Music Fell on Alabama 9781588381576

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Music Fell on Alabama

Music Fell on Alabama The Muscle Shoals Sound That Shook the World

C. S. Fuqua

NewSouth Books Montgomery

NewSouth Books P.O. Box 1588 Montgomery, AL 36102

Copyright © 2005 by C.S. Fuqua All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fuqua, Christopher S., 1956Music fell on Alabama / C.S. Fuqua. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 143) and index. ISBN 1-58838-157-9 (alk. paper) 1. Sound recording industry—Alabama—Muscle Shoals—History. 2. Popular music—History and criticism. 3. Musicians—Alabama. I. Title. ML3790.F87 2005 781.64’09761—dc22 2004025132 Printed in the United States of America First edition published by Crane Hill in 1991, with ISBN 0-9621455-7-2.

For all who enjoy music, the ones who truly make a song a hit . . .

Contents Preface / 9

Part I 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Part II

Alabama’s Music Muscle / 15 Prelude to Fame / 17 Fame, the First Time Around / 25 A Second Shot at Fame / 32 Bringing the Shoals to the World / 42 Splinters / 50 Getting a Piece of the Rock / 59 Cooperation and Disintegration / 67 Growth and Turbulence / 76 More Than Money: A Different Measure of Success / 85 Today’s Music Ain’t Got the Same Shoals / 94

Stars Who’ve Risen from Alabama / 103 Alabama / 105 Jimmy Buffett / 107 Nat King Cole / 109 William Levi Dawson / 113 The Delmore Brothers / 114 W. C. Handy / 115 Emmylou Harris / 118 Erskine Hawkins / 119 Sonny James / 120

Hugh Martin / 122 Sam Phillips / 124 Sun Ra / 125 Martha Reeves / 127 Lionel Richie / 128 Toni Tennille / 131 Dinah Washington / 133 Hank Williams / 135 2005 Epilogue / 139 Bibliography / 143 Index / 147

Preface

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ongs. Stories set to music, reflections of our lives, of our times, our fears, desires, sorrows, our joys. They’re magic. And to reward that magic, we reach into our pockets to make certain songs hits, certain performers stars. But are the hit makers really magicians or simply good business people with a certain savvy, a peculiar understanding of public taste, people who know how to gauge exactly what will make a consumer decide to buy a record, tape or compact disc instead of a new pair of desperately needed jeans? “Songs are everything,” says Jimmy Johnson of Muscle Shoals Sound Recording Studios. “That’s one of the strengths of Rick Hall [owner of Fame Recording Studios]. He knows a great song. He’s got the ear. He can hear a song and cast it on somebody, and the average person who hears it will want to buy that record.” To relate the story of every Alabamian who has affected the listening public through music would require a roomful of books. Music Fell on Alabama affords only a glimpse at the history of a few Alabamians who have touched our lives with their words, their voices, their instruments, their songs, and—possibly more than anything else—their business expertise, their innate ability to make us fork over our dollars to reward them well for the time they spend in a recording studio. The main story here is the music industry of the Shoals, a fourtown area situated on the banks of the Tennessee River in the 9

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northwest corner of the state, an unlikely locale for the “Hit Capital of the World.” In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a few mavericks carved a niche in the music world for themselves and for Alabama, bucking the system, snubbing the rules. They built a rhythm and blues reputation, and then, just when the rest of the industry figured it had the Muscle Shoals sound pegged, the players changed the game and applied their talents to pop, rock, country, and gospel. The main obstacle in the research and writing of a contemporary history such as Music Fell on Alabama is the memories of the people involved. No two individuals will recall the same event quite the same way; each person remembers a different hero, a different villain. But from all the tales, a general story will eventually take shape. The histories of the Muscle Shoals music industry and Alabama music achievers—before the audience and behind the scenes—have been culled from some extremely colorful and interesting individuals, their tales not always the same, but always intriguing. Music Fell on Alabama does not pretend to be the definitive word on the shapers of an industry that has had its share of roller coaster rides and is once again on the down side. Part One of this book provides only an overview of a rich and dynamic history of the Shoals music industry. Part Two examines the lives and careers of a few musical achievers from across the state. The stories contained here are testaments of individualism, determination, jealousy, deception, downfall and lasting success—of the public and the personal kind. For the their time and assistance, I am grateful to Terry Woodford, Buddy Draper, Tammy Lawler, Quin Ivy, Janna Malone, Jimmy Johnson, Linda and Rick Hall, Dexter and Grace Johnson, Ray Johnson, Mike Curtis, Dick Cooper, and the others who provided important input. I am also grateful to the multitude

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of talented musicians and songwriters who wrote and recorded the songs that became the foundation for the Shoals music industry. And for her unyielding support and for her assistance in research, I am most grateful to Bonnie. C. S. Fuqua Huntsville, Alabama April 1991

Music Fell on Alabama

PART I Alabama’s Music Muscle

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Prelude to Fame

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f you ask anyone from the four Alabama cities that make up what’s known as the Shoals, that person will probably tell you that a high concentration of talented musicians and songwriters are an inherent ingredient of the area’s constitution, a phenomenon uncommon to the rest of the country. But that wouldn’t be quite right. Indigenous talent is no more abundant in the Shoals than it is in Jordan, Montana. As one Shoals music industry executive puts it, the upper hand the Shoals has on most of the country is its ability to draw out local talent as well as entice other music achievers to the area from elsewhere by offering would-be artists a place and means to flourish. At least that’s the way it was, although in recent years, the once-thriving Shoals music industry has shrunk, and, with it, opportunity as well. Some 65,000 people now live in the four cities—Florence, Sheffield, Tuscumbia and Muscle Shoals (the smallest)—an area in which the primary industries include textiles and aluminum production. The four cities sit on both sides of the Tennessee River in Colbert and Lauderdale counties. Long before white settlers arrived in the 1700s, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Shawnee Indian tribes made this rich section of the Tennessee Valley their home, relishing the region’s bounty of food and game—especially mussels, the small shellfish that flourished in the Tennessee River shoals. When the first white settlers arrived, the area’s natural beauty—the shallow and craggy waters and lush valleys and 17

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hills—struck a sweet chord, coaxing them to stay instead of pushing further west. The abundant mussels and the soft, rushing shoals became the area’s namesake, but how “mussel” became “muscle” in Muscle Shoals, according to area historian William McDonald, can only be credited to an anonymous misspeller and an unexplained unwillingness of those who followed to correct the mistake. The lives of the early white settlers, to say the least, were hard. They had to carve their existence out of the wilderness, which meant a lot of hard work with little play. But when time eventually allowed for play, it came in the form of games, spinning tops, whittling, and music. People would gather at barn dances, house raisings, and weddings to play their fiddles and guitars while others danced and whooped and let go for a while. Music became an ingrained part of life, the standard entertainment at family and social get-togethers. As the area grew in population and importance, its musical heritage grew as well, the same way music developed in every part of the country, each area’s particular characteristics reflected in the songs. In 1916, World War I brought to the Shoals construction of two major projects, the world’s largest munitions plant and Wilson Dam, the latter destroying the river shoals that gave the area its name. New construction and industry promised prosperity, and, for area residents, the trade-off of shoals for a brighter future appeared to be a good deal. Even Ford Motor Company bought land to locate its “Ford City” and automobile plants in the Shoals, but the plans never materialized. Then in 1941, Reynolds Aluminum Company established itself in Florence and has since become the area’s primary employer. Although the Shoals has produced such notable achievers as Hellen Keller and Sam Phillips, residents before the late 1950s preached that if you wanted to make the “big time,” you had to

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leave, go to places where the big time was happening; if you were a musician or songwriter, that meant Nashville or Chicago or New York or California—anywhere but the Shoals. And when residents voted in the 1950s to make the counties dry, getting your music heard locally became even more difficult. Without liquor, there were no nightclubs, and without nightclubs, there was little opportunity for a musician to find exposure except on radio, at occasional dances or on the fraternity circuit. No one was fully aware of the talent that existed in the area until that talent had left for good. Take Florence native W. C. Handy for example. Handy, an innovative composer and musician, never would have become “The Father of the Blues” had he remained in the Shoals. And even though Handy’s talent and fame brought to the area some recognition by association, little changed until the middle to late 1950s when a few spirited individuals decided they didn’t want to leave the Shoals to find the success they craved; they would make it happen at home. Fueled by desire and tenacious determination, they decided that all they needed was a bit of talent and a sharp eye for business.

The Area’s First Studio Over the years, the name of Muscle Shoals has become synonymous with the name of Fame to anyone vaguely associated with the recording industry. A sign today on the side of the building that houses Fame Studios in Sheffield boasts “Where it all started.” And that’s arguably right—and wrong. Although the firm establishment of the Shoals recording industry can be credited to Rick Hall and his studio, Fame was not the Shoals’ first studio. Flashback to 1938. Musician Dexter Johnson has come home to Sheffield, twenty years old and looking to settle down after three years of performing on the road. “I went to Detroit when I was seventeen,” he recalls. “We played the joints. One winter, we

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never played the same place twice. We had been playing down in Mississippi at square dances, making three or four dollars a night. The first night we played in Detroit, we made fifteen dollars. I thought, ‘Boy! I don’t believe I want to work anymore.’ I was just starting out; I didn’t know what it was all about.” Born in Belmont, Mississippi, in 1918, and later moving to Iuka, Dexter and his brother Ray came to the Shoals when Dexter was fourteen because “I wanted to get on the radio and there wasn’t [a station] in Iuka,” he recalls. “Staying with people here and there,” the Johnson brothers soon established themselves in the Shoals, playing on most of the four-city area’s radio stations. After his return from Detroit, Dexter married, resolving himself to a more conventional life-style, taking a job as an assistant turbine operator at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) steam powered electric generating plant. By 1942, Dexter had built his wife and himself a home and settled into a working man’s life. But he couldn’t shake the urge to perform, to hear the applause of an appreciative audience. Manning the upright bass, he joined the Blue Seal Pals, a five-member country music group sponsored by Columbia Mill and Elevator Company, the makers of Blue Seal Flour. The Pals soon became a regular feature on Florence’s WJOI radio, their live broadcasts fed via the Blue Seal Network to stations in Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi. While Dexter continued to work with TVA, the Pals’ popularity grew, and they became a morning feature on WSM radio in Nashville. The band’s logical next step was the road. Dexter had to make a choice: his job or his music. He chose the latter, the Pals taking to the tour circuit in the late 1940s with such performers as Cowboy Copas, Grand Ole Opry comic Rod Brasfield, and Minnie Pearl. In 1949, Dexter and the Pals decided to call it quits, and Dexter returned to the Shoals again to take a job with TVA.

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In 1951, still with a musical itch, Dexter tried his hand at another part of the music business by converting his garage into a recording studio, the first in the Shoals. Wanting the best sound possible, he remembers, he equipped the small studio with a monaural tape recorder instead of a wire recorder which had been the earlier standard. While occasionally offering his services as a session musician in Nashville and Memphis studios, Dexter began engineering radio programs and demos in his own studio for performers and songwriters who wanted to hear how their work sounded, performers that included such future stars as Melba Montgomery and a young Tanya Tucker. “Tanya was thirteen,” Dexter says. “Her sister was singing commercials and they were coming through here when her mother got sick and went into the hospital. They got with Peanut Montgomery,” a local musician, “and Peanut came over here and set up a time for them one night, and I recorded her. It was just some songs. When they started home that night, her daddy asked me to pick up a dozen single song reels. I did, and her and her dad came back the next morning, and she put down quite a few songs.” He laughs. “That was the last I seen of them.” While no hit record emerged directly from Dexter’s studio, Dexter served as a session musician on the 1957 million-seller by Dave Gardner, “White Silver Sands,” recorded in Memphis. And during the mid-1980s, Cattle Records of West Germany issued several albums of Dexter’s own performances.

Tune Town While Dexter cut demos and radio programs in his garage, a fellow across town got a hankering to get into music publishing. During a stint in the Army, James Joiner, whose father had begun a Florence-based charter bus company in 1939, had been part of a band, playing service clubs and backing USO acts. When Joiner

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returned home, he wanted to do something with the talent that existed in the Shoals. In December 1956, Joiner teamed up with Kelson Hurston, Walter Stovall and Marvin Wilson to form Tune Records and Publishing Company, what’s considered to be the first full-fledged record company in Alabama. Splitting his time between the family busing business and Tune, Joiner set up a simplistic recorder in the back of the Florence bus station, using the waiting room as a studio after the place had closed down for the night. During its span, Tune used several sites to record, including WLAY, a local radio station. The company’s first—and last—big break came late on a night in 1957 when Joiner was driving one of his company’s buses on a return trip to the Shoals. He glanced up, saw a falling star, and, according to his niece, Judy Joiner, he wrote “A Fallen Star” before he went to bed that night. Certain the song could be a hit, he didn’t want to use just anyone to cut it; he had a special sound in mind, a young voice, controlled, yet moving. He enlisted the help of Bobby Denton, a high school student who later became a prominent local politician. Tune Records cut the record in February 1957 at WLAY, and the song became a regional hit, getting a lot of radio play throughout the South. It went on to be recorded by scores of other artists, including Ferlin Husky. Thanks to the success of “A Fallen Star,” word quickly spread throughout the state that some guy in the Shoals was cutting hit records and publishing songs. Alabama songwriters and musicians began to migrate to the area, the only place they knew of where they might break into the music industry while maintaining their ultimate goal of eventually becoming part of the Nashville scene. Two of those hopefuls were Billy Sherrill and Rick Hall, who had hooked up together in Hamilton in a band called the Fairlanes. Hall and Sherrill, both from Phil Campbell, began making weekly bus trips from Hamilton to the Shoals to pitch their songs

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to Joiner. The trips paid off. Joiner liked what he heard and published several of their songs, including “Aching, Breaking Heart” and “Sweet and Innocent.” A hint of the success in store for Hall and Sherrill came when such prominent artists as Roy Orbison and Brenda Lee recorded their work. By the late 1950s, Tune Records had failed to repeat the success it had with “A Fallen Star,” so Joiner decided to return full-time to the family business, although he continued to write songs that were later recorded by various artists. “I asked him one time why he’d gotten out of the business,” Judy Joiner says. “Both my grandparents were in the hospital at the time, and I said, ‘You have so many God-given talents, why have you stayed here [in the bus business]?’ He looked at me, and tears started coming down his face. He said,‘I always wanted to be around my family.’ That’s the only answer I ever got.” Despite his decision to devote his energies to the bus company, Joiner left his mark on the Shoals music industry with more than just a hit song. His most profound and lasting act occurred in the late 1950s when Tom Stafford, a local bohemian type, approached him with an idea. Stafford had heard that Hall and Sherrill’s songs had done reasonably well, and he wanted to meet the men; he had a proposition, he told Joiner. What Joiner and Stafford didn’t know was that Stafford’s interest couldn’t have come at a more critical time. Hall and Sherrill had begun to toy with the idea of bypassing Joiner completely, taking their songs to Nashville themselves. A hunchback in his thirties whose family owned the City Drugstore in Florence, Stafford was dismissed by many townsfolk as just another character. Stafford was far more than an oddball, though. He was well aware of the new boom of talent in the area, generated mainly by the notoriety of Joiner’s song, and he saw his chance to cash in. When he contacted Joiner, he had already

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decided to open a studio and publishing company in the space over his parents’ drugstore previously occupied by a podiatrist. In the years to come, Stafford’s reputation as a nonconformist and someone who liked to hang out would appeal to and inspire several young musicians and songwriters who came looking for a break, writers like Dan Penn who would play a part in putting Muscle Shoals on the music map. Stafford would listen to the musicians’ dreams of stardom, all the while reassuring them that they’d get what they wanted, that they would someday cut a hit record. Joiner put Stafford in touch with Sherrill and Hall who were more than taken with his proposition to become partners in a studio and publishing company. Joiner fronted the trio a small loan to start up operations, and, in the spring of 1959, the doors of the Shoals’ first Fame opened. Despite its presumptuous sound, the studio’s name meant little more to Sherrill and Stafford than Florence Alabama Music Enterprises. For Rick Hall, however, the Fame name served as a harbinger of the success he’d attain after parting ways with Sherrill and Stafford. The only way to justify that name’s connotations would be to create a bona fide hit factory. And Hall would use all his abilities to do just that, allowing nothing—and no one—to stand in his way.

