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| Muscle Shoals, Alabama; A Southern Music Mecca | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 3 2008, 08:24 PM (355 Views) | |
| Lmo | Aug 3 2008, 08:24 PM Post #1 |
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I was having a conversation with a few friends the other day when the subject of Muscle Shoals, Alabama came up. One of the friends in the conversation wasn't from the South and thought we were discussing a beach location. Now, having lived in the South all my life, and having, therefore, grown up with knowing that Muscle Shoals is a serious music recording location, it occured to me that maybe not everyone knows about it. Is this one of the South's best kept secrets? If so, I'd like to share a little info on Muscle Shoals with all of you as it pertains to the music industry. Muscle Shoals is located in Northwest Alabama and hosts several festivals each year, including the Trail of Tears Motorcycle Ride, the Helen Kellar Festival and the W. C. Handy Music Festival. Even though it has a population of approximately 12,000, it is rich with music history. The city is one of four municipalities known as the Quad Cities, the others being Florence, Alabama, Sheffield, Alabama and Tuscumbia, Alabama. Muscle Shoals is known for recording many hit songs from the 1960s through today at FAME Studios, where Aretha Franklin recorded many of her signature works, and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio which developed work for Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and countless others. While the music from the area is often referred to as the "Muscle Shoals Sound", all four of the Quad Cities have significantly contributed to the area's impressive musical history. Without question, Muscle Shoals is among the world's most unassuming "music capitals" in that it remains unspoiled by the music industry. It can be said that the same attraction that artists such as Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and The Rolling Stones felt to the area remains intact today. The famed southern hospitality is still present and, at first glance, one may assume that everyone in residence is a part-time songwriter or musician. The community's contribution to American popular music during the 1960s, 70s and 80s is staggering, and the tradition continues to the present day. A number of artists have made successful pilgrimages to Muscle Shoals in an effort to escape the limelight and write/record their signature works. Both FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studios are still in operation in the city. While famous for classic recordings from Rod Stewart, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers, recent hit songs such as "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood and "I Loved Her First" by Heartland continue the city's musical legacy. Additionally, fans of Muscle Shoals Music frequently make trips to the area to visit local landmarks. While most of the city's esteemed recording studios are still active, the majority will allow tours with an appointment. Further, a number of Rock, R&B and Country music celebrities have homes in the serene, mountainous rural area surrounding Muscle Shoals (Tuscumbia) or riverside estates alongside the Tennessee River and often perform in area nightclubs, typically rehearsing new material to an audience of honest locals. Among the musical celebrities with homes in the area are George Strait, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. The music written and recorded in Muscle Shoals is typically regarded as unique because of the frequent combination of soul/gospel, country and rock influences. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the area was a hotbed of creative talent as both white and black artists worked side-by-side. While this "desegregation" of artists is usually praised for its innovation, it was nothing new for most artists in North Alabama. In fact, the common practice of white and black musicians working together in Muscle Shoals can be traced as far back as the 1930s, regardless of racial tensions elsewhere in the American South. What is most unusual, musically speaking, about the area is the cross-pollination of musical styles that originated in Muscle Shoals. Black artists from the area (Arthur Alexander and James Carr being ideal examples) utilized White country music in their work and White artists from the Shoals frequently borrowed from blues/gospel influences of their Black contemporaries, creating a generous melting pot of music. Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, lived in the area and directly related in his autobiography that Muscle Shoals (primarily radio station WLAY (AM), which played both "white" and "black" music on its playlist) influenced his merging of these sounds at Sun Records with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. Muscle Shoals remains a fascinating study of American music and today is at once a landmark and distinguished contributor to popular recordings. [edit] Recording artists A partial list of artists who have recorded in Muscle Shoals[6]: [edit] Pop, Rock, Soul and Jazz Andy Williams Aretha Franklin Art Garfunkel (solo) Arthur Alexander B. W. Stevenson Bettye LaVette Billy Swan Billy and the Beaters Bob Dylan Bob Seger Boz Scaggs Candi Staton Canned Heat Carlos Santana Cat Stevens Cher Clarence Carter Dorothy Moore Dr. Hook Drive-By Truckers Duane Allman Eric Clapton Etta James Glenn Frey Helen Reddy Issac Hayes Jason Isbell James & Bobby Purify Jerry Lee Lewis Jimmy Buffett Joan Baez Joe Cocker Joe Tex Johnny Rivers José Feliciano Julian Lennon Kim Carnes Laura Nyro Leon Russell Linda Ronstadt Lindsey Buckingham Lulu Luther Ingram Lynyrd Skynyrd Mary MacGregor Mel and Tim Melissa Etheridge Millie Jackson Orleans Ray Reach Otis Redding Patti Austin Paul Anka Paul Davis Paul Simon (solo) Percy Sledge Phoebe Snow R.B. Greaves Ray Stevens Rod Stewart Simon and Garfunkel (duo) The Allman Brothers Band The Osmonds The Rolling Stones Sanford-Townsend Band The Staple Singers Tim Sharpton Tom Jones Tony Orlando Travis Wammack Widespread Panic Wilson Pickett [edit] Country Alabama Amazing Rhythm Aces Blackhawk Donna Fargo Eddie Rabbit Faith Hill Gary Nichols Jerry