies could discover kids off the street and turn them into immortals.

¢ Filmmaker Rick Sebak (“A Hot Dog Program”) offers a new summer treat. “To Market to Market to Buy a Fat Pig” (7 p.m., PBS) celebrates urban and farmers markets across America. He visits the Hilo Farmers Market in Hilo, Hawaii, and the Lexington Market in Baltimore, attends a tomato tasting in Asheville, N.C., and visits a market in Lancaster, Pa., that may be the oldest in America.

Tonight’s other highlights

• The top eight perform on “So You Think You Can Dance” (7 p.m., Fox).
• The top 10 perform on “Last Comic Standing” (8 p.m., NBC).
• Back to the drawing board on “American Inventor” (8 p.m., ABC).
• Business school graduates compete in the financial game show “Fast Money MBA Challenge” (8 p.m., CNBC).
• Gene splicing can be murder on “CSI: NY” (9 p.m., CBS).
• Scheduled on “Dateline” (9 p.m., NBC): the millionth “news” piece involving the iPod.
• Eight survivors are grilled on “The Nine” (9 p.m., ABC).
• Frozen foods take center stage on “Top Chef” (9 p.m., Bravo). Rocco DiSpirito cameos as a guest judge.