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Fame, the First Time Around

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hen James Joiner closed down Tune Records, the Muscle Shoals music industry would have ended there, before it had even gotten a good start, had it not been for a conspiracy of events that would lead to the founding of Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, events that would instill in Rick Hall, after the company’s dissolution, an obsessive determination—a “never say die” attitude, as he calls it—to put the Shoals on the musical map. In time, he would develop an uncanny talent for producing the hit songs that would create a solid base for a music industry that would thrive into the 1980s, despite tremendous odds against such success. But to understand the driving force behind Hall, to understand what made the Shoals music industry what it was in the early days, you have to go back to Hall’s childhood. “Life has never been easy for Rick,” says Linda Hall, Rick’s wife. “He was very poor; I can’t comprehend anyone being so poor.” Born in 1932, about forty miles from Muscle Shoals in a place called Freedom Hills, Hall experienced, by anyone’s standards, a hard childhood, dirt poor and under the scrutiny of a strict father, forced to use oil drums for cooking food and heating the house. Hall’s father, a sawmill operator, was a man who loved his two children deeply but who would not hesitate to beat them when he felt circumstances dictated it. When Hall was four, his parents divorced, his mother leaving him and his sister with their father. 25

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Hall’s first true exposure to music can be credited to his father, a fan of old Southern gospel. The elder Hall would stay up late nights, learning new songs to teach in ten-day singing schools he conducted for extra money. On Sundays, according to Hall, his father would take him to community singings, but Hall’s interest in music at that point was minimal. In the early 1940s, his musical outlook began to change when he got a taste of country music. About the same time, an uncle who was living with the family brought home a mandolin, and a neighbor showed Hall a few chords on the guitar. The sound of country music had hooked the young Hall. And in the same way as other poor Alabamians, he satisfied his desire to hear the music by listening to the radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville. Alabama country folks would use all sorts of excuses to play and listen to music, but radio back then was a luxury few could afford. Even so, each community usually contained at least one person who owned a radio that could be powered by a car battery. Neighbors would gather on nights (Saturday was the favorite time) to listen to the news of the day, professional fights and, of course, the Opry. By 1944, Hall’s father had moved north, to Cleveland, Ohio, taking a job in a defense plant, hoping to make enough money to return to Alabama someday to buy a parcel of land. Cleveland provided Hall with his first truly urban experience; he realized then that a small community like Freedom Hills, Alabama, would never give him what he desired in life. At the end of the war, the family moved back to Alabama where Hall’s father remarried and settled into sharecropping. Hall, now a teenager, had begun attending classes at age eight at Rock Creek School, a three-room building with only a couple of teachers; returning to school in Alabama, he joined a fourteen-member Future Farmers of America string band, which garnered first and second prizes in successive

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years in state competition at Auburn University. The music, however, wasn’t enough to keep Hall in school; before his senior year, he quit. Never a student extremely interested in academics, Hall has said that his only true accomplishment in school was his tenure in the FFA band. In 1951, while Dexter Johnson was setting up his garage studio in the Shoals, Rick Hall once again headed north, to Rockford, Illinois, where he became an apprentice tool and die maker at Rocker Clutch Division. By day, he worked his shift; by night, he played in a band at Corey’s Bluff Tavern. For its pay, the band got tips and all the beer its members could drink. Hall quickly learned how to make up the difference on nights when tips were off. In 1952, he was drafted, but he balked, entering the Army as a conscientious objector, which had nothing to do with religion, only an unwillingness to kill or be killed. Home on leave just before he was to ship out as a front-line medic in Korea, Hall got drunk at a dance. After leaving the party still drunk, he flipped his car, breaking his back which laid him up for a year. When he reported back to duty, the war was over. Hall no longer had to play the role of a conscientious objector; instead, he joined the Fourth Army’s honor guard and played in a band that featured Faron Young and Gordon Terry. After discharge, Hall returned to Alabama and married in 1955. He went to work at Reynolds Aluminum in Florence, and his life began to resemble any other working man’s life. Music was only a hobby, not a serious candidate for a career. But eighteen months after he took his vows, that typical life turned inside out. On the way to hear fiddler Bennie Martin perform, Hall’s car crashed, killing his wife. A couple of weeks later in mid-April 1957, tragedy struck again; this time, Hall’s father died when his tractor overturned. Whatever Hall’s plans had been before, they were quickly

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wiped away, forgotten. He quit his job and began the life of a drifter, drinking heavily, running moonshine, living out of his car. And whether he was seeking solace or just some way to pass time in a manner that had once given him pleasure, he began to play music on a regular basis, in a band called the Country Pals, standing in on whatever instrument needed to be covered at the time—guitar, mandolin, fiddle. The band played small towns throughout North Alabama, a circuit also traveled by another group called the Rhythm Swingers, known for a pop music sound. When Hall met Billy Sherrill, the piano and sax man in the Rhythm Swingers and the son of an evangelist, the two men hit it off. Over the following year, Sherrill and Hall became close friends, despite the fact that Sherrill never cared for Hall’s romance with alcohol. The two became roommates and started writing songs together. They quit their bands to form the Fairlanes, a rock and rhythm and blues band. With the Fairlanes, Hall had taken his first step down a path that would lead him away from his country roots for the next two decades. When “A Fallen Star” made its mark, like other Alabamians with an eye on Nashville, Sherrill and Hall became acutely aware of James Joiner’s Tune Records and Publishing Company in Muscle Shoals. They began making weekly trips to the Shoals to pitch their songs to Joiner. By early 1959, however, the men had begun to think that, with Nashville artists such as Roy Orbison and Brenda Lee having recorded some of their songs, maybe they no longer needed Joiner, that they could take their songs to Nashville and pitch them without Joiner’s help. Had Joiner not decided to return full-time to the family bus business when he did, the Shoals music industry might have ended with Tune Records. But Joiner put Tom Stafford in touch with Sherrill and Hall, and the initial meeting made the two men rethink their plans. The idea

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of writing, publishing and marketing their own work, not just pitching it, tantalized them. That initial meeting soon led to the formation of a three-way partnership in Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, the first Fame. Sherrill and Hall moved into the rooms above the City Drugstore and were greeted with plaster feet littering the floor, left over by the podiatrist who had formerly occupied the space. They set up cots for sleeping and then went to work, stapling egg cartons to the walls to serve as soundproofing. They equipped the floor with old carpet and the windows with drapes discarded from the Princess Theater which Stafford managed. They installed a small paned window between rooms. In one room, they set up a tiny table and equipped it with a Berlant-Concertone recorder. After they bought three mikes and a mixer in Birmingham, the space above the drugstore suddenly became a recording studio. Musicians and songwriters had already begun migrating to Muscle Shoals because of Tune Records’ brief success. For most, Muscle Shoals represented a proving ground, a crack in the door to Nashville. If they could slip their foot in there, the next step wouldn’t be so hard. The Fame team took advantage of the talent flow, recording demos and signing on all sorts of local writers, from poets to high school kids, a stable that included Vernon native Dan Penn and Arthur Alexander, a young black man from the Shoals. But despite the growing wealth of talent, the studio seemed stuck in Tune Records’ rut, unable to get a hit. And even though Sherrill and Hall continued to play with the Fairlanes throughout the area, back at the studio, their personalities began to clash; they didn’t see eye to eye when it came to running Fame. Hall, forever pushing Stafford and Sherrill to produce more and to spend increasing time in the studio, chipped away at their patience.

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Hall’s obsessive pursuit of success also rubbed against some of Fame’s stable of writers, in particular, Dan Penn. The brash, headstrong teenager resented being told how to write or perform a song, especially when the person directing him wasn’t extremely gifted in diplomacy. Conflicts escalated until mid-1960 when Penn issued Stafford an ultimatum: the partners could either kick Hall out or kiss Penn goodbye. Having Penn leave didn’t sound too good to Stafford because the writer had provided Fame with what promised to be a breakthrough: in Nashville, Conway Twitty had recorded (but not yet released) Penn’s “Is a Bluebird Blue?” Stafford told Penn not to worry, that he’d take care of things. “Billy and Tom thought Rick was too aggressive, that he was pushing too hard to get something going, to get success going, trying too hard,” says Linda Hall. “Billy wanted to be more laid back” while Hall grew ever more driven and dictatorial from the pressing inner desire to be “the boss,” to control every aspect of the business, from the writing of the song to the sound that went down on tape. The Penn incident brought tempers to a head, and the partnership crumbled. Sherrill and Stafford gave Hall the Fame name and publishing company but retained Fame’s record label, Spar, for themselves. They told Hall, more or less, to hit the road. Soon afterward, Sherrill “went to Nashville to work for Sam Phillips,” Linda recalls. “He sold Rick the name of Fame and the publishing company for a dollar.” Not sure of what he had—at the time, it was little more than a sheet of paper giving him legal ownership of a name—Hall retreated to hometown Phil Campbell to lick his wounds. Meanwhile, back at Spar Music above the drugstore, local musicians continued to hang out, playing their music together, looking to Stafford for advice and guidance—musicians that included David Briggs, Jerry Carrigan, Donnie Fritts, Spooner

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Oldham and even novices like Jimmy Johnson, Roger Hawkins and David Hood. The latter three would one day refine a certain sound and distinguish the area musically. But despite Stafford’s mystical appeal to local musicians, Spar never brought a record out after the breakup of the partnership. In Phil Campbell, Hall spent his days sorting through options. Although his songwriting ability had proved promising with songs like “Aching, Breaking Heart,” which reached number one in the country charts, royalties were not what he thought they should be, certainly not enough to support him in the manner he knew his work could. Then the clouds began to clear. Hall’s stint with the Fairlanes had afforded him exposure to another type of music, a funky sound called R&B that had proved extremely popular with whites and blacks alike. Well aware from personal experience that Nashville showed little interest in new talent, Hall returned to Muscle Shoals to resurrect Fame, now more than ever determined to make himself heard in the music industry. “I couldn’t get anything going in Nashville,” Hall says. “It left me no alternative but to try to get something going in Muscle Shoals.” As Linda puts it, “He wanted to prove it could be done.”

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A Second Shot at Fame

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ithin nine months after Stafford and Sherrill kicked him out, Rick Hall would produce a record that would define the direction of the Shoals music industry for the next decade. Back in Phil Campbell, however, Hall wasn’t sure what 1960 held for him. All he knew was that Sherrill and Stafford had left him little with which to work—just a piece of paper giving him the name of Fame. He chose the only option offering even a glimmer of possibility and returned to the Shoals to produce the best artists he could find, hoping they would be good enough to break into the Nashville circle. But Nashville would be more difficult to crack than Hall imagined. It would seem that no matter what he did or how big a hit he produced, Nashville’s doors would forever remain shut to him. While some novice producers would have given up, Rick Hall only became more determined. Returning to the Shoals, Hall rented a dilapidated tobacco warehouse, located on Wilson Dam Highway, and rigged it into a workable studio. Short on cash, he went to work at a used car lot owned by Hansel Cross, who would soon become his silent business partner and, before year’s end, his new father-in-law. “Rick had done some jingles for my dad,” recalls Linda Hall. “Dad had always been interested in the music business, and he was fascinated by Rick. Rick talked him into . . . ” She stops, chuckles. “They discussed” Hall’s situation, “and they went to the bank to 32

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borrow money to buy enough equipment to do what Rick needed in the studio. Rick had an old 1956 Mercury and maybe two changes of clothes, and that was all he had to his name. He mortgaged the Mercury to get the money, and then he started, as he calls it, ‘beatin’ and bangin’.’” Living in the studio with an old cot serving as his bed, Hall used “light meter cartons and put them on the wall for sound effects,” Linda says. “He also did things with burlap for sound effects.” And, despite his and Sherrill’s differences concerning the first Fame, the Fairlanes continued to play together. (Sherrill, who now had moved to Nashville, would become associated with CBS Records, working with such artists as Tammy Wynette, Tanya Tucker and Charlie Rich.) “After we were married, Rick worked at my dad’s car lot in the daytime, played music in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on the weekends with the Fairlanes—they’d pick up Billy in Nashville on the way up—and worked in the studio at night.” With music driving him twenty-four hours a day, Hall used fellow band members Terry Thompson, Randy Allen and Charles Senn in studio sessions as he began developing other local musicians such as Jerry Carrigan and David Briggs, designing and refining Fame’s first rhythm section.