Reed John Michael Montgomery Johnny Paycheck Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers Mac Davis Marie Osmond Reba McEntire Ronnie Milsap Shenandoah The Forester Sisters The Oak Ridge Boys Willie Nelson [edit] Songs associated with Muscle Shoals Music A partial list of songs recorded or written by Muscle Shoals songwriters or featuring musicians from the area. This is, by no means, a complete discography of Muscle Shoals music, as there are literally thousands of songs to be cataloged. Alabama - Old Flame Alicia Bridges - I Love The Nightlife All 4 One - I Swear Angela Hacker - Total Loss Aretha Franklin - Baby Baby Baby (Since You Been Gone) Aretha Franklin - Chain Of Fools Aretha Franklin - Do Right Woman, Do Right Man Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Love You) Aretha Franklin - Respect Aretha Franklin - Think Arthur Alexander - Anna (Go With Him) Arthur Alexander - Sally Sue Brown Arthur Alexander - You Better Move On Arthur Conley - Sweet Soul Music Barbara Mandrell - Angel In Your Arms Barbara Streisand - Woman In Love Beatles - Anna (Go With Him) Beatles - A Shot of Rhythm and Blues Billy Ray Cyrus - Achy Breaky Heart Billy Swan - I Can Help Blackhawk - I Sure Can Smell The Rain Blackhawk - Like There Ain't No Yesterday Bob Dylan - Gotta Serve Somebody Bob Seger - We've Got Tonight Bob Seger - Katmandu Bob Seger - Old Time Rock N Roll Bobbie Gentry - Fancy Bobby Moore & The Rhythm Aces - Searching For My Baby's Love Bobby Womack - Harry Hippie Bobby Womack - That's The Way I Feel 'Bout 'Cha Bobby Womack - Woman's Gotta Have It Box Tops - Cry Like A Baby Box Tops - The Letter Boz Scaggs - Loan Me A Dime Brooks & Dunn - Hillbilly Deluxe Candi Staton - I'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart (Than A Young Man's Fool) Candi Staton - Young Hearts Run Free Candi Staton - Stand by Your Man Candi Staton - In The Ghetto Carrie Underwood - Before He Cheats Clarence Carter - Patches Clarence Carter - Slip Away Clarence Carter - Too Weak To Fight Commodores - Machine Gun Conway Twitty - Borderline Conway Twitty - She's Got A Single Thing In Mind Craig Morgan - That's What I Love About Sunday Cry of Love - Peace Pipe Darryl Worley - Have You Forgotten? Dave Dudley - Six Days On The Road David Alan Coe - Now I Lay Me Down To Cheat Denise LaSalle - Fast Hands And Dirty Mind Dire Straits - Lady Writer Dixie Chicks - Once You've Loved Somebody Don Covay - I Was Checking Out, She Was Checking In Donnie Fritts - Muscle Shoals Dorothy Moore - Misty Blue Dr. Hook - When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman Dramatics - Be My Girl Dramatics - I'm Going By (The Stars In Your Eyes) Dusty Springfield - Breakfast In Bed Earl Thomas Conley - Holding Her And Loving You Earl Thomas Conley - I Can't Win for Losing You Earl Thomas Conley - What I'd Say Earl Thomas Conley - Shadow of a Doubt Eddie Hinton - Uncloudy Days Eddie Rabbit - Suspicions Emmylou Harris - I'm Too Far Gone Emmylou Harris - One Of These Days Emotions - If You Think It... Etta James - Amost Persuaded Etta James - I'd Rather Go Blind Etta James - Tell Mama Forester Sisters - Mama's Never Seen Those Eyes Forester Sisters - Men Gary Allan - Putting Memories Away Gary Allan - Learning How to Bend Gary Nichols - I Can't Love You Anymore Glenn Frey - Smuggler's Blues Hank Williams Jr. - That's How They Do It In Dixie Heartland - I Loved Her First Herbie Mann - Muscle Shoals Nitty Gritty Highwaymen - Silver Stallion Hot - Angel In Your Arms James & Bobby Purify - I'm Your Puppet James Brown - It's Too Funky In Here James Brown - Regrets James Carr - The Dark End Of The Street Janie Fricke - Tell Me A Lie Jason Aldean - Relentless Jerry Reed - The Bird Jerry Reed - She Got The Goldmine, I Got The Shaft Jimmy Buffett - Bama Breeze Jimmy Buffett - Coconut Telegraph Jimmy Buffett - Growing Older But Not Up Jimmy Buffett - It's My Job Jimmy Cliff - Sitting In Limbo Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Come Jimmy Hughes - Steal Away Joan Baez - Rainbow Road Joe Cocker - High Time We Went Joe Simon - Let's Do It Over Joe Tex - Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman) John Lennon & Elton John - Whatever Gets You Thru The Night John Michael Montgomery - I Swear Johnnie Taylor - Disco Lady Johnnie Taylor - Running Out Of Lies Joss Stone - Victim Of A Foolish Heart Julian Lennon - Too Late For Goodbyes Julian Lennon - Valotte Kenny Chesney - Back Where I Come From Kris Kristofferson - Border Lord Kris Kristofferson - The Pilgrim Laura Lee - Dirty Man Leann Rimes - The Heart Never Forgets Leann Rimes - Commitment Leblanc & Carr - Falling Leon Russell - Stranger In A Strange Land Leon Russell - Tight Rope Little Richard - Greenwood, Mississippi Loleatta Holloway - Love Sensation Lonestar - I'm Already There Lou Rawls - Dead End Street Lou Rawls - Love's A Hurtin' Thing Lou Rawls - Your Good Thing (Is About To End) Louvin Brothers - Cash On The Barrel Head Louvin Brothers - I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby Luther Ingram - If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Wanna Be Right) Lynyrd Skynyrd - Ballad Of Curtis Loew Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird Lynyrd Skynyrd - Gimme Three Steps Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama Mac Davis - Baby, Don't Get Hooked On Me Mel and Tim - Starting All Over Again Millie Jackson - A House For Sale Millie Jackson - Bad Risk Millie Jackson - If You're Not Back In Love By Monday Millie Jackson - Letter Full Of Tears Millie Jackson - Lovin' Your Good Thing Away Oak Ridge Boys - American Made Oak Ridge Boys - Bobbie Sue Osmonds - Down By The Lazy River Osmonds - One Bad Apple Osmonds - Double Lovin' Osmonds - Yo-Yo Otis Redding - You Left The Water Running Patti LaBelle - Dreamer Paul Anka - You're Having My Baby Paul Simon - Kodachrome Paul Simon - Loves Me Like A Rock Paul Simon - Still Crazy After All These Years Paul Simon - Take Me To The Mardi Gras Percy Sledge - Sweet And Tender Love Percy Sledge - Take Time To Know Her Percy Sledge - When A Man Loves A Woman Phish - Fast Enough For You Phish - It's Ice Phish - Maze Phish - Mound Phish - My Friend, My Friend Phish - Silent In The Morning R.B. Greaves - Take A Letter, Maria Randy Travis - Is It Still Over? Ray Charles - We Had It All Reba McEntire - The Fear of Being Alone Reba McEntire - Little Girl Ricky Van Shelton - I Am A Simple Man Ricky Van Shelton - Crime of Passion Rod Stewart - I Don't Wanna Talk About It Rod Stewart - Sailing Rod Stewart - The First Cut Is The Deepest Rod Stewart - Tonight's The Night Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar Rolling Stones - Wild Horses Rolling Stones - You Better Move On Rolling Stones - You Got To Move Ronnie Milsap - There's No Gettin' Over Me Ronnie Milsap - How Do I Turn You On Ruth Brown - Can't Stand A Broke Man Sanford-Townsend Band - Smoke From A Distant Fire Sara Evans - Saints and Angels Sawyer Brown - Thank God For You Sawyer Brown - The Walk Shenandoah - I Wanna Be Loved Like That Shenandoah - Sunday In The South Shenandoah - The Church On Cumberland Road Shenandoah - The Moon Over Georgia Shenandoah - Two Dozen Roses Shenandoah - Next to You Next To Me Shenandoah - I Got You Simon & Garfunkel - My Little Town Solomon Burke - Proud Mary Solomon Burke - Someone To Love Me Solomon Burke - Take Me As I Am Soul Children - The Sweeter He Is Staple Singers - Heavy Makes You Happy Staple Singers - I'll Take You There Staple Singers - Respect Yourself Steve Wariner - Leave Him out of This Supremes - Bend A Little Sweet Inspirations - Sweet Inspiration T. Graham Brown - Don't Go To Strangers T. Graham Brown - Memphis Women And Fried Chicken Temptations - Glass House Temptations - Happy People Temptations - Memories The Dells - Give Your Baby A Standing Ovation Tony Joe White - On The Return To Muscle Shoals Tony Joe White - Polk Salad Annie Traffic - Light Up Or Leave Me Alone Traffic - The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys Traffic - Uninspired Travis Tritt - Now I've Seen It All Travis Tritt - Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde Travis Wammack - Scratchy Van Morrison - A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues Waylon Jennings - Ladies Love Outlaws Widespread Panic - Pickin Up The Pieces William Bell - I Forgot To Be Your Lover William Bell - My Whole World Is Falling Down Willie Nelson - Bloody Mary Morning Willie Nelson - If You Can Touch Her At All Willie Nelson - It's Not Supposed To Be That Way Willie Nelson - Pretend I Never Happened" Wilson Pickett - Land Of 1,000 Dances Wilson Pickett - Mustang Sally Wilson Pickett - Hey Jude Wilson Pickett - Don't Knock my Love Wilson Pickett - Everybody needs Somebody Wilson Pickett - Hey Joe Wilson Pickett - Funky Broadway |
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| Oldiebutgoodie | Aug 6 2008, 09:11 PM Post #2 |
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More of the fantabulous Alabama musical heritage--thanks for sharing that=another reason to be proud of my home state!! Hmm-maybe one day Taylor's name can be added to that list! |
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| mouser | Sep 6 2008, 06:19 AM Post #3 |
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Here is a definitive article about Muscle Shoals, Alabama , written in 1986 http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/barney-hoskyns-deep-soul-mecca-muscle-shoals-alabama-1986/ Barney Hoskyns - “Deep Soul Mecca: Muscle Shoals, Alabama” (1986) September 6, 2008 at 2:12 am This is an unpublished article Barney Hoskyns wrote in 1986 about the famed studio that was home to hundreds of great soul recordings… Muscle Shoals: the very name suggests some grotesque image dreamt up by a surrealist painter. Shouldn’t it be Mussel, you wonder… and yet this North Alabama town is a very long way from the sea. Muscle Shoals: the name also encapsulates the classic Southern soul sound it has spawned; rhythmically tight, dense, compact while melodically loose, fluid, and supple. Muscle Shoals: the connoisseur’s brand of soul, the seal of quality you check for on the label of any ’60s or ’70s soul side. Second only to Memphis as a mecca of brooding, gospel-rooted r’n'b, the Quad Cities area of Shoals/ Florence / Sheffield /Tuscumbia produced in its heyday more hits per session than any other music town in the world. Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, Percy Sledge’s ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, Wilson Pickett’s ‘Land Of 1000 Dances’, Aretha Franklin’s ‘I Never Loved A Man’ – just a small handful of the classics created at Muscle Shoals, all sounding as fresh and vital today as they did two decades ago. (Others were by Joe Tex, Laura Lee, Jimmy Hughes, Etta James, Solomon Burke, Millie Jackson, Clarence Carter, the Staple Singers, Arthur Conley, Candi Staton, Bobby Womack… etc etc) The single most extraordinary thing about these records is that, in the main, they were written, produced, and performed by white Alabama country boys – sung by peerless black voices, to be sure, but crafted by hands that twenty years before would have held fiddles, mandolins, steel guitars, and maybe even a burning cross or two. Strange that, in the liberal North, R&B should have been so divorced from white culture, while in the segregated South, black and white musical traditions found such common ground. But that is the way it happened. The story of soul would be very different without the white presence in Southern R&B. Muscle Shoals was not by any means the first case of black and white musical interchange, of course. Country singers like Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, and Hank Williams had all learned from black blues singers years before, and Sam Phillips, preparing the ground for Stax Records in Memphis, brought hillbilly music and rhythm’n'blues together in the early ’50s. But Shoals was remarkable for being so small – there is virtually no parallel case of an r’n'b scene devolving from scratch. “It all came together in Florence, Alabama,” says Dan Penn, one of the great Shoals songwriters. “There seems to be a strip from Meridian, Mississipi up to Florence, and a lot of white rhythm ‘n’ blues people came out of that strip.” (Sam Phillips himself was born in Florence and worked in the ’40s as a DJ on WLAY Muscle Shoals.) White rhythm’n'blues people: a strange breed of Southerner, especially when in hillbilly accents as thick as Jed Clampett’s they tell you how much they loathed and detested country music. “We weren’t interested in any kind