The Second Fame’s First Hit Back at Spar Music, the biggest things happening were hanging out, jamming, and wishing. Then in 1961, Tom Stafford got hold of something he considered hot, but he needed help, so he came to Hall. He told Hall that one of Spar’s writers, Arthur Alexander, had composed a hit song, but Stafford didn’t know what to do with it. Still smarting from the collapse of the partnership, but not enough to let it prevent him from making his mark, Hall brought Alexander into the Fame warehouse studio. (Although Alexander had signed officially with Spar as a songwriter, like everyone

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writing for Spar and for Fame, the job did not provide a paycheck every week. In Alexander’s case, he had to continue working as a bellman at the Sheffield Hotel to support himself while he chased a dream. For Spar and Fame writers, paychecks came when their songs sold and royalties began to flow in.) When Alexander sang his song for Hall, Hall agreed that the song had definite hit potential. With Peanut Montgomery, Terry Thompson, Jerry Carrigan and David Briggs as session musicians, Hall cut the song using three microphones, one mike devoted to both Montgomery’s acoustic guitar and Alexander’s voice. To get down on tape the sound he had in his head, Hall fiddled relentlessly with room and recording acoustics, varying the distance of instruments from the microphones. He later dubbed on some background voices, packed up his tape, and headed for Nashville, certain that this song would open doors that had never before opened. “But he couldn’t get anybody to do anything with it,” Linda recalls. Undeterred, Hall hand delivered the song to a few radio stations and managed to get enough airplay for it to receive some recognition among the listening public. With his confidence restored by airplay response, Hall again went to Nashville, but still no record company showed interest enough to buy in. Then he took it to Nashville’s WMAK Radio music director Noel Ball, who was representing Randy Wood of California-based Dot Records. Ball played it for Wood, and Wood liked the song enough to pick it up, offering Hall and Alexander three percent of royalties each. The record topped out at number twenty-four on Billboard’s Hot 100 and was later recorded by the Rolling Stones, who would eventually come to Muscle Shoals to cut one of their biggest singles. Hall’s first royalty check from “You Better Move On,” says Linda, was $1,900, “which was a lot of money to us. We were riding high, but the man that owned the [tobacco warehouse]

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building found out Rick got a check. Rick was paying $65 a month, and the man raised it to $365. Rick said, ‘Wait a minute; I can build my own studio for those kinds of payments.’” But buying his own studio would mean obtaining another bank loan, and one hit record could not make area bankers any more willing to risk their money on musicians than they had been before. “Back then,” Linda says, “the bankers were very reluctant to loan money to anybody in the music business. [Music people] were viewed as long-haired hippies and sort of freakish people with no stability.” But Rick Hall had never let another person’s opinion stop him before, and he wasn’t about to start now. “I did not lend money to Rick Hall when he came to me,” remembers Buddy Draper. At the time, Draper headed the Bank of Leighton in Leighton, a small town about twenty miles east of the Shoals. “Rick came up looking for enough money to build his studio,” Draper says, “but I couldn’t get my board of directors to lend it to him.” Draper laughs now. “Rick from then on never forgave me, and he never carried any accounts with our bank.” Hall, in part because he still had the backing of his father-in-law partner, found a better reception to his loan application from a cousin who was a vice president at the First Federal Savings and Loan in Florence. “He loaned Rick enough money to build the original building here,” Linda says, referring to Fame’s present Avalon Boulevard location in Sheffield. Another loan from the First National Bank in Tuscumbia financed the equipment Hall needed. Hall designed his Fame building after a Nashville RCA studio simply because he was familiar with its specifications. Little more than a tall, brick shack that appeared to be modeled roughly after a small mobile home, the studio spanned some twenty feet in width and seventy feet in length, with an eighteen-foot ceiling. Hall completed the studio in late 1962. Although Alexander’s record brought in a total of nearly $10,000,

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paying for the new construction and equipment quickly consumed the funds. Success had only bred the need for more success. The obvious path would have been to follow up the hit with another song by Alexander, but Tom Stafford had sold Alexander’s contract, leaving Hall once again in the cold, scrapping to find the right acts, the right songs. Meanwhile, just to make money, Hall rented out studio time (referred to as “custom sessions”) to local bands who wanted to cut demos. One of those bands was the Del Rays, in which Jimmy Johnson played rhythm guitar. Hall was taken enough with the guitarist to hire him as Fame’s first paid employee. Johnson became a jack-of-all-trades, sweeping, assisting as engineer on custom sessions, learning licks from Fame’s first primary rhythm section (David Briggs on piano, Norbet Putnam on bass, Jerry Carrigan on drums, and Terry Thompson on guitar). “You had to have musicians who could pick,” Hall says. “We just had to go out and pick the best we had, which wasn’t much.” But Shoals musicians were a group hungry enough to play mainly for the joy of playing because the best Hall offered his session people was free studio time and $53 a session (the minimum monetary union fee; in Muscle Shoals, however, sessions sometimes dragged on much longer than the union standard of three hours).

Starting from Semi-Scratch After Stafford sold Alexander’s contract, Hall found himself doing much the same thing he had been doing before, only in a new building. He still had no money to speak of, which forced him to continue his work at the car lot and with the Fairlanes. The worse part of it all, “You Better Move On” had not moved any record company to blaze a trail to Fame’s door. Hall, with no other choice, continued recording demos on various local artists, hoping to come across another hit, another star, but nothing paid off

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immediately. Ever the hard-nosed business man, Hall refused to give up. By now, Spar had crumbled with Stafford unable to handle the success generated by “You Better Move On.” And when Dan Penn made his move to Fame, Hall again put previous disagreements and hard feelings behind him. He refused to allow problems with the first Fame spoil potential success for the second Fame. He quickly signed on the writer, but Penn and other Shoals songwriters (who included Donnie Fritts, one of the few that maintained his independence, never signing with Hall) remained in even more of a musical limbo than Hall. They called themselves songwriters, but they weren’t making any money from their craft. Then in late 1963, the area’s luck began to change in the form of Bill Lowery from Atlanta. If Alexander’s hit did nothing else, it at least gave Hall some notoriety in Southern music circles. Lowery, a former disc jockey and radio station manager, had tried unsuccessfully to get an Atlanta record industry started with his own National Recording Corporation; when his company went bankrupt, he made a deal to provide acts to ABC. Lowery had heard of Hall’s Fame Studio and decided that he’d bring his acts to Muscle Shoals to record. Some of his artists included Tommy Roe, Joe South, Ray Stevens, the Tams, and Mac Davis. (Davis would develop a close relationship with Hall over the years, and have his biggest hits produced at Fame.) Hall’s studio style began to solidify as he tried to impress Lowery with his recording savvy. Hall heard in his mind what he wanted to hear coming through the control room speakers. To get that sound, he engineered the sessions himself as well as played instruments on each track while directing the other musicians to produce the sounds he wanted on tape. Lowery was impressed with the producer’s style, but he was even more impressed when

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cuts of his first two acts recorded at Fame—the Tams and Tommy Roe—became hits. For the Tams, it was “What Kind of Fool”; for Roe, “Everybody.” For Fame artists and songwriters, the success of the two songs provided a new spark of hope that a music industry really could exist in Muscle Shoals. After all, they were finally making some money. Penn and Fritts had written “Sorry I’m Late, Lisa,” the flip side of “Everybody,” and were receiving actual pay for their writing. If Penn and Fritts could do it, others reasoned that they could as well. For Hall, the Lowery connection pointed him in the right direction, but Lowery alone could not provide Fame with the amount of business and talent Hall craved. While people like Dan Penn were enjoying their limited success (Penn and Fame’s rhythm section also played the fraternity circuit as Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, derived in part from the way they transported the instruments and equipment—in a beat up hearse), Hall still had his eye on the big time, a dream that finally seemed attainable. Hall’s next attempt in the studio came with a member of the Fairlanes, singer Charles Senn, “but he could never get anything off the ground with him,” Linda Hall says. Time slid along, and while Hall worked day and night, producing what he hoped he could use to crack the national market, a problem that had been in the making grew increasingly evident. Drug use—some illegal, but mainly alcohol abuse, despite the fact that the counties were dry—became commonplace. “Back then, they were creative,” Linda says of the artists, “but that was as far as it went. Let’s face it, there were a lot of drugs back then. You had to put up with it or they wouldn’t come here. But now we don’t have to put up with it. If they do it, they do it elsewhere. This is something we’ve found in the last fifteen years. They respect you about your stand on drugs.”

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As Hall struggled toward a breakthrough, his style as a producer solidified, even though he was still somewhat undecided as to the musical direction Fame should take. But Alexander’s song had caused a stir among the area’s potential rhythm and blues artists. Though he wasn’t actively seeking them out, the success of “You Better Move On” generated an influx of R&B acts. “When word got out that there was this white guy working with black people,” Linda says, “they infiltrated in. They’d just come by and see what was going on because this was the early sixties and that wasn’t the thing to do, white people working with black people. But Rick did it anyway, and enjoyed it, and has always been able to relate well with black people. It’s always been a good marriage.” As for Alexander, he was never able to recapture the momentum of his first record, even though he went on to score several regional hits and a couple of songs that charted nationally.

A Shelved Hit Hall produced Fame’s second major hit actually before he produced its first. While he was still working out of the Wilson Dam Highway studio, a young man from Leighton stopped in one day and sang him a tune. Jimmy Hughes, employed at the time by Robbins Rubber Company, had been serving as the tenor for the Singing Clouds, a local gospel group that regularly performed on radio. After his initial meeting with Hall, Hughes began cutting demos for the producer, songs that included “Steal Away” and “I’m Qualified,” the latter written by Hall and Quin Ivy, a DJ at WLAY. Although “I’m Qualified” garnered some early success in the South after Philadelphia-based label Jamie-Guyden picked it up, “Steal Away,” a song about adultery, couldn’t find a home. “After ‘Steal Away’ was cut, it stayed on the shelf for two years,” recalls Linda. But Hall truly believed in the song’s potential simply because it made best use of Hughes’s talent, taking full advantage

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of his strong tenor voice. Hall had modeled the song after a 1959 pop hit called “Candy Apple Red,” using back-up voices to support Hughes’s strong lead. After the stint with Bill Lowery’s artists, Hall decided to give “Steal Away” another shot. Respecting Lowery for his knowledge of the industry, Hall called him for advice. He told Lowery that he was certain he had a hit, but he couldn’t get anyone to pick it up. Lowery told him to press the record himself, a few thousand copies. “Rick and Dan Penn loaded the few records he had pressed and went to all the black radio stations in the Southeastern United States,” says Linda. “I don’t know what all they did, but they got the stations to play the record.” “What all they did” included sleeping out of the back of a Ford station wagon when Penn and Hall weren’t romancing disc jockeys with flattery and bottles of vodka. They stayed on the road for two weeks, drinking a lot and talking a lot to DJs on and off the air. Whatever Hall told the DJs, it worked. The record got enough airplay that “it started making a lot of noise,” says Linda. By the time Hall returned to the studio, orders were already coming in. The only glitch: Hall’s credit was no good with the record plants. Records had to be bought COD, and Hall didn’t have the money. “Well, he called and got a thousand or so records pressed up,” all he could afford, says Linda, “and went to the distributors and all the major stores and left them two hundred or so records, and said, ‘When you sell those call me and I’ll send you more.’ After the third week, he got calls in for like ten thousand each, but he didn’t have the money to have them pressed. He called Bill [Lowery] again and asked, ‘What am I gonna do? I have a hit on my hands and can’t get the records pressed.’” Lowery told Hall to sit tight, that he had an idea. Lowery sent the record to Steve Clark of Vee Jay, a black owned, L.A.-based operation previously located in Chicago. The song impressed Clark enough that he picked it up

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for distribution in mid-1964. “It was a big record,” Linda says, “but Vee Jay went bankrupt, and we didn’t get all our money.” At the time of the deal, Vee Jay was in a legal battle with Capitol for the American rights to the Beatles; Vee Jay had already issued “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” and “Please Please Me.” In the midst of the Beatles legal battle, “Steal Away” climbed into the Top 20, and Hall relished the fact that at least one door—Vee Jay’s—had opened to him. The company subsequently sent Joe Simon to the Shoals for Hall to record a song written by Penn and Spooner Oldham, “Let’s Do It Over.” Timing, however, wasn’t on Hall’s side. Vee Jay went out of business in 1965, but, because of “Steal Away,” Hall was left in much better shape than after “You Better Move On.” By then, Linda says, “Rick had made a name for himself in the small circle of music at the time.” Vee Jay’s demise that year turned out to be Hall’s secondary problem, the more pressing concern arising within Fame. Twentyfour-year-old guitarist Terry Thompson had died suddenly during treatment for alcoholism. And the rest of the session players that Hall had worked so hard to assemble into a tight rhythm section decided to flee the Shoals for Nashville. For Briggs, Putnam and Carrigan, the move came mainly as a business decision: they’d seen good money start filtering into Muscle Shoals, but, as session players, they weren’t getting much of it. Studio time and little pay for session work had been okay in the beginning, but with hits now being made, income did not approach what musicians of their caliber were drawing in the major music centers. They’d heard from Lowery’s artists that all the work they could handle was waiting on them in Nashville. So they packed their bags and left, their departure sending Hall scrambling to find not only a record company to fill the Vee Jay void, but also to replace musicians as fit as the original rhythm section.