of white music, period,” states Penn, reclining at his Nashville home in a pair of farmhand overalls. “If the dude was white, I didn’t wanna hear it. That was how bad I had it… I did not want to fool with any country music. It did not smell good or taste good to me.” The amusing thing is that almost every soul ballad Dan Penn ever wrote could be a country song. Many of them – like ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’ and ‘Dark End Of The Street’ – have been covered as such. For country was the unlikely ingredient that made Muscle Shoals soul what it was; the white man’s blues that hooked into southern black gospel to fashion the mournful ache of Jimmy Hughes’ ‘Steal Away’ and Percy Sledge’s ‘Out Of Left Field’. Country was what half the Shoals writers and pickers were reared on. (Like Stax’s Jim Stewart, Rick Hall – the town’s principal producer for many years – started life as a fiddler in square dance bands, building his first Fame studio with future Nashville kingpin Billy Sherrill.) A country song, moreover, was what kicked the whole thing off – reputedly the first record ever pressed up in Alabama. It came out in 1957 on a tiny label called Time, owned by one James Joiner, and became an enormous hit. “Before the 50’s,” says Joiner, “you had your basic country music, and then you had your Frank Sinatra/Nat King Cole type of music. The country-pop crossover came in about 1957, and our record, Bobby Denton’s ‘A Fallen Star’, was one of the first big crossover songs.” Muscle Shoals might even have become a satellite of Nashville, just a few hours north in Tennessee, had Rick Hall not enjoyed such unexpected success with black artists. Most of the musicians’ sights were set on Music City. “The reason for my involvement with black music was that I couldn’t get my foot in the door in Nashville,” says Hall. “I was kind of thought of as the guy who was hangin’ onto Billy Sherrill’s coat-tails in order to make it, and I was pissed about that.” Only the missionary R&B fervour of Dan Penn and others kept him experimenting with black singers. Perhaps the single biggest influence on the taste of the white boys in Alabama was a Nashville disc jockey named John R, who blasted out a rhythm ‘n’ blues show every night on the 50,000 watt WLAC station. John R (Richbourg) was an older white guy who sounded black and attracted a vast audience of black and white R&B fans starved of any other source of their music. Everyone, whether in town or on the remotest share cropping farm, could pick up WLAC, and everyone in Muscle Shoals grew up on Richbourg’s show. Presley had unleashed the hillbilly’s pent-up White Negro frenzy – now it was time to feast on the real thing. Keyboard player Barry Beckett, who left Rick Hall in 1969 to become part of the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section, explains: “The way the Muscle Shoals sound came about was that the musicians were tied in a kind of triangle that stretched from New Orleans to Memphis to Nashville… we sat pretty much in the middle. Maybe it even stretched as far as Houston, with the Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland stuff. I don’t know whether that was really regional music or not, but it was more popular down south. When the Muscle Shoals bands played the fraternity parties, they played rock ‘n’ roll, but it had a blues connotation. It had the connotation of this regional black music, and what came out of all that was a hard form of rock’n'roll with blues riffs goin’ on in the middle of it, pickin’ up off of Ray Charles riffs and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland horn licks…” Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, James Brown: the three founding fathers of southern soul, the three blues-ballad demigods who most transparently gospelized the honking good-time black music of the ’50s. The three men who brought in all the pain and anguish, all the stored-up woe and endurance of the black church. And Southerners all three, of course. Muscle Shoals started as a bunch of post-Presley country/rockabilly bands gradually adjusting their sets to include rhythm’n'blues songs. Beginning in schoolhouses, they ended up playing for frat parties at the Universities of Alabama and Mississippi, and while it would take a humungous Pete Frame family tree to plot the labyrinthine evolution of these groups, the most prominent were the Fairlanes, (with Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill, a more pop-country affair), Hollis Dixon & the Keynotes (who at one time or other boasted just about every aspiring musician in Muscle Shoals) and the Mark V’s (starring the original blue-eyed redneck soul hipster, Dan Penn.) “When Dan came along,” says drummer Jerry Carrigan, now in Nashville, “we turned our backs on all the country stuff we’d been playing. He was doing the whole James Brown routine, rolling around on the floor… they told us at the Air Force base in Columbus, Mississippi that we were causing too many blacks to come in the club and that we’d have to play in a different style. There was no other style for us.” Out of the frat-party scene came a pool of musicians who were more serious about the recording business. A crucial figure was Tom Stafford, whose father owned the City Drugstore in Florence and allowed him to build a tiny, very primitive studio over it. Tom was writing songs with a gangling black giant called Arthur Alexander, whom he later managed, and in 1959 formed FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) with Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Around this fledgling operation gathered the luminaries who were to make Muscle Shoals a major recording centre. The first monster record out of Muscle Shoals was Arthur’s ‘You Better Move On’ in 1961. Arthur had worked on the song for three months, refining it into a faintly disturbing threat, while the arrangement (plus his weird, country-inflected delivery) suggested a kind of backwoods version of the Drifters. When Rick Hall eventually placed it with Dot Records in L.A., he made $10,000 and built the FAME studio that stands to this day in Muscle Shoals. Thus began the era of “country soul,” and of the relationship between black singers and white pickers. “I had people asking me why we were foolin’ with