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efore Jimmy Johnson went to work for Rick Hall in 1962, he had been drifting, more or less, undecided on what to do with his life. Coming out of the Army where he’d learned to type, he entered the University of North Alabama in Florence “because all my friends were going. I was majoring in marketing and retailing, which I didn’t want any part of.” By the time he left the university, he’d spent three years in studies, but he never graduated. Instead, he married then fathered a child, which meant he had to make a living, and the best way he knew how to do that was in music. In his early days at Fame, Johnson did a little bit of everything, from engineering to occasionally playing guitar, but most of his duties were limited to “secretarial work. I set up Rick’s whole filing system. I guess that’s why it’s screwed up today. I was clearing all the copyrights, agreements, getting the songs written into sheet music. I worked as assistant engineer, and when somebody needed something to eat, I was the gofer. Rick and I also split the janitorial duties,” he laughs, “but I’d do most of it.” In 1964, Johnson’s duties changed, shifting completely out of maintenance into music when Hall’s first rhythm section “went to Nashville because they could work every day instead of just parttime,” says Johnson. “It left a big void [at Fame]. There was Rick with no musicians; it wasn’t like he had a lot of choice.” Hall, a man who has said that musicians without management are noth42

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ing, brought in Johnson on rhythm guitar, Junior Lowe on bass, Roger Hawkins on drums and Spooner Oldham on keyboards. “I was recruited over to play guitar because there was nobody else to get that had any expertise or ability or desire,” says Johnson. The new rhythm section’s sound was far from an instant jelling of styles. The musicians had to woodshed—practice together, getting used to each other’s technique—for nearly two years, doing little more than basic demo work until the music finally “fell together. We were guys who just wanted to do it.” (In Johnson’s old position, Hall hired Mickey Buckins who has since become one of Fame’s primary songwriters.) “You know,” says Johnson, a chubby man with a quick wit, “session playing is a lot different than playing live. The difference is the adrenaline rate. You don’t get the same adrenaline effect [in the studio] you get in front of a live audience or a lot of beautiful girls out there. We had to learn to play with the same intensity in the studio we’d play with in front of twenty thousand people. You had to come off like you had that edge. I’ve seen great singers that could go on stage and kill you but come into the studio and be just dead.” While Johnson and the other members of the new rhythm section honed their musical skills, Hall’s business picked up, the studio accommodating people like Buddy Killen, a Shoals hometown boy who had started Tree Publishing Company in Nashville, bringing Joe Tex and his band to record at Fame. Still, few people outside certain music circles were aware of Fame and the Shoals music industry. It would take a smash hit and Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler to bring the Shoals to the world. By 1966, the rhythm section’s sound had finally come together, but work for the musicians remained nearly as difficult to get as it had been for the first section. Hall had begun to turn away custom session demo business, preferring to develop specific artists. Hall

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figured he had everything in control, that the success he’d always envisioned was in reach. And he was right, but the breakthrough would not originate at Fame, even though it would have the most profound effect on Hall and the rhythm section.

The Easy Way to Make a Hit Back in 1959, Quin Ivy, who now serves as an accounting instructor at the University of North Alabama, had been working at a Shoals radio station when he first became acquainted with Rick Hall “coming through on his way to Nashville plugging songs.” Shortly after meeting Hall, Ivy moved to Nashville to become a disc jockey at KDA. Whenever Hall went to Nashville to plug yet another song, he’d stop in to see Ivy, and the two developed a friendly relationship. When Ivy moved back to the Shoals in 1961 to become a leading DJ at WLAY, his relationship with Hall strengthened, and Ivy began cowriting songs with the producer. Ivy, who also owned a Sheffield record store, kept his aspirations no secret; he wanted to do more in music than cowrite a few songs and spin records on the radio. “We were sitting in Rick’s office one day,” Ivy remembers, “and one of these calls came in— typical call about how much it costs to make a record—and Rick told them this outlandish figure just to get rid of them ’cause he didn’t want to fool with them.” Ivy was not blind; he spotted opportunity right off. Ever the diplomat, though, Ivy asked Hall if he’d object to Ivy opening a small studio to handle the work Hall was turning away. “He said it was a great idea: ‘I’ll send you all this stuff.’” Ivy got busy, found a partner, Marlin Greene, and opened Quinvy Studio on Second Street across from his record shop, equipping it with “junk,” he laughs, but junk is the correct term. He used old, nearly worn out equipment for the studio, including

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an RCA control console he bought from WLAY for $150. Paul Kelly, the radio station’s engineer, ripped out the console’s guts, rewired it, and painted it. An old Ampex and a couple of A7 speakers completed the equipping stage, giving Ivy what he felt he needed to do simple demo work. For sessions, Ivy regularly borrowed Fame’s rhythm section and used other local musicians as well, but like the musicians who played for him, Ivy was short on cash. He “traded out studio time with the musicians because he couldn’t pay them money,” says Johnson. Ivy’s use of the rhythm section in the beginning caused no problems “because Rick and Quin were friends,” Johnson says. And for the section members, the work, even though little cash ever passed hands, was welcomed because they were attempting to “build clientele as players and engineers. We were working other places [mainly playing the frat circuit in bands on weekends], but there weren’t a lot of places demanding all this [musical] talent,” Johnson laughs. That year, 1966, would be a milestone year for the Shoals, but when a life-shaping event occurs, everyone involved has her or his own story about what happened. It’s no different with the tale of how Leighton native Percy Sledge came to record “When a Man Loves a Woman” in Quinvy Studio. According to one account, Sledge sang out “Why did you leave me, baby?” one night at a fraternity dance, trying to cure his blues over a woman who’d ditched him. In this particular version, Ivy had been in the audience and asked Sledge to come down to the studio to cut a demo. In another account, Sledge asked his band’s bassist, Cameron Lewis, and organist, Andrew Wright, to play something in any key while he cried out his emotions to their tune. Sledge then cleaned up the song and took it to Ivy. In yet another story, Dan Penn, who was assisting in some of the engineering duties at Fame, sent Sledge to Ivy when Hall turned away the work. The story that

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seems truest to fact, however, is Ivy’s. Sledge, who had been traveling the frat circuit with the Esquires, had become a minor celebrity at the Colbert County Hospital where he worked as an orderly, everyone aware of his band and his vocal ability. “The second session I did was on Percy,” Ivy says with a grin. “Percy was all the time going up and down the [hospital] halls singing. He was kind of famous in the hospital. An old friend of mine, Leroy Wright, had been in the hospital with a broken back from a rodeo fall. Well, Percy came into my record store one day and Leroy was there and introduced him to me, and said, ‘By the way, did you know Percy is a singer?’ I turned to Percy and said, ‘I’d like to hear you sometime,’ and he said, ‘How about this afternoon?’ So he got his band and they gathered down there that afternoon. They hauled a Hammond B3 organ down on a pick-up, and he sang to me what would become ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ When I heard Percy deliver that song, it really hit me. We had to work on it a little [because] I felt the words needed some work, but the melody was there, the delivery was there.” After shaping the lyrics and refining the tune, Ivy bought a little Farfisa organ and borrowed Fame’s rhythm section for the session, with Marlin Greene taking Johnson’s place on guitar while Johnson engineered. Using two mono recorders with no EQ, “Percy went down on the original, live,” says Johnson, because they had only one chance to overdub since multiple overdubs would have created severe sound deterioration. “Quin’s control room didn’t sound good,” recalls Johnson. “We’d use one speaker [to monitor recording], but the way the room was built, the speaker had to be mounted on a side wall instead of being in front. I had to keep my head turned toward the speaker to listen while I fiddled with the controls in front of me trying to do the mix. It was kind of tough cutting in that studio because it didn’t sound as good as other

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studios, but the end product was pretty good when you played it back somewhere else. And, I remember now, there was a moment when we got the tape—a magic moment, a spontaneity, about the third take, when everything fell in, the right echo, the right voice, the right mix. I do recall that moment when I thought, ‘Wow! Listen to that.’ A chill-bump moment.” With the basic track down, Ivy and Johnson overdubbed additional background vocals, a guitar fill, and an accompaniment of horns which were played out of tune near the end. A couple of days later, Ivy played the tape for Hall, “and he loved it.” Hall asked him how he planned to handle the cut, and Ivy replied that he would be sending it to Atlantic. “And he said to me,” Ivy remembers, “‘Why don’t you let me send it to Jerry Wexler for you, and I think he’ll give a good listen to it that way.’” Back when Hall had been trucking Jimmy Hughes’s “Steal Away” around to different radio stations, he had met Joe Galkin, an exsong plugger from New York City who had come to Atlanta after his Queens bar went broke. Galkin called Jerry Wexler in Memphis and introduced him to Hall over the phone. Wexler told Hall to call him if he ever got anything really big. “Rick was really impressed” with “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Linda Hall says. “He called Jerry Wexler on a Sunday and got him out of the swimming pool and told him, ‘I’ve got a smash for you.’ Jerry said, ‘You better have to have gotten me out of the swimming pool on a Sunday.’ So he told Rick to send it, and, at first, he didn’t think it was a hit, but Rick kept on telling him it really was.” “Rick sent him the tape,” Ivy says, “and Wexler called me right away. He said, ‘What do you want for it?’ I told him a thousand bucks up front and eight percent.” Wexler immediately agreed, then said that he thought Hall should get a two percent finder’s fee, that he’d kick in one percent if Ivy would. Ivy’s remaining

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seven percent would be divided with three percent going to Sledge, two to Greene as co-producer and two to Ivy. As for the publishing, Wexler offered Ivy half, even though Ivy owned it fully at the time. Ivy accepted. “I didn’t make a whole lot of money out of it,” Ivy says. “But it wasn’t too far off from a standard deal of that day.” As for Johnson, “I made nothing, zero. Quin had come to me to engineer it because I had cut a couple of hits over at Fame, and he said, ‘If we get a deal and get it leased, we’ll pay you.’ He forgot. And I always heard that Rick made more out of the record than Quin did.” Hall not only got the two percent finder’s fee, but he also did well from the flip side because he owned the publishing rights to that song. But more important, he’d made a critical connection with Wexler and Atlantic, establishing himself as a man who could recognize a hit song. After coming to terms on the cut, Wexler decided that he wanted the overdub redone using the Memphis Horns to replace the original, out-of-tune horns. “Quin told me he was redoing the overdub, and it was like he was cutting me out,” says Johnson. When Atlantic released the record in February 1966, it debuted at number 100 on the Hot 100. Seven weeks later, it became Atlantic Records’ third number one single and a personal victory for Jimmy Johnson. “I’ll never forget when I was driving in [to the studio] and I heard it on the radio. You wouldn’t know which cut they were using until they got to where those out-of-tune horns were.” He laughs. “And there they were at the end, just as out of tune as hell; they had put out the wrong tape.” “After the record came out,” Ivy says, “Wexler called me and said, ‘Now, ain’t you glad we recut it?’ And I said, ‘Jerry, you used the original.’” “I think the out-of-tune horns kind of helped it in the long run,” Johnson says. “They gave it a mystique, a semi-nonprofes-

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sional kind of sound. It wasn’t so squeaky clean. It was a real triumphant moment for me in that car that day.” To the Muscle Shoals recording industry as a whole, Ivy had proved that Fame was no longer the only game in town, that hefty competition existed. “To be really truthful,” says Ivy, “Rick and I were not as close after my record as we were before. Some of that is my fault. You see, it started out that I was going to do some inconsequential business down here in this little spit-and-baling wire studio. Then all of a sudden I cut a big hit record. Suddenly, we are competing for musicians ’cause we’re trying to use the same set of musicians. I don’t know whose fault it was that we grew apart to a great extent. I don’t know what happened. We got so involved in doing our own thing that we just didn’t see each other anymore.” After the hit, “I tried my best for years to convince Atlantic Records that Percy was a country act,” Ivy says. “I’d been on the road with Percy, and the folks who came to his shows were not black; it was white country folks who came to see him.” By 1973, unable to recapture the success of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Ivy decided to move on. “I had not been able to get anything happening on another artist,” he says, even though one of the acts he tried to hit with had been Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band that would carry on a long love affair with the Shoals. “It’s my nature to get to wanting to do something else, so, in 1973, I sold out” to earn an MA degree from Ole Miss, then return to the Shoals to teach. For Rick Hall and Jimmy Johnson, “When a Man Loves a Woman” signaled a dramatic change in the business of Shoals music. First, it gave the area world exposure. Second, it brought in Jerry Wexler and Atlantic Records. Good times ahead. But with good times come bad.

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n the beginning, the relationship between Jerry Wexler and Rick Hall appeared as though it would be a good one, beneficial to Atlantic and to the Shoals. But after the initial sessions, the association deteriorated rapidly. When Percy Sledge’s song took off, Wexler (who had been recording his artists at Memphis’s Stax studios, but who was now having severe differences with Stax’s Jim Stewart) decided to give Hall’s Fame a try, and in the process, establish the Shoals as a major recording center for R&B. Wexler brought Wilson Pickett with him in early 1966 to cut what would be Pickett’s first Top 10 hit, “Land of 1,000 Dances.” The first sessions went better than anyone could have hoped for, with up to four songs a day being cut. Wexler’s reputation for a mover and shaper preceded him and held everyone—even Hall—in awe, but, in October, when Wexler returned with Pickett to record “Mustang Sally” and “Funky Broadway,” Hall’s initial gaga view of the man began to evaporate rapidly. Wexler tried to run things his way, making changes in the standard operation of Fame. First off, Wexler replaced the Fame rhythm section’s Junior Lowe with Memphis bassist Tommy Cogbill; Wexler even brought in his own engineer, Tommy Dowd. Hall began to see the man as an opportunist who took advantage of good situations, such as Fame and the Shoals, only make them over to satisfy his own special whims. Wexler, in turn, felt Hall was 50

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too much of a dictator in the control room. Two men, two huge egos, both used to being in control, calling the shots—one hell of an incident was brewing, one that would play havoc with those involved in Muscle Shoals music.