niggers,” says songwriter Donnie Fritts, who drummed on Arthur’s early demos. “We were so visible, right in the middle of Florence above that drugstore, with Arthur and his friends coming in and out all day. The whole town hated it.” “Segregation was something you didn’t talk about or think about,” says Barry Beckett. Perhaps more honestly. Meridian songwriter and singer George Soulé admits that he was racially prejudiced as a teenager: “Back then, if you said you weren’t prejudiced you were in trouble. I think the prejudice was conditioned. Certainly it was a strange feeling to like black music and play that style of music and yet… appear prejudiced.” (In 1973, Soulé was to record the tough black message song ‘Get Involved’ for Fame – and be mistaken for an African-American artist!) Arthur moved on to Nashville, as Billy Sherrill had done, and Tom Stafford sold his interest in FAME. Hall was left to consolidate the potential at the studio, and produce his second hit, in 1963 – the year of desegregation. Even then he wasn’t fully sold on soul. Jerry Carrigan recalls that at the demo session for Jimmy Hughes’ ‘Steal Away’, Rick called the musicians into the studio and said “Guys, bear with me now, coz I hate this r’n'b stuff.” ‘Steal Away’ was masterful, a bluesy gospel performance with a wailing vocal by Hughes and brilliant country piano fills by David Briggs. Hughes’ adaptation of a phrase used originally in slavery days was given all the chilling, adulterous desperation that later became an obligatory fixture of southern soul. It was this record above all that had southern producers and entrepreneurs rushing their acts to Fame in hopes of a hit. Within two years, Atlanta publisher Bill Lowery brought in The Tams and Tommy Roe (FAME’s first white success), Nashville bigwig Buddy Killen brought in Joe Tex, and the great John R himself brought in Joe Simon and Roscoe Shelton. All obtained the desired goods: The Tams hit with ‘What Kind Of Fool’, Tommy Roe with ‘Everybody’; Joe Tex had the original black country homily ‘Hold What You Got’ and Joe Simon the Dan Penn/Spooner Oldham-written ‘Let’s Do It Over’. The FAME sound was coming into its own. The proven commercial power of this new rural R&B finally cured Hall’s Nashville blues and turned him into a fanatical studio perfectionist. “Rick just kept adding things to the studio,” says Carrigan. “We were simply guessing – we didn’t have any other studios to spy on. Rick learned it hands on! He worked us for days, and when he believed in a song, he would just cut it over and over and over on artist after artist after artist.” “We had longer hours than Nashville,” says Hall. “When we started out, Nashville paid union scale and you were in trouble if you didn’t get four sides in three hours. I can’t believe anybody can cut four hit records in three hours. I spend a minimum of three hours per song, and I don’t think that’s enough. Plus we would have a lot of competition – three bass players on a session, one in the studio and two others sitting in the lobby. It was intimidating. Whoever came up with the best riff got the gig. “One thing I’d do was call the guys into the studio before a session and give ‘em a little pep talk. Most of the time it was pretty down, it was to deflate their egos. It was saying, these people have come four thousand miles to cut a hit record, and if we don’t give ‘em a hit record you may never be cuttin’ again. I was the total dictator of the session. I had a tremendous temper and everyone was always on pins and needles with me. I was hell when I was well, and I was never sick.” Hall’s perfectionism may have worn out his rhythm sections – the first one left for Nashville in December 1964 – but it honed a soul sound so clean and powerful it is without rivals to this day. As Bill Millar wrote, “that distinctive Southern rhythm section of clipped guitar, sparse bass and drums, all recorded open-miked with the amplifiers low, would help to make Muscle Shoals the soul capital of the world.” Essentially the sound is country music reinforced with a gospel intensity. Bass and drums are tight and solid, with the snare slightly behind the beat. Compressed horns and churchy organ flesh out the hard bones of rhythm, and a country guitar bends and tweaks swampy fills. Not surprisingly, it works best on the agonized, pleading 6/8 ballads dubbed “deep soul” by the British R&B fraternity – the three-minute testimonies of loss and loneliness written by teams like Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. Sides like Mighty Sam’s ‘In The Same Old Way’, Kip Anderson’s ‘Without A Woman’, Etta James’ ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’… not unlike the Stax sound, but less funky, more tense and tragic. “How did the Southern ballad style come about?,” says Spooner Oldham. “You mean those slow, pitiful things? I dunno.” “Dan Penn: “What that era of rhythm ‘n’ blues was, was white people doin’ the background and black people doin’ the foreground, and it made a wonderful sound. I mean, blacks make good records, but a lot of ‘em are so slick they run over my head. White people, y’know, they just ain’t as hip as blacks, never was and never are gonna be, but you put them in there and they pull some of that slick and hipness offa the blacks. They put some realness in there, like real earth, and just surrounded those blacks with it.” “My country background had an influence,” says Rick Hall, “because I was quite melodic-thinking, and Hank Williams records, for instance, had a lot of melodic fill on them – the arrangements would answer the vocal. I never believed in records being stock to the extent that the rhythm pattern just went along and you changed the melody without being led there by strings or voices. In other words, pick-up notes: I wanna be led there and not just planted there.” Hall’s FAME sound was properly established with the introduction of his second and most famous rhythm section, initially Jimmy Johnson (guitar), Roger Hawkins (drums), Spooner Oldham (keyboards), and Junior Lowe (bass). David Hood then came in on bass, with Junior switching to lead guitar, and Barry Beckett arrived from Florida to take over Spooner’s spot in 1967. This was the core of players in residence for Fame’s golden period, 1965-1968, when Hall signed a distribution