The Shake Up In January 1967, differences between Wexler and Hall would escalate in a matter of hours, from negligible to irreconcilable. Wexler arrived in Muscle Shoals with his engineer Tommy Dowd, singer Aretha Franklin and Aretha’s husband Ted White for a week’s work at Fame. Most of the people involved in the first session remember it as beginning with a sense of magic. They started with the basic tracks for “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”; and it seemed no one could do anything wrong on the session. By afternoon, the song was on tape. After the break, they would start putting down “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” At the break, someone produced a couple of bottles of whiskey. Ted White and Hall began passing one back and forth in the control room while the session players nursed their own. Recording began again, but the magic present with the recording of “I Never Loved a Man” had vanished. What happened next has always been a point of debate, but, according to one account, Ken Laxton, the session trumpet player, said something to Aretha that her husband did not appreciate. None of those involved seems to remember exactly what was said, but it was “more or less racial,” says Linda Hall. “You know how things get out of hand when there’s drinking going on. There were words exchanged,” which is to put it mildly. By the end of the session, White had loudly voiced his unhappiness over the fact that only white musicians were working on the session. Wexler, in turn, admonished Hall for not hiring the integrated horn section he’d requested. Hall had tried to

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get the section Wexler wanted but those musicians had already been booked elsewhere for the date. The trumpet player in Hall’s horn section then made another wisecrack to Franklin, and Hall immediately fired him, but it was too late. The session that began with magic had suddenly ended in turmoil. Hall, sensing Wexler might take his business elsewhere, wanted to smooth things over with White even though neither was in the mood or condition to talk rationally. Hall went to the hotel where White and Franklin were staying, and they let him into the room. But what had been planned as a mission of diplomacy and apology exploded into a shouting match between White and Hall with a few punches thrown to punctuate their feelings. When Hall reached the hotel lobby, he made a call to White, and, in drunken rage, warned him to get out of town. By morning, Ted White and Aretha Franklin were gone. Wexler flew back to New York that day, but not before telling Hall that their relationship had come to an end. Jimmy Johnson says that he and the other musicians were kept in the dark about events following the session. “They kept it away from us. We didn’t know what had happened. We didn’t know until months later, and then it was only bits and pieces. All we knew was that we were going in [to Fame] to record the second day and the studio doors were locked.” Wexler finished “Do Right Woman” in New York, leaked it to a few disc jockeys around the country, and discovered that he had a hit he couldn’t release because he didn’t have a song for the flip side. He telephoned Hall and asked if the producer could spare the rhythm section; he told Hall he needed them in New York to cut the King Curtis album King Curtis Plays the Great Memphis Hits. Hoping that cooperation would patch things up between him and Wexler, Hall sent up the section which now consisted of drummer Roger Hawkins, keyboardist Spooner Oldham and rhythm guitarist Jimmy Johnson. Neither Hall nor his musicians had any idea

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that Wexler had also scheduled an Aretha Franklin session following King Curtis, but Wexler wanted to finish the Franklin album that had been started in Muscle Shoals, using the rhythm section. Johnson believes that Wexler neglected to tell the section about the Aretha session because “they weren’t sure we’d perform and play the same way in the city. You know—we were Southern, laid back, suburban country boys. So Wexler and Atlantic engineer Tommy Dowd brought us up to do this instrumental album and they didn’t even want to waste one of their great artists on it, so they brought us up to see how we’d react. They liked us, of course, and it put away those false ideas.” Hall was furious when he learned of the Franklin sessions and immediately booked a session at Fame to get his rhythm section back home. That move—to limit the rhythm section’s outside work—would eventually prove to be a costly mistake.

Defining a Sound With Atlantic acts constantly in and out of the studio in 1966 before the Franklin fiasco, Muscle Shoals’ Fame quickly established itself as one of the region’s preferred recording studios, in part due to Hall’s growing image as an R&B hit-maker, in part due to the rhythm section’s ability to capture the “Memphis sound.” From Pensacola, Florida, independent producer and nightclub owner Papa Don Schroeder began bringing his artists up; with them, he would bring certain musicians he liked to work with, including keyboardist Barry Beckett. After completing a record at Fame, Schroeder would lease the cuts to Larry Uttal of Bell Records, Atlantic’s primary competitor. “Papa Don,” recalls Jimmy Johnson, “was a real speedy guy; you’d always feel like he took you. He’s like the guy who came up to [rhythm section drummer] Roger [Hawkins] while we were in New York and said, ‘Buddy, I need a quarter. If I had a quarter I could go and do something.’

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Roger reached into his pocket and when he handed the quarter to him, the guy opened his hand and about thirty or forty quarters lay right there. But Roger had already let go, and the guy steps back and goes ‘Thank you,’ like ‘Gotcha!’ For some reason, though, I liked Papa Don. He and I got on.” In 1966 when Schroeder took James and Bobby Purify to Fame (Beckett’s first trip up), the Fame rhythm section had already built up a considerable clientele, and Hall had not yet moved to make them exclusive to his studio. Among Fame’s library of demo songs by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, the Purifys found one they wanted to record. “I’m Your Puppet” would eventually top out at number six on the pop chart. (As for songwriter Penn, he was ready to break out of the Muscle Shoals scene, so he fled to Memphis where he hooked up with Chips Moman. Penn and Moman would cut more than a hundred Top 100 hits over the next four years at Moman’s American Studio.) In the spring of 1967 after Hall called his rhythm section back from the Franklin sessions in New York, David Hood, formerly with a local band called the Mystics, joined the section on bass, and keyboardist Oldham, like Penn, left for Memphis looking for more than the Shoals could offer. Already on good working terms with Beckett from the Schroeder sessions, and knowing that the keyboardist, a Birmingham native, was eager to come to Muscle Shoals to stay, the section asked him to take over in Oldham’s place. With the addition of Beckett, the rhythm section that would define the “Muscle Shoals sound” had finally come together, but the sound that would distinguish them and the area would take the four men about a year to refine. (Today, people in and out of the music industry often refer to the old Muscle Shoals sound in mystical terms, but they have a hard time explaining what made it so special. Most, like Linda Hall, say it was “a funky sound, different.” Rick Hall described it to a Newsweek reporter in

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1969 as “funky, hard, gutty, down to earth. It’s warm and heartfelt with a dance beat. No gimmicks or sound tricks.” Whatever it was, it became a musical magnet, drawing scores of artists and producers to the Shoals.) Over the next two years, though he never returned to Fame or asked Hall for help, Wexler called on the rhythm section several times for session work. The section also continued doing occasional sessions for Quinvy Studio as well as the sessions for Rick Hall. “Rick, by the way,” recalls Johnson, “wasn’t for us doing [other sessions]. He didn’t just come out and demand that we not go, but what he would do was try to book stuff to block us from going. There was a problem. If we booked someone, we went. At that time, we weren’t exclusive to anybody even though we did most of our work at Rick’s studio.” In 1969, however, “He tried to tie us up completely,” and that’s when the four musicians decided, with some hesitancy, that it was time to go out on their own. Back in 1967, Jimmy Johnson had helped businessman Fred Bevis turn an old Jackson Highway casket warehouse, located across the street from a cemetery, into a four-track recording studio, but Bevis hadn’t made much of a go of it. Bevis, in the meantime, kept telling the section members that they should buy his studio, go into business for themselves. When Roger Hawkins called Jimmy Johnson one night to talk over the idea, the ball began to roll. And even though the section did not leave Fame for two years after the Franklin debacle, Hall still blames Wexler for “stealing” his rhythm section. “Rick was negotiating a deal with Capitol Records to include the rhythm section as part of the production,” recalls Linda Hall. “Wexler had gotten wind of it. We’d gone to the Virgin Islands for an Atlantic Records seminar. Coming home, Rick got word that something was going on, so Rick stopped in Miami,” where Wexler now resided and worked, “to meet with Wexler. He sent

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myself and the children on home. When he got back, he said something bad was going down. Evidently, Wexler had put up the money or financed [the section] to go out on their own. There were some real hard feelings at first between Rick and the section because these boys were teenagers when they came here, and they left him with nobody, and sent word back that they were going to put him out of business. So there were hard feelings for six or seven years.” Jimmy Johnson remembers it a little differently: “A lot of people maybe think Wexler coerced us, but we called him and informed him that we had just bought a studio in town, and we let him know about Rick’s plan to close the door to all outside business, and that we’d still be there for him [Wexler] if he wanted us, which he did. At the time we were cutting about three weeks a month for outside business and a week or less a month for Rick. We had a built-in clientele, four or five record labels coming to us. Rick was going with the Capitol deal, so we didn’t really take anything from him. He was going to operation of a closed shop, and we didn’t want to. We took the business he shut his door to, so we didn’t really take away his business. We took our business that he was fixing to cut off. He had approached us to work exclusively for him and nobody else. Just the fact that we left, he felt like we deserted him. At the time, he was basically by himself, and we were going to be exclusive to ourselves, so I can see why we might have offended him, but on the other hand I can see why we wanted to get ahead, because it was very well certain we weren’t going to be a part of his company. I will say this: if he had made room for us with a little piece of stock for each of us, we probably would’ve never left. It was talked about in a roundabout way, but I think he didn’t want any partners; we could’ve been gotten with just a very little stock. We felt like [leaving Fame] was our only chance to do something for ourselves and not just be players. We

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had aspirations of being publishers and producers too.” Johnson set up financing with Atlantic through Wexler (to be paid off in studio time) for upgrading the Jackson Highway studio to eight-track; Wexler, in turn, guaranteed the group at least eighteen months of work. The following year, the group upgraded the studio to sixteen-track with another loan from Atlantic. After Wexler began to concentrate Atlantic’s R&B work in Miami, he tried to convince the rhythm section to move down as well, but they refused, and the business they had been getting from Atlantic eventually dried up. The day Johnson and the other section members told Hall they were going out on their own, Hall was signing a reported milliondollar contract with Capitol to produce artists on Fame’s own record label. Hall offered each of the section members $10,000 a year to become Fame’s exclusive band, but they had made nearly double that the year before and could not justify signing for Hall’s offer. “He’d been up all night,” remembers Johnson, “but I thought he reacted good under the circumstances. He did tell us, ‘I would do the same thing, but you’ll never make it.’ And he had a right to say that because, before we did that, there had never been, to my knowledge, a group of musicians that could get together to even play a peewee football game—they like playing [music] together, but they don’t do a lot of business together. It’s really a unique thing that we got the studio and had a successful thing. First off, we didn’t have any animosity; Rick had some, and we understand why he did. But you can only be angry for a while; he didn’t carry it with him forever. He’s the guy that got me into the business. I have a lot of respect for him and care about him. It was tough to leave him, but if I wanted to get ahead, I had to leave. We didn’t take anything from Rick, no business. He hired all top players to replace us. We just had something magic when we played together that set us apart.”

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At Fame, Hall found himself in a déjà vu situation, with no musicians and a lot of work coming his way. Again he had to assemble a workable rhythm section, recruiting veteran Fame man Junior Lowe on guitar, songwriter Jesse Boyce on bass, Freeman Brown on drums and Clayton Ivey on keyboards. He also organized a horn section, later dubbed the Muscle Shoals Horns, which would eventually distinguish itself as a salable act, not just a back-up section. Hall also brought in a friend, Al Cartee, as studio manager and engineer. “There was always a different set of musicians trying to get started,” Linda Hall says. “They weren’t as good as the ones Rick used all the time, but he just called these guys in and developed his new rhythm section. He has done this at least four or five times. A studio musician has to be a very motivated, creative type person. A road musician most of the time just cops what somebody else has done. A studio musician has to come up with the licks.” In September 1969, Newsweek pegged Muscle Shoals as a town trying to be to rhythm and blues what Nashville was to country music. Whatever the Shoals music industry had been shooting for, the departure of the rhythm section from Fame signaled more than the birth of another Shoals recording studio. “When the decade ends,” Linda says matter-of-factly, “the music changes.”

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ay Johnson, Jimmy’s father, likes to tell this story: “One day Jimmy came in and said I’d like for you to show me some chords. I showed him all the chords I knew, and, in about a week, he could show me chords. He was thirteen, fourteen.” Jimmy Johnson’s interest in music had begun early on in school where he played trumpet in band, which he promptly quit his first year of high school when he joined the football team. His guitar playing continued, however, part of his interest arising from the stir his uncle Dexter created in the neighborhood with the Shoals’ first studio. After all, the street in front of Dexter’s house was sometimes clogged with people wanting to hear the music being made in the garage studio. “Jimmy was interested in records,” Dexter recalls, “wanting to learn all he could about them,” which is why Jimmy helped his uncle from time to time, setting up mikes or assisting in the control booth. “He’d just let me operate the recorder which I enjoyed doing,” Jimmy says. “It gave him another arm and hand. He was usually playing” with whatever artist came to the studio to make a demo. After his dad showed him a few basic chords, Jimmy got his hands on several chord books and taught himself how to play, but his best lessons came from watching other musicians. “Jimmy went to see the Keynotes [a local band] a lot,” Ray says, “and he would pick up all he could. One night, their guitar player was out sick, and they used Jimmy. He came in and laid ten dollars on the 59

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table, and I said, ‘Where’d you get that, Jimmy?’ And he said, ‘I made that tonight playing.’ And he said, ‘Someday, I’m going to make a lot of money with this.’ I said, ‘Jimmy, I thought that too. I played guitar all them years. Me and Dexter played on radio programs, and I wound up working at Reynolds. And he said, ‘Wait and see. Someday, I’m going to make some money with this.’” Always looking more like a football player than a musician, Jimmy continued his guitar playing throughout high school, but despite what he told his father the night he earned ten bucks, he wasn’t sure music would be his career. “I was an athlete,” Jimmy says, “and I had thoughts about being a professional baseball or football player. I made my mind up really out of high school. I had about five colleges looking at me to play football for them. At the time, I was just peaking as a guitar player. I was really making money. I was able to make as much as my dad [who worked as a crane operator at Reynolds Aluminum] made all week just for playing two nights on the weekend. And that was kind of impressive for a guy in high school, playing at the universities on Friday and Saturday nights—and even during football season, I’d try to play a sock hop after the game,” usually leaving before the coaches finished with their players for the night. Johnson winks and grins. “The coaches liked that a lot. You can imagine how they ate that up. But I was pretty spirited and I didn’t mind. They would try to hurt me on Monday, but they never could.” He laughs again. “So they finally gave up. “Anyway, I made my decision then. I felt like, physically, I had one problem. I always felt like my legs were too small. So I said, ‘Well, that won’t affect me in music.’ You need stumps to go into college ball and all the way up. I could’ve made it in a [University of North Alabama] type school, but if I couldn’t do the big one, I said, ‘Well . . . ’” He shrugs. “And I think it was just a feeling too

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that I should stay in music, but I didn’t know where it was going to lead me. I wasn’t really sure. But it was something I loved so much that it just took over. And I didn’t really have a lot of big plans. All I ever really wanted to do was own a studio. So Roger Hawkins, who was in the band [Del Rays] with me, and I built a lot of studios on the return trips from the universities after we’d play. I can’t tell you how many studios we built on the drives back. Then one day, we were partners in a studio.” After leaving Fame, the rhythm section’s first task was to name their studio, to give the band an identity. “It’s just geographic,” Johnson says. “We just named it what we were. We were in a circle inside the office trying to figure out what we were going to name the company—I mean, we were coming up with all these names. We had a big long pine tree sitting out in the parking lot, and Barry said, ‘Long Pine Studio.’ Naw . . . ” He shakes his head. “You know how you do. So David Hood said, ‘Why don’t we call it Muscle Shoals Sound?’ And everybody laughed. It sounded funny as hell. We laughed because the ‘Memphis sound’ was what we’d been associated with. Then we got to talking later on and said, ‘That’s what we are.’ And Rick always called his the ‘Fame sound.’ He never used Muscle Shoals as a geographic thing; we did that. We put Muscle Shoals on the map when we named our studio. The identifying sound came with us. After we thought about it, we said,‘Let’s just say what we are.’ And now, people think it’s great. They think about [the Muscle Shoals sound] like we thought about Memphis. It’s just like the name of a hit artist. If I told you that New Kids on the Block was going to be the biggest group to come out in five years, you would laugh, but they are, and what kind of name is that? Is that a great name? But it’s a money name now. Once the Muscle Shoals Sound [studio] became successful, and people heard about it, then it was okay we were called the Muscle Shoals Sound. That’s what we were, this raw, funky sound

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on the very edge of tightness and looseness. It was just a feeling there. And if you listen to those songs” the rhythm section established its name with, songs like “Take a Letter, Maria,” “they make you feel good. And if you heard one come on the radio, you’d turn it up. It’s just something we always had from the early days, like ‘Slip Away,’ ‘Tell Mama,’ all those great old hits we did with Rick.” The rhythm section was later tagged with the nickname Swampers and immortalized in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Sweet Home Alabama.” Despite later fame, the early days of Muscle Shoals Sound weren’t exceptionally great days. The first artist Atlantic sent to the studio was Cher. And even though Cher was impressed enough with the rhythm section’s ability to name the resulting album 3614 Jackson Highway, the Muscle Shoals Sound Recording Studio’s address, the album did not sell well. In fact, it wasn’t until late 1969, more than six months after operations geared up, that the studio got its first hit, when R. B. Greaves cut an R&B flavored pop tune called “Take a Letter, Maria.” The studio followed it with Greaves’s “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me.” And when the Rolling Stones flew into Muscle Shoals in December 1969 during the Greaves sessions, the Muscle Shoals Sound studio finally established a firm reputation for professional and musical know-how. “The Stones came here when they were in the process of signing with Atlantic to do the American and Canadian distribution of their records,” recalls Johnson. “They were on tour after Brian Jones’s death” when the group decided to take time out to record “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar” and “You Gotta Move.” “I was engineer on the date,” says Johnson. “We cut three days and cut three songs. We’d record starting at six o’clock at night,” which meant “double sessions because I was playing on R. B. Greaves’s sessions in the daytime, starting at ten in the morning, then I’d

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take a two-minute break and start the Rolling Stones sessions and go until we got through. Even in the books that were written about it—they had authors that were on the tour, and they couldn’t understand why I wasn’t on drugs. And I wasn’t! They were saying that it was amazing I could keep going.” He laughs heartily. “I was just shoveling food in. That’s what keeps me going. And I was smoking a lot of cigarettes and drinking a lot of coffee. By the way, I don’t drink coffee or smoke anymore, but can you imagine a carton every two days?” As for the sessions, “Jimmy Miller, their producer, for some reason didn’t come,” says Johnson. “They don’t know why to this day. But I wasn’t the producer on the record. If anybody was, it was Jagger, but they looked to me as if I was. If Jimmy Miller had been there, he wouldn’t have done any more than I did. “So they would rehearse in the studio, didn’t even have the songs totally written. Jagger might have the lyrics there, but he didn’t have all the arrangements or anything, just an idea. Great genius, this guy Jagger. They would come in, and for the first two hours, it was terrible—it was horrible! But something would start happening about hour three or four, and they would start coming together, and you would feel it. And then by the time it would peak, that’s when I had to do my job. I had to have the sounds right, make sure everybody sounded right, but I could do that while they were running it down, while they were horrible. But when that thing would start to come together, it was unbelievable. “I remember on ‘Brown Sugar,’” which would be called everything from racist to sexist to pornographic, “it was like that whole building almost flew; it was just like it took off because there was that sound, that Keith Richards guitar, man—I mean, everything was there, and there was that Jagger. An unbelievable moment. And they would know it would be getting close, but even when you play it, it sometimes may feel a little awkward, but in the

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control room, you’d know. So they would look to me after each cut. I didn’t even tell them when I started rolling; I’d just start rolling the tape when they would start getting there. If you missed it, it’d be gone. I had to have that tape rolling at the exact moment, right.” “They’d be about just two takes in and they’d all get up there and look at me, and I’d say, ‘Let’s do one more,’ and they’d get through, and they’d say, ‘Is that it?’ And I’d say, ‘That’s it. Come on in.’ I was making the decisions, and they’d come [into the control room], and they’d love it. And they had people filming there, doing the documentary Gimme Shelter. And everybody’s in there, and it’s a tiny control room, and I’m blowing the speakers out of the cabinets. So it’s a lot of pressure. It’s eight-track, which ain’t that many, so I throw this little mix together, and the only thing they added later was the saxophone and the background vocals, and that was the only thing they added. In Richards’s opinion, and most of the band’s, he said [“Brown Sugar”] was the best single they ever made.” “I got a call from one of their top engineers out of England about three or four months after that. And I had done this little old seven-and-a-half rough right before they got on the plane and left town. You know how you’ll just throw up something and it’ll fall in? So then he called me, said, ‘Jimmy Johnson, I want you to know something. It took me four weeks to even get close to your little mix.’ Well, I’m real proud to hear that, you know, that he took the time to call me and tell he still didn’t beat it. That made me feel good.” In the years to come, the Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section would produce countless magic moments as their reputation grew and artists made their way south. “We never one time advertised,” says Johnson. “The chart was our advertisement. At times, we’ve had ten percent of the Hot 100.” The artists who helped promote

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that word-of-mouth and Hot 100 chart advertising in the early days included Lulu, Herbie Mann, Joe Cocker, J.J. Cale, Boz Scaggs, Leon Russell, the Staple Singers, and Bob Seger. When Traffic came to them in 1972 for help on the group’s Shootout at the Fantasy Factory and On the Road albums, the Sound expanded its expertise by getting a taste of “big time” touring as David Hood and Roger Hawkins joined that year’s Traffic lineup; the following year’s tour also included Beckett. As for Johnson, “I mixed their [concert] sound two years—the European tour and two American tours. That was a lot of fun. That really broke us into the big time concert business right.” “I remember the first night. They just threw me in like they’d throw somebody in a well, swim or sink. And we were doing Yale University, the old gymnasium. It was something. It was just so scary because I had never mixed a live performance before. And this console was stacked up; I’ve never seen one like it since.” But Johnson handled the task to everyone’s satisfaction. “I was geared for mixing live because I was a mono mixer when I started recording,” back on cuts like “Sweet Soul Music,” “Road Runner” and “When a Man Loves a Woman.” “People who start recording today with all this multi-track stuff, they’re not really geared for mono.” Off the road and back in the studio, the rhythm section members continued to turn their talent into gold. When Paul Simon scheduled three days at Muscle Shoals Sound to cut the basic track on one song, he had no clear idea of the section’s capabilities. Simon had liked the Staple Singers’ 1972 release “I’ll Take You There,” produced with the Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section; and desiring a similar sound for one of the songs to be included on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, he decided to come to Muscle Shoals. The rhythm section members, admittedly apprehensive and hoping to please their new client, immersed themselves in Paul Simon’s music, listening to all of his albums,

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fully familiarizing themselves with his style. Simon booked the studio for three days with plans to cut only “Take Me to the Mardi Gras.” The artist gave the musicians the chord sheet, they ran through it once, twice, then cut the song within two hours on the first day. The Sound’s proficiency stunned Simon; he still had two days booked. The rhythm section asked him if he had other songs, if he’d like to give them a shot since he’d already bought the studio time. Before he left Muscle Shoals, Simon and the rhythm section had cut “Kodachrome,” “St. Judy’s Comet,” and “One Man’s Ceiling, Another Man’s Floor.” The rest of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon was later mixed at the studio. As a result, a new crop of artists came flowing through, taking the rhythm section further and further away from its R&B reputation of the 1960s. In 1972, Muscle Shoals Sound branched into other areas of recording, with Beckett and Hawkins directing the production of “Starting All Over Again” by Mel & Tim. But they were in far more demand for their musicianship—at times doing three sessions a day, six and seven days a week. And, unlike counterparts in other recording areas of the country who adhered strictly to the standard union limit of three hours per session, the rhythm section would work until the client artist had gotten on tape exactly what he or she wanted—as long as the artist didn’t give the musicians a hard time. Muscle Shoals Sound had a lot of things working for it, its greatest asset being musical adaptability, an ability to complement the style of any artist, the rhythm section’s own style never overshadowing. It seemed that everything they worked on was bound for gold. And at Fame as well, music continued to turn to gold. Muscle Shoals seemed musically infallible. But the 1970s would prove a volatile period as the area’s music industry would rise to international prominence only to begin a slow slip into hard times by decade’s end.

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T

here was a lot of competition and jealousy between the studios back then,” recalls Buddy Draper, president of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce in 1971 and 1972 when Fame and Muscle Shoals Sound were turning wax into gold. The jealousy that Draper cites can be credited, in part at least, for the phenomenal success the Shoals music industry experienced during the 1970s. While Muscle Shoals Sound concentrated heavily in rock ’n’ roll, Rick Hall turned his attention to pop music, having missed his chance at rock when he failed to sign one of the genre’s future legends. In late 1968, Hall had used Florida guitarist Duane Allman on a Wilson Pickett session. Although the producer liked the guitarist’s ability well enough to use him regularly on sessions work, Hall dismissed Allman as an artist ahead of his time—in other words, unmarketable. After the Allman Brothers Band proved themselves later on, Hall probably wished he’d given Allman more consideration when he’d had the chance, but Hall has never been a person to cry over missed opportunities. There are always other artists, other chances. “In late 1970,” recalls Linda Hall, “Rick was in L.A., and Mike Curb approached him about producing some young kids that had been on the Andy Williams Show.” A popular brother act called the Osmonds had been performing regularly on Williams’s weekly television variety show from December 1962 until the show ended 67

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in 1967, but the five brothers, despite their television following, had never scored a hit record. The Osmonds had been recording for Williams’s Barnaby label and for MCA’s Uni Records before Mike Curb signed them to MGM, sensing that the brothers could be as big as the Jacksons, another five-brother act that had been dominating the charts with four consecutive number one singles, including “I’ll Be There.” Hall’s decision to produce the Osmonds would signal his departure from the rhythm and blues music that had made Muscle Shoals a recognizable name in certain music circles during the 1960s. But Hall wasn’t worried so much with past reputation as he was with future success, the next hit. And from the moment Curb approached him about the Osmonds, Hall had a good feeling. George Jackson, one of Fame’s many writers, had written a song that Hall felt certain could prove to be the Osmonds’ ticket to stardom. “One Bad Apple” would certainly be a hit, but Hall could have never anticipated just how big a hit it would be. Debuting January 2, 1971, at number seventy-eight on the Hot 100, “One Bad Apple” went to number one six weeks later and stayed there for five consecutive weeks. The single racked up a phenomenal 11 million sales that year, proving that Hall’s talent for making hits extended far beyond the R&B genre he’d been working in. Hall went on to produce the group’s next hit, “Yo Yo,” and two albums, The Osmonds and Homemade, which also went gold. Times were a lot different now than in the early days when he ran his operations in the old tobacco warehouse. But despite the fact that he no longer had to scrap for a living, Hall refused to slow down. He continued to work with the same relentless fervor that had caused Billy Sherrill and Tom Stafford to kick him out of the first Fame. And for his labors that year, some of the recognition he had been chasing since digging his heels in at Muscle Shoals finally

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came when Billboard named him 1971’s Producer of the Year. “It just seemed like everything he touched turned to gold around that time,” Linda says. And though his story differs from that of the Osmonds, Mac Davis also found it a profitable time to be associated with Hall and Fame. In the early 1960s, Davis first came to Muscle Shoals with Atlanta’s Bill Lowery to record a few demos at Fame. While there, he developed a friendship with Hall. But after nothing materialized immediately for Davis, he left performing to become a regional promotion man for Vee Jay Records, where he again became associated with Hall when Vee Jay distributed “Steal Away.” Davis’s interest in songwriting grew steadily during his tenure as a promotion man, and he eventually wrote hits for Bobby Goldsboro (“Honey”), Kenny Rogers (“Lady”) and Elvis Presley (“Suspicious Minds”). When Davis decided to try his hand at recording once again, it was at Fame he chose to do it. And Hall immediately put the artist’s songwriting ability to test. “Rick told him, ‘Write me a song with a hook,’” says Linda, a song with a catchy, repeating phrase oriented to single release. Davis went upstairs at the Fame studio and came down later that same day with nothing more than a phrase and a melody line—and the hook, “baby, don’t get hooked on me.” Davis worked the rest of the day with the Fame rhythm section to come up with a skeleton chord progression, then he finished the song overnight. By the end of the following day, the song was on tape. “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me” charted number one in September 1972, leading Hall and Davis to produce five albums together over the next five years.