deal with Atlantic and ended up playing host to Jerry Wexler protégés Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. It all started with local boy Percy Sledge, who grew up picking cotton on a farm just south-east of Muscle Shoals and possessed a beautifully rich country-soul baritone that was taking him nowhere. One day in 1965, he walked into a Sheffield record store called Tune Town and got chatting with its owner Quin Ivy, a white DJ who had just built a classic “spit ‘n’ bailing wire” studio across the road. (Quin’s idea was to pick up the extra business Rick Hall didn’t need at FAME.) The encounter led to one of the biggest-selling records of all time, ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ – a song from which Hall himself would profit. Hall: “I was sittin’ with this distributor guy in Atlanta and he asks me if I want to speak with Jerry Wexler, which was rather like asking me if I wanted to speak to Jesus. So I said, yeah, and here’s my IDOL I’m talking to, and I stammered something… and the upshot was that if I had any product I was excited about I should send it to him. “Well, it wasn’t but two weeks before Dan Penn told me about this song they had over at Quin’s studio which he said was a hit record if they didn’t screw it up. So I went over and heard ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ and I knew it was a No. 1 record. Jerry couldn’t hear it, so I just told him to forget it and put it out, ’cause it was a number one. And he and Quin gave me a penny each as finder’s fee!” Atlantic had already been down south, of course. They’d picked up Stax’s distribution in 1960, and Wexler had just taken Wilson Pickett down to the Stax studio for ‘In The Midnight Hour’: “I’d go down to Memphis and see these guys working, and I’d watch Steve and Duck and Booker walk in and hang up their coats and start playing. If they didn’t have a song to play, they played chord changes. It was very fresh, while in New York we were still doing this really tired stuff and getting songs from hacks.” Unfortunately, Pickett aggravated the folks at Stax, and Memphis’ loss was FAME’s gain. Wexler took him down to Muscle Shoals and came out with ‘Land Of 1000 Dances’, ‘Funky Broadway’, ‘Mustang Sally’. “In those first couple of years in the South,” says Wexler, “we cut nothing but hits. I’d go down there and come home with hits. We never knew what it was to cut a failure.” If Pickett’s dance anthems injected some flash big-city fizz into this sleepy town, the Wicked One was himself an Alabama-born gospel screamer and quite at home. But the most illustrious session put down at FAME was the one that produced Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic debut 45, the swampy ‘I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)’. Dan Penn claims he was the only guy in town who knew who she was: “I kept close tabs on the black folks back then, and I knew her family background and everything. I kept tellin’ Rick, this girl who’s comin’ down, she’s gonna kill y’all.” Aretha had started out in her famous dad’s Detroit church but gone secular in the early 60’s with Columbia. The latter treated her as an uptown gospel-cum-showbiz entertainer, neglecting the fact that she had been born in Memphis and was fundamentally a Southerner. Finally, signed by Wexler in 1967, she took the Pickett route to Muscle Shoals. Two sides materialised from that visit – the fabulously sultry ‘Never Loved’, a blues shuffle that provided the perfect vehicle for Franklin’s unnervingly intelligent phrasing, and ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’, a gentle but defiant country ballad written by Dan Penn with Memphis guitarist/producer Chips Moman. The first was a No. 1 smash and the initial step in establishing Aretha as Queen of Soul, the second a sizeable hit in its own right. More FAME sides would have followed, too, had it not been for an incident in the hotel after the session. “One of the horn players had pinched Aretha’s butt in the studio,” recalls Spooner Oldham, “and later he and her husband Ted White got in a drunken fight. Well, she left the next day saying she’d never come back to Alabama, and we ended up going to Atlantic’s New York studio to finish the album. “ Southern players worked on most of Aretha’s famous Atlantic sides, and meanwhile Wexler steered a steady stream of visitors – Don Covay, King Curtis, Brook Benton and others – to Fame. Other outsiders included Papa Don Schroeder, a Florida DJ who brought up Mighty Sam, Oscar Toney Jr., and James & Bobby Purify, and Chicago’s Chess, whose Etta James, Laura Lee, and Maurice & Mac were booked in for a Southern makeover in 1967. The Purifys’ ‘I’m Your Puppet’ was a gorgeous black pop record, while Chess enjoyed several classics of female deep soul on Etta, Laura, and lrma Thomas – sides veering from Etta’s boisterous ‘Tell Mama’ to Laura’s indignant ‘Dirty Man’ to Irma’s tender reading of Otis’ ‘Good To Me’. (Otis Redding was himself a visitor, producing his protégé Arthur Conley’s Shake, Rattle, & Roll album at FAME.) 1967 was also the year Clarence Carter arrived. He was a blind Alabama bluesman with a hoarse, ragged voice and not a soul balladeer, but he helped Rick implement a funkier feel to the FAME sound. ‘Tell Daddy’ became Etta James’ ‘Tell Mama’ and, in Rick’s words, “he had a real knack for little licks that were offbeat – he was Delta funk-Southern.” Clarence had two modes: one was the punchy Memphis feel of ‘Slip Away’ and ‘Too Weak To Fight’, the other was the nascent hard rock blues of ‘Road Of Love’ (a version of which featured Duane Allman’s first slide-playing at Muscle Shoals.) His hits signalled the beginning of the end for Shoals country-soul, as Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham left for Memphis to be replaced by black writers like George Jackson, O. B. McClinton, and, later, Phillip Mitchell. “Muscle Shoals was something to get used to,” says Clarence, “because I had always played with black folks, but they had a way of playing that was different, and I took it as an opportunity to learn something. Rick’s suggestions always made the record sound better, always. Mind you, he insisted things were done the way he thought they should be done. The only way you got him to do it the way you thought it should be done was to make him think he thought of it. And see, I learned how to do that.” The predominance of white musicians at FAME was beginning to produce less friendly, if still ambivalent, feelings in blacks. “I liked the fact that white people were gettin’ involved with the music I was raised on,” says horn player Harrison Calloway. “The thing I didn’t like was that the opportunities for black musicians seemed lessened. There was a tendency to say, these guys can have their own thing, why can’t we? Somewhere that’s still in the back of my mind, but when we combined, say, four white musicians and four black, man, the end result just brought everything together.” Guitarist Moses Dillard, who came up to Shoals with Don Schroeder, is more bitter. “It was the black road musicians who put the music on fire, and those white studio guys didn’t go out on the road. The difference between the blacks and whites was that the whites knew how to write the music down. Even so. I’d have to say that some of the white guys were as soulful as the blacks, because they knew all the idioms and the slang of black culture.” One Fame star who carried on the country-soul tradition was a girl called Candi Staton, discovered in a Birmingham club by Clarence Carter and later married to him. Candi was a downhome Gladys Knight with an irresistibly hoarse, hurt voice, and she’d been raised on gospel and the Grand Ole Opry. One of the first things she wanted to try at Fame was a soul version of Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ (originally produced, of course, by Rick’s old partner Billy Sherrill), and the arrangement, based by Clarence on ‘Stand By Me’, created one of the all-time Muscle Shoals classics. “Rick was never mean,” says Candi, “but he would make me sing a song over and over again until I was hoarse. He wanted to work up the emotions out of me so that I got a hoarse kind of Wilson Pickett sound.” Hall groomed Candi as the female star he’d wanted to make out of Etta James, and sides like ‘I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart’ and ‘I’m Just a Prisoner’ (a stinging semi-retake of ‘Chain Of Fools’) were electrifying performances. Pickett himself returned to Fame for his thunderous version of the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, again featuring the new ingredient of Duane Allman’s slide guitar. Duane was the original Southern longhair, and the story goes that Rick Hall was only too pleased to be rid of the dirty hippie when Otis Redding’s old manager Phil Walden offered to buy his contract in 1969. ‘Hey Jude’ was also one of the last great FAME sessions to be played by the Hood/Hawkins/Johnson/ Beckett quartet before their April ‘69 departure to form Muscle Shoals Sound. “There was a lot of bitterness between Rick and us,” says Barry Beckett. “It was a dirty parting that we’d hoped to avoid, and for about five years there it was rough. What hurt was that Rick had just made an exclusive deal with Capitol, and he wanted us to ‘work exclusively for him, on salaries that would have given us a third of what we’d been making without side work. We figured he had us over a barrel, and that’s what made Jimmy and Roger decide to move. It was either that or move to Nashville.” Hall was insulted, and the insult was compounded when Jerry Wexler switched his Atlantic acts over to the new studio in Sheffield. Moreover, the split coincided with the passing of the Southern soul era – both parties were shortly to expand into pop, rock, and country, Hall with the Osmonds and Mac Davis, MS Sound with Cher and Paul Simon. “I just knew in my bones that the southern sound was gonna go,” says Jerry Wexler, “and that it was gonna happen quickly. I mean, we had Joe Tex, Arthur Conley, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, the Sweet Inspirations, Sam & Dave, King Curtis, the most incredible roster. And then in one year it was all gone. Stopped, ran into a wall.” Various explanations have been given for the southern soul decline. One says simply that people had grown tired of the sound. Another notes the growing sophistication and urbanisation of black music at the end of the sixties, what with Norman Whitfield, Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone and others experimenting on the West Coast. A third holds that the growing resentment and militancy of black musicians after Martin Luther King’s Memphis assassination in 1968 led to threats against white R&B carpetbaggers, and that consequently white producers pulled back from the soul field to concentrate on southern rock and country. Wexler discounts this last theory – “there was this bullshit about pre-empting us and taking over the companies, but it was all rhetoric”– and opts for the first. “The main reason Atlantic became a power in white rock’n'roll, especially with English rock, is because we took the black thing as far as it could go. We couldn’t get it over the way Motown could, and here’s the point: Motown made music for white middle-class teenagers, whereas we made music for black proletarian adults. People have romantic delusions remembering what never happened. Aretha Franklin never crossed to the white market.” Among the black artists who recorded at FAME, Clarence Carter voices a common suspicion. “I don’t think that when those white guys opened their studios in the South their aim was to stick with black music. They were gonna use black music and make money from it, then they were gonna move onto the next thing. See, when Otis Redding died, Phil Walden could just as well have turned and gone on with something else, but he didn’t, and that was because he hadn’t gotten as far along as he wanted to be. And when he got Duane Allman from Rick (actually Wexler’s suggestion), it was because he could see further on down the road what could be done with him.” It would be wrong to imply that Muscle Shoals soul hit the dead end Jerry Wexler indicates. Hall’s FAME label, distributed by Capitol, continued to release excellent sides by Staton, Bettye Swann, Spencer Wiggins, Willie Hightower and others, and Muscle Shoals Sound played host to Millie Jackson (the sublime Caught Up), Bobby Womack, and Stax acts like Johnnie Taylor and the Staple Singers. Stax itself was in worse shape, hence the farming-out of acts to