A Failed Celebration Until the founding of Muscle Shoals Sound Recording Studio, the Shoals recording industry had revolved strictly around Fame, even

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though Quinvy Studio had produced “When a Man Loves a Woman.” After Muscle Shoals Sound opened for business, though, the face of the Muscle Shoals recording industry began to change rapidly with other studios springing up constantly in the early 1970s. In 1971, Hall’s third rhythm section lost keyboardist Clayton Ivey when he joined with Terry Woodford—a former songwriter for Fame who had already left to run Muscle Shoals Sound’s publishing company—to form Wishbone recording studio and production company. In 1972, the rest of the third rhythm section banned together to form Widget Studio, which, during its opening week, cut the Sailcats’ “Motorcycle Mama.” What had been primarily a one-studio industry had suddenly become a thriving music city, yet the community at large remained oblivious to the studios and the artists recording there, thus publicity at home and across the country was next to nothing. “I was the president of the chamber of commerce,” Draper recalls, “when Jimmy Johnson, James Joiner, Terry Woodford, and some others came to me with the idea that we should get a little outside publicity for our area here. They were proposing we do a Muscle Shoals celebration of music. I had come here from Nashville, Tennessee, and, as a youngster, I used to be a gofer for the Grand Ole Opry. I saw what had happened in Nashville and felt like we could do something pretty well here too. But, right off the bat from the time they saw me at the chamber of commerce, I realized this was a hard group to put together because they were all going their separate ways. Jealousy. It’s hard to understand how much jealousy was involved in those days among the studios. At times, they wouldn’t even talk to each other. They were afraid someone was going to steal something. It was pretty well disorganized.” Despite the problems, Draper says, the studio owners finally

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organized well enough to begin work on the first and only Muscle Shoals Music Celebration. “We thought, ‘Let’s bring the community together,’” even though the four cities have never been much for cooperation, according to Draper. “We’ve got an area here where the communities don’t get along. Muscle Shoals will not annex with Sheffield and Tuscumbia [even though] that’s the answer for the big problems around here, but they just won’t do it. And Florence—we [Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, Tuscumbia] are bastards to them. So, I said, ‘Well, heck, I’m the president of the chamber of commerce. What we need to do is bring them together,’” and he thought the music celebration would be just the event to do the job. “We’d have a parade go through all four towns, so we started making our plans. Wayne Newton was recording at Fame at that time, and we made arrangements for Wayne to give a concert. “Terry Woodford went to see the people at Muscle Shoals High School first, to see if we could use their football field, and the coach said, ‘I’m not going to have a bunch of hippies ruining my football field.’ And when we decided to go ahead and have the parade, I contacted all the four mayors to ride in it, but each of them would have absolutely no part in it.” Draper refused to be deterred, however. He decided to try once again, certain that he could convince at least one of those mayors, the one that owed him a favor, to help out. “As president of the [First Colbert National Bank], I had supported the mayor of Sheffield [Buddy Walden] financially through our bank. I went to him, and I said, ‘We have a problem. I need to get you to ride in that parade. I can’t get a single mayor to ride in it. It’s going to fall flat on its face if we don’t have some dignitaries in it.’ He looked me straight in the eye, and he said,‘Buddy, I appreciate all the things you did for me when I ran, and I say to you, face to face, if it weren’t for you, I don’t think I

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would have been elected, but I’m not about to ride in that parade. I would be committing political suicide.’ I told him, ‘Buddy, you’re going to ride in that parade ’cause you owe me this. If you don’t, I’ll do everything I can to see that you never go into office again.’ But he wouldn’t ride, and that’s the reason I ran for mayor of Sheffield and got elected because I couldn’t find anyone else to run when election time came. “We went ahead and had that celebration. We went on and had the concert, even though Wayne Newton didn’t show” due to scheduling conflicts, Draper says. “We had to pay the Muscle Shoals Police Department $2,000 for protection, and the reason that happened was because we had a reporter here who wrote the editorials. And someone got the rumor out that we were going to have another Woodstock here, and he put it in his editorial. He said if there was anything this community needed, it was not to have another Woodstock here with all the hippies in town. And that’s why the Muscle Shoals Police Department thought there’d be an underground, hippie thing here.” He laughs, shakes his head in wonder. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

The Muscle Shoals Music Association Despite the failure of the music celebration, Hall and the other studio owners realized that cooperation between them had to be maintained. Competition, jealousy—it was getting out of hand. And as the number of recording studios continued to grow, the jealousy fostered an atmosphere of suspicion and resentment. As Hall told Cash Box in 1977: “It was dog eat dog. I was out to get them, and they were out to get me.” In 1974, several events conspired to move the studio owners more toward cooperation. At Fame, Hall was seeing the constant flow of people from his studio—from engineers to musicians— into studios of their own. In 1974, even songwriter Al Cartee, who

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had been Hall’s engineer since the Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section’s departure from Fame, opened Music Mill, a production studio that concentrated on country music. Music Mill’s first session in November 1975 resulted in its first hit, Narvel Felt’s award winning “Reconsider Me.” With such a growing diversity of hit-producing studios and artists, studio owners finally convinced each other that they had little choice but to cooperate. After Cartee left, Hall fired his fifth rhythm section. Since the musicians were playing only a few sessions at Fame each month, he could not justify keeping them on draw. Riding high on a Grammy nomination for 1974’s Record Producer of the Year, Hall made his biggest show for the unity of local music studios when he called in the Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section to participate in several Fame projects—the first time the musicians and Hall had worked together since 1969. By 1975, the studios had successfully established the Muscle Shoals Music Association (MSMA), with Hall serving as its first president. Buddy Draper, because of his past support of the Shoals music industry, was hired as MSMA’s executive director. The former banker, as Sheffield mayor, had already helped begin a turnaround in community attitude toward the industry, promoting the studios behind the scenes. But it wasn’t until the formation of the MSMA that community acceptance became a fact, an accomplishment that most in the industry say began with “the bankers” who perceived the potential economic benefits of a strong music industry. “Once the bankers realized that [the studios and musicians] brought money in,” says Draper, “it was accepted.” “We had to win over the bankers first,” agrees Jimmy Johnson. “From them, it spread out to the lawyers and the rest of the community. [They said], ‘These guys have a legitimate business, bringing bucks into the area—and, most of all, they’re making this

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area known.’ The community started accepting us economically when [they saw] these musicians making more money than anyone in town—buying the biggest cars, buying the biggest houses, having the biggest divorces. Economically—that’s where the acceptance came.” With the stated goal of promoting the Shoals music industry “to the world” and not only to the local community, the MSMA began a series of annual seminar picnics that brought record executives in primarily from Nashville, and that, some say, was the beginning of the Shoals music industry’s biggest problems. They charge that the Nashville people used the annual get-togethers simply to siphon off Muscle Shoals talent. “I thought bringing recording people from here and recording people from there together would be something wonderful,” says Draper. “And yet, one of the first things I heard from here was, ‘We don’t need to have any more of these [seminars]. Nashville’s just using us to have a big party.’ That, coming from someone influential, can put a damper on things. Were it not for Nashville, our seminars would not have been successful.” In 1977, MSMA’s most lasting achievement came when senator Bill King introduced into the Alabama State Legislature a bill the organization had lobbied hard for. The bill passed, establishing the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, to be funded by the State with a staff independent of the MSMA. The Hall of Fame, which is located in the Shoals, will eventually house a Southern music research library and a performance auditorium. A museum, the Hall of Fame’s first phase, opened in July 1990. Before Draper vacated the director’s MSMA seat in 1980, interest in the organization had already begun to wane, a sickness brought on by the deterioration of cooperation between studios. The same jealousy and suspicion that had led to its formation, now underscored by a national economic recession, ripped it apart.

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After Draper’s departure, the association began a rapid decline from which it never recovered. By late 1984, the MSMA had essentially died, a reflection of bad times for what had once been a thriving Shoals industry.

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Growth and Turbulence

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uring the early 1970s, competition among studios was a fact of life, but if it was anything more for Rick Hall, it was impetus to press on, to continue his same level of hit production that he’d come to be known for. As a result of his success with the Osmonds, a trail of stars flickered through his studio—Bobby Gentry, Tom Jones, Wayne Newton, Little Richard, to name only a few. But one of the biggest hits Hall ever produced would prove his most controversial—not because of what happened in the studio, as was the case with Aretha Franklin, but because of the song’s expressed sentiments. While Hall was still writing and plugging his own songs to James Joiner in the late 1950s, Paul Anka was establishing himself by twice singing his way to number one on the charts with “Diana” in 1957 and “Lonely Boy” in 1959. Anka wouldn’t have another chart topper until 1974, however, when he and Odia Coates would team up to sing a song he wrote for his wife. The song would be included on the album Anka, a project that the artist chose Rick Hall to produce. When controversy as well as popularity greeted the single “(You’re) Having My Baby,” neither Anka nor Hall was surprised. Before general release, Anka had tested the song and found that some people would object to the way Anka’s song apparently portrayed women as subservient to men. In fact, the National Organization of Women awarded Anka one of their annual “Keep 76

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Her in Her Place” awards. Claiming that the song purported nothing but the rapture of a man caught up in the coming birth of his child, Anka finally acquiesced to criticism during the tour that followed the record’s chart run and changed the lyrics from “(You’re) Having My Baby” to “(You’re) Having Our Baby.” Anka’s duet partner, Odia Coates, later signed with Hall who leased her recordings to United Artists, which was also Anka’s label at the time. Hall also produced Anka’s later album, Times of Your Life, the title song based on the Kodak commercial. The single charted number seven. By the mid-1970s, Hall was finally forced to slow his pace. For nearly two decades, he had been pushing himself and Fame relentlessly, working long days, long nights, long weekends. “He’s a perfectionist,” says Linda Hall. “Everything he does has to be perfect. He doesn’t believe in giving a hundred percent, but a hundred and fifty percent. If the next guy’s working eight hours, he has to work twelve.” Recalling the early days of Hall’s attempts to establish Fame, Linda says the hardest thing was “doing without a husband for so many years. I used to beg him to go back to work at Reynolds. Sometimes the boys wouldn’t see their dad from Sunday to Saturday. In the early days, it was real hard financially, but he banged away at getting it done. We would have rifts from time to time, but my whole life was built around making him happy. I did my homemaker things when he was working, and when he was home, I had nothing to do but devote my time to him. I could never understand wives who griped about their husbands watching football on television because I used to pray for Alabama to play on television because I knew he’d be home to watch. I knew in my heart that if he went to work at Reynolds, we’d be miserable.” In 1977, however, the long hours caught up with Hall, and, says Linda, “he began to have health problems—an inflamed

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pancreas. It was due from stress and overwork; he was doing thirteen albums a year, and that meant very little sleep and never eating correctly. So he decided he was going to slow down. He got out of his deal with United Artists,” which included Paul Anka, “and he just walked in and told them, ‘I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want the pressure that goes along with it. You can have Paul Anka.’ They worked it all out; it was a mutual, peaceful separation. “He thought he was ready to retire. We had a cattle ranch about ten miles out of town, and he wanted to build a house on it. He quit working except doing one album a year to build our house.” And Hall was satisfied during the two years it took to complete the family home. Afterward, though, he began to rethink the retirement, and decided that he’d been too hasty, that he wasn’t ready to quit after all. But when he returned full-time to recording, he discovered that the industry he’d left wasn’t the one he came back to, that “all of his friends who were in the pop field [when he left] were no longer there,” says Linda. “Everything had changed.” Rick Hall, though, wasn’t the only one trying to cope with the changes. The entire Muscle Shoals music industry was in a state of flux.

That Old Time Rock and Roll Throughout the 1970s, it seemed that the stream of rock artists coming to Muscle Shoals Sound to record would never run dry. The rhythm section had become one of the most respected groups of studio musicians in the country, but in their own state, the section’s notoriety didn’t go much further than the threshold of the studio’s front door. “We were Alabama’s best kept secret,” says Jimmy Johnson. “But we didn’t go out to get publicity. That wasn’t our goal. All we wanted to do was play in that studio. We played three sessions a day, six days a week. We cut thirty, forty albums a year. Had we been on drugs, we couldn’t have kept up

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our pace.” He pats his stomach and laughs. “We did get fat! What can I say?” “Of course, there were people from the fundamental churches who would drive by and say, ‘They’re having orgies in there.’ When we first opened the studio, the Sheffield police came by. It was Sunday night, the back door was open, and the music was blaring out. A church was a hundred yards away, but the service was over. We were hammering, putting baffles in. The police pulled in and wanted to see our dance permit. We said, ‘There’s no dancing.’ They had to go in and see for themselves. But we won their respect.” After the general community accepted the music industry years later, the police department incorporated into its patrol unit insignia, “Hit Recording Capital of the World,” the presumptuous slogan adopted by Muscle Shoals in the mid1970s. Artists traveling South to Muscle Shoals in the 1970s came not only for the musical and production expertise found there, but also for the area itself. It was a place where they could come without much worry of being accosted by fanatical admirers. And they were always pampered well. Take Muscle Shoals Sound, for example: until residents voted in 1982 to make the counties wet, a gofer made trips to Tennessee and neighboring counties to ensure that enough beer and liquor was always on hand for artists, and, in the case of Joan Baez, enough Perrier. Throughout the 1970s, the rhythm section members continued to expand their expertise into various areas of recording. After Barry Beckett produced the 1972 Mel & Tim album Starting All Over Again, he moved on to other production projects that included coproduction of the 1975 Peter Yarrow album Hard Times. He followed with production of “Torn Between Two Lovers” by Mary MacGregor, a background singer on the Yarrow LP. From there, his production credits grew to include work by

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Sanford and Townsend, Dire Straits, Bob Dylan and Stephen Stills. As section members eased more into production and engineering, they purchased a second studio to use for completing production projects, but the separate building, located across town, proved inconvenient at best. The rhythm section still found itself primarily cutting the basic tracks in Muscle Shoals only to see the artist’s work flown off to L.A. or New York to be finished. In April 1978, all that changed. The rhythm section moved into a 31,000-square-foot building constructed at the turn of the century on the banks of the Tennessee River. Originally meant to accommodate a power plant for Sheffield, the building became a Naval Reserve Center in World War II. The structure now houses two large recording studios and control rooms, game room, kitchen, offices for staff and artists, lounge, tape vaults, photo lab, echo chamber and a sun deck. With studio design work by Audio Consultants in Nashville, the building’s outer walls are constructed of ten-inch and twelve-inch concrete brick, filled with sand for added mass. Air spaces separate walls of adjoining areas that require acoustical isolation. It’s a far cry from the days when Jimmy Johnson had to use the john as a guitar booth in Muscle Shoals Sound’s Jackson Highway studio. In 1979, as Rick Hall was returning to Fame only to find that his friends in the pop field had moved on, a song the rhythm section had pitched to Bob Seger, who had recorded several times at Muscle Shoals Sound since 1972, took off on the charts and became Seger’s biggest for that year. George Johnson, a staff songwriter for Muscle Shoals Sound, had penned a tune he called “Old Time Rock & Roll.” The rhythm section pitched it to Seger, who liked the song, but he wanted to cut it differently. A few months later, Seger gave up on his attempt and asked for the original demo tracks to use, doing the overdubs with his own band.

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By the end of the decade, the Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section’s fame had grown to international proportions. The section had begun to host several international artists from Japan, Sweden, Canada and France. But to the rhythm section’s chagrin, some of those artists were disco. When the disco craze died, the rhythm section couldn’t have cared less. As musicians performing on the cuts, the section had found the music simply boring.