Shoals. Hall, moreover, had replaced his old rhythm section with the first permanent black players, bassist Jesse Boyce and drummer Freeman Brown, he’d ever used. Nonetheless, the lure of pop megabucks was great. “We wanted to get a pop sound,” admits Barry Beckett. “We didn’t want to be tied in to R&B for the rest of our lives. When it got to Paul Simon, we said this is it… if we don’t jump on this one, we’re losin’ our chance. ” Simon came down because of the sound on the Staples’ ‘I’ll Take You There; and went away with the million-selling There Goes Rhymin’ Simon album – just one of many white acts to benefit from Muscle Shoals in the ’70s. (That includes the Stones, who recorded ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’ at MS Sound.) Things finally came full circle in 1974 when Jerry Wexler brought Willie Nelson down to Muscle Shoals Sound to record the ahead-of-its-time Phases & Stages album. More recently. Rick Hall has returned to country music and produced hits on Jerry Reed, the Gatlin Brothers, and Terri Gibbs. Of the other studios that surfaced in the wake of FAME and MS Sound, Quin Ivy’s Quinvy bravely persevered with Percy Sledge and a bunch of lesser artists on the South Camp label. The studio was renamed Broadway Sound when Ivy sold out to his engineer David Johnson in 1973, and has been home to Swamp Dogg productions on Freddie North, Z. Z. Hill and the Dogg himself. In the early ’70s, it took on Motown acts (the first Commodores album, for example), then concentrated on southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Outlaws, and (in a different vein) J.J.Cale. Another studio used by Motown was Wishbone, built by ex-Fame staffers Terry Woodford and Clayton lvey, who produced albums on the Supremes, the Temps, and Thelma Houston. Adequate though these Motown productions were, they had nothing to do with Muscle Shoals tradition. In many ways that tradition passed into the hands of the white singers who emerged at the turn of the decade – the J.J. Cales and Tony Joe Whites. Duane and Gregg Allman, whose band symbolised the union between R&B and country, had performed Muscle Shoals ballads (including two Penn/ Oldham songs) on the second Hourglass album, and Gregg had a blacker voice than most whites. Jerry Wexler hoped that Phil Walden’s Capricorn label would save Southern R&B in the 70’s, but Capricorn bands like The Allmans and Wet Willie made black acts redundant. By the time disco arrived in the mid-70’s, everyone had forgotten about Southern soul singers. Rick Hall wound up the FAME label in 1974, the year of Stax’s collapse. “The hot streak for me started to phase out about 1973. Disco music killed black music, and it killed a lot of other music too. There was an era there where I was completely left out. Of course, there was a phasing-out of blacks because a new breed of young, aggressive white people came in after the Stones and the Animals and so on and made such an impact. “I went back to country because I got tired of the fast lane and tap-dancing in New York and L. A. I was no longer obsessed with making hit records, because I’d made a lot of money and done what I wanted to do. The only thing I hadn’t succeeded at was country, and it was a lot easier to drive to Nashville to see Billy Sherrill or Buddy Killen than it was to fly to L.A. for a week. The other thing I was tired of was going through rhythm sections, and being in an outpost like Muscle Shoals, you don’t have three thousand guitar players signed to the union. Every time I’d break in a group and get ‘em really clicking, they’d move across town and start their own studio. I always had to have another horse in the stable, always had to groom the number two group to replace the number one group, and it was heartbreaking to start all over again.” Hall wasn’t the only one to go back to country. Almost all the leading session men in Nashville today come from either Muscle Shoals or from Chips Moman’s American studio in Memphis, and while this has made contemporary country more soulful, it’s left a lot of great black singers out in the cold. “Country music’s gotten a little more funky,” says ex-Shoals pianist David Briggs, one of the first to move. “That’s because all your R&B players from Muscle Shoals, Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, and Shreveport have moved here. Sometimes I do regret that we’re not still helping to make great R&B music, but we were working three days down there for what we could make here in three hours.” The other side of the coin, of course, is that there are no virtually no black musicians in Nashville. “The few that are around I have tried to help,” says Briggs. “There’s Jesse Boyce, Harvey Sanchez. Unfortunately, black musicians aren’t very good at sticking to a simple country formula, and if you don’t stick to the formula here, you don’t get work.” Muscle Shoals Sound has never abandoned black music, but nor have they attempted to develop a black artist. The record business slump of the late ’70s hurt them because, in David Hood’s words, “the record companies just didn’t have the budgets they once had to cut records outside their own backyards.” And certainly not black records, one is tempted to add. The studio’s big successes of late have been Bob Seger, Julian Lennon, the Oak Ridge Boys – not the most soulful names one might pull out of a hat, though Seger’s ‘Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was penned by black writer George Jackson. George Michael even did a take of ‘Careless Whisper’ at the studio (then decided his own one was better than the Jerry Wexler-produced version). The good news – to end on an optimistic note – is that the enormous M.S. Sound studio, sitting on the banks of the wide, wide Tennessee River, has been acquired by Malaco Records of Jackson, Mississippi, the most successful black independent in America today. Malaco have on their roster Johnnie Taylor, Denise LaSalle (we can overlook ‘Toot Toot’), and none other than the master himself, Mr. Bobby Bland. Chances are we’ll be hearing some great black Muscle Shoals records again. The top man at Malaco is an old school chum of Jimmy Johnson’s from Tuscumbia, Alabama. His name is Tommy Couch. Oh yes, and he’s white. |
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11:02 PM Jul 30