Regrouping in Hard Times In 1980, business for all the Shoals studios began to drop off as a severe economic recession set in nationwide. And though musicians like Julian Lennon still came South for the anonymity the area offered (he arrived nervous and publicity shy; by the time he left, club owners were announcing—at his request—that John Lennon’s son was in the audience), the industry had to do some quick scrambling to stay afloat. Still, many of the studios that had flourished during the 1970s, despite their frantic efforts, had no choice but to close. Even the solidly established Muscle Shoals Sound suffered. In 1983, Barry Beckett “went through an industry shake-out as a producer,” says Johnson. “His phone quit ringing. He had to do something as a producer; he was unable to continue making a living here, so he went to Nashville, and it took about three or four years, but he’s now knocking it down up there,” producing acts that have included Hank Williams Jr. and the group Alabama. In 1985, the rhythm section sold Muscle Shoals Sound Studios to Mississippi-based Malaco. As to exactly why, Johnson will confess only, “There’s a time to buy and a time to sell. It was time to sell.” David Hood, Roger Hawkins and Johnson were kept on by the new owners to oversee operations, produce acts, and to serve as session musicians. Since Malaco produces its own artists, the need to bring in other acts is no longer critical to the studio’s

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survival, even though Johnson has produced in recent years such artists as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Gary Rossington (guitarist formerly with Skynyrd) and Connie Francis. Johnson leans back in his chair and thinks a moment about his career, where it’s brought him, about his increasing role as a producer, about coping with the changes wrought during the 1980s. He smiles, says matter-of-factly, “Rick Hall is a genius. Nobody can produce a record like he does. He goes in, has it all in his mind how he wants it. He doesn’t disclose a lot of it to the players. He’s experimenting, trying different things all the time. He’s created his own way of doing it. Unique. But I couldn’t produce records the way he does. I pull more from the players, and he pulls from himself. I pull more from people on the project, the artists and the song. I try to take them and shape them into what they are. He can take someone and shape them into something that’s different from what they are. I sharpen what they have. It’s my belief that the less a producer says on a session, the better. It’s opposite from the way Rick does it. He calls all the shots. He doesn’t depend on pulling from the players. In fact, he’ll say, ‘Give me a set of musicians and I’ll cut a hit with them,’ and he can. He’s one of the few people I’ve seen who could do that.” When he returned to the business, faced with a national ailing music industry, Hall demonstrated that, even in hard times, his ability to shape artists into hit-makers remained as sharp as ever. “When he came back,” says Linda, “he decided, ‘I don’t want to live in the fast lane anymore; I don’t want to fly to L.A., fly to New York every other week. My kids are teenagers. I want to work at home where I can spend time with them and do all the things a daddy’s supposed to do.’” But times were tight, and Linda admits that getting something going took a lot of energy. Hall produced a couple of albums on minor pop acts, but nothing took off. “So he said, ‘I’ve been R&B, I’ve been pop; I’ll go back to my roots, try

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the country field.’ So Mac Davis hadn’t had anything going for him for some time.” Hall gave Davis’s manager a call, who put him in touch with Davis. The result was Davis’s Texas in My Rearview Mirror album, which hit on both the country and pop charts. Following Davis were the Osmonds (who returned to do a country album), Marie Osmond, Larry Gatlin, Gus Hardin, Terri Gibbs, and Jerry Reed, whose work at Fame included the number one singles “She Got the Goldmine and I Got the Shaft” and “The Bird.” After that, Hall scored two number one singles with T. G. Sheppard—“Strong Heart” and “One for the Money.” “He’s done all he wants to do in the country field,” Linda says, “and he didn’t want to do over one or two albums a year.” But Hall is far from finished. After Sheppard, the producer decided country was where he wanted to remain, shaping promising talent into national talent. “He’s got a group now called Shenandoah. Some of them were songwriters for us, the guitar player and bass player were musicians here, and the lead singer was a friend of theirs.” The band members had been playing local clubs to get by when Hall decided to coproduce them with Robert Byrne, an in-house songwriter and producer. The group has served Hall and CBS Records well in recent years, scoring several number one country hits like “The Church on Cumberland Road.” While the band obviously pleases a large segment of country music fans, it hasn’t impressed some critics quite as favorably. Some call the band a weak imitation of groups like Southern Pacific, Exile and Alabama. The critics charge Shenandoah (who has been sued twice for use of the name, each time settling out of court) of riding a recognizable sound into stardom, hoping to cash in before that sound passes out of vogue and the band gallops off into obscurity as so many others have. Hearing an R&B spin on every cut, one reviewer of Shenandoah’s 1989 LP The Road Not Taken said that each song sounded as if it had been written as a

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potential hit (many of the songs are either written or cowritten by Robert Byrne), which is probably right since hits are Hall’s trademark. “The first big hit” in country, Linda recalls, “was ‘There’s No Getting Over Me’ by Ronnie Milsap, the biggest publishing song we’ve ever had. It wasn’t typical Nashville at all. It had a touch of pop, a touch of R&B, a touch of country. That’s one of the things that make our songs different,” and one reason Hall’s Fame has survived into the 1990s, the studio’s work having finally become a part of the Nashville scene. Fame now maintains an office in Nashville, headed by Hall’s son, Mark. The 1980s proved a trying time for all of the Shoals studios, with many closing under the pressure of tighter economic times, but, in the end, those people who had shaped the industry from its inception remained, for better or worse.

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More Than Money: A Different Measure of Success

F

or the most part,” says former rock and pop producer Terry Woodford, “the people in this industry who survive are ego motivated, fame motivated, or money motivated— one or the other or a combination of all three, usually a combination. When those are your prime motivators, ethics, morals, business practices, friendships, loyalties—all those things don’t mean quite as much as you’d like for them to.” Woodford speaks from experience. During the adolescence of the Shoals music industry, he sang on the fraternity circuit in the Mystics band which also featured Muscle Shoals Sound’s David Hood. In the 1970s and 1980s, Woodford proved himself an extremely adept independent producer, heading, with partner Clayton Ivey, Muscle Shoals’ Wishbone Inc., a production, recording, and publishing company, which makes his claim that he “never could just let go and say it was something I wanted to do all the time” even more difficult to understand until the 1980s are taken into account. Originally from Oakland City, Indiana, the 47-year-old Woodford has always been a maverick among mavericks in Muscle Shoals music, helping to shape and define the industry during its most volatile stage. “I didn’t do it like the rest,” he says. “I was a guy who went to college and who went to graduate school on a 85

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scholarship,” receiving a master’s degree in technical engineering. “I wasn’t born on a farm; I wasn’t a kid who drove a tractor, who made it real rough and had it tough.” Woodford was a kid who liked music, however. Throughout his college days, he wrote songs for Rick Hall’s Fame and continued to perform with the Mystics, but after graduation, he dropped music to take a job with a textile company in South Carolina. But in 1969, he returned to Muscle Shoals to head up Muscle Shoals Sound’s music publishing companies as president and part owner. In 1971, Woodford and Clayton Ivey hooked up to form Wishbone Inc., recording their artists in local studios as well as studios in other cities. In 1974, the two signed Reuben Howell to Motown and became the first independent producers to lease an artist to the Detroit-based record company. In turn, Motown signed Wishbone to an exclusive production agreement, and, for the next two years, Woodford and Ivey ran a Shoals-based Motown artists and repertoire office, cutting their artists’ work in California and Miami, producing top acts that included the Temptations, the Commodores, Thelma Houston and the trio Hot. The company didn’t have its own studio until 1976 when it ended its Motown ties, opting for the freedom of independent production. Once againon its own, Wishbone continued to do things a little differently from the other Shoals studios. In technology, it became the area’s first twenty-four-track studio, and it was the first to computerize operations. For state-of-the-art technology, no Shoals studio was better equipped than Wishbone, but Woodford says the best thing about his studio was not technology; it was the way songwriters were treated. “One of my greatest abilities,” he says, “was to take a songwriter and develop that person into someone who wrote for money. Songwriting’s about ninety-five percent craft and five percent inspiration.” While staff songwriters went through their developmental stages, Wishbone made sure they

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had money to pay for food and rent by placing them on draw as soon as the company signed them to a contract; other local studios paid their writers only when a song produced an income. Several of the writers today at other Shoals studios, including Mac MacAnally and Robert Byrne, began developing their talents at Wishbone. As Wishbone’s business grew, so did studio facilities, incorporating not only recording studios but also housing accommodations for visiting artists. Then, in 1981, the Jacksons’ production company arrived in town to produce three albums at the studio. The Jackson company had been there three days when fire destroyed the recording facilities. In late 1982, during the rebuilding, Woodford bought out his partner. Upon completion of the reconstruction, Woodford began to stretch himself thin between production, day-to-day business, and his activities as board chairman for the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, devoting increasingly less time to his creative side. He began to tire. By mid-1983, his outlook on music had begun a slow but definite change. He had written hit songs, such as the millionseller “Angel in Your Arms”; had run a recording studio; had worked with some of the biggest names in soul and pop music; had speculated on twenty-two artists and signed nineteen to labels, an extremely high rate of success for an independent; had served as Hall of Fame board chairman; had taught courses in the University of North Alabama’s commercial music program. But “I started finding out some things,” he says. “You may get a gold record, but by the time they bring you thing—and I got a bunch of them in the closet—it doesn’t mean quite as much as you thought it would. And, of course, you’re only as good as your last record.” With a tough divorce added to his already harried schedule, Woodford found himself increasingly disillusioned with the industry.

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The beginning of his turn-around came in Spring 1984 while he was serving as a judge in Huntsville’s annual Panoply of the Arts Festival. A nursery school teacher approached him with a suggestion that seemed innocuous enough at the time, one that he quickly tucked away in the back of his mind. “This woman said to me, ‘There needs to be some kind of contemporary sounding music for these kids at day-care centers.’” He shrugs. “So what? That was my attitude.” But the teacher had planted a seed that began to grow. Later in the year, Woodford decided to produce a tape of contemporary Christmas songs for use as gifts to business associates. “So I cut ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ like the Doobie Brothers might do it. One side had the song without singers; the other side had the singers.” And he remembered what the Huntsville day-care teacher had suggested, so he assembled 150 decorated packages containing the tape and a lyric sheet, and sent them to day-care centers randomly chosen from various city directories. Along with the tape, he also sent a questionnaire asking for the teachers’ thoughts on the tape and what they used it for. “And I didn’t think much more about it. All of a sudden, these questionnaires started coming back. We got back one hundred and fifty positive responses. And I got letters from the kids; it was a neat thing. And one of the comments was, ‘We’d like to have more music.’” Still bogged down in the process of making money with music, Woodford didn’t rush back into the studio to cut more songs for the day-care centers, but neither did he dismiss the responses he’d received. Taking his time to mull over options, he decided not to produce another Christmas tape. “And the only other time I thought that they would like to have music would be at nap time,” he says. “I figured if you take the human heartbeat, record it right where a baby lays its head, and use that as the rhythm for lullabies,

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it might help these kids go to sleep at nap time. I figured I’d knock that out in a couple or three days, using traditional lullabies. “But I ran into some technical problems. Not only was the heart not in tempo, it wasn’t even the same in between beats. And then I realized that if it was going to amount to anything, it was going to have to reproduce on inexpensive cassette players because low frequencies disappear on the cheap players.” He recorded the heart, began the work, and soon, what had begun as mild interest suddenly blossomed into obsession, with Woodford spending more than 1,500 hours getting the heartbeat regulated into three different tempos and reproducible on small speakers. As for the songs, “I went through about thirty-five singers just for the first five songs, trying to get them to sing straight forward,” Woodford says. “Normally, your job as a producer is to get the identity out of the singer, to sell the emotion, but the emotion you’re trying to sell here is compassion; you’re trying to calm someone; you don’t want an identity, and that was hard for a lot of the singers to understand. And I wasn’t even sure why I was taking it so seriously.” After putting several songs on tape, including “Brahms’ Lullaby” and “Rock-a-bye Baby,” he played the tape for a doctor, who immediately spotted a glitch: the heartbeat in one of the songs had been reversed. Correcting the mistake, Woodford cut five songs within a year, using the heartbeat as their rhythm. “I took it over to Helen Keller Hospital here locally, and asked the nurses what they thought of it?” The nurses reserved judgment until they had conducted 212 tests on fifty-nine babies over a six-week period. When the nurses played the tape in the nursery, ninety-four percent of crying babies went to sleep without a bottle or pacifier. Those results proved pleasing enough to Woodford, but he didn’t know what to do with them until “I saw a special on 20/20 about how crying babies keep people up, that kids up to six years old have sleeping

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problems, and that there’s no solution for it. And I laughed. I said, ‘I’ve got the answer to that right here,’ but I didn’t know what to do.” Woodford decided to try three things: give the local hospital a large supply of tapes to send home with new mothers; send copies to the original 150 day-care centers; “and I had it tested at the Better Birth Foundation in Atlanta. Then a clinician at the University of Alabama [in Birmingham] in the cardiac recovery unit got hold of one of the tapes [Woodford still isn’t sure how the tape ended up in the doctor’s hands], and they tried it on a baby that was resisting a ventilator. And it calmed the baby down. They called me up, wanted me to come down to the cardiac recovery unit; they wanted to talk.” When he arrived at University Hospital, he stood in awe, having never before been in an intensive care ward or beheld such gravely ill infants and their fragile hold on life. The ward’s staff “told me they needed a way to play the tape at a lower volume because it was making the nurses tired.” The staff demonstrated how well the tape calmed babies without sedatives or tranquilizers, and “I got really motivated. I made a little speaker out of PVC sewer pipe so they could disinfect it, and I bought this Radio Shack auto reverse player and amp with a four-inch speaker so they could play it at a real low volume.” As his relationship strengthened with the UAB hospital, he continued to experiment with the tape, adjusting the level of the heartbeat relative to the music level. He also added songs, “and they’re encouraging me the whole time because they’re thinking it’s really neat that a record producer would care enough to come in there, and I’m thinking, ‘God, these people are heroes and nobody even knows. These babies are coming from all over the world, and these nurses are keeping them alive!’” Still, Woodford’s Wishbone survived on making music for

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dollars, just as Fame and Muscle Shoals Sound and Widget and the rest. But then Woodford’s value system changed completely. One day while at University Hospital, Woodford saw an infant who had gone through open heart surgery begin to fight its ventilator—a common problem among infants who have experienced major surgery, a problem that can lead to a child’s death. “They said, ‘Watch this,’ turned on the tape, and the [child’s] heart rate came right down. The baby calmed down and went to sleep. I mean, it freaked me out! I thought, ‘I didn’t do this. I really didn’t.’ I guess the only thing I could come up with was that God was involved. And I’m not sure why I happened to be the vehicle, but I wasn’t going to question it because it scared me to death. “From that moment on, I tried to get out of the [pop] music business. I took heavy losses to get out. I sold my publishing company to Michael Jackson’s managers for what I owed. Sold my equipment to a company in Nashville. When you lose interest, it just doesn’t mean anything. You know, if you could have success right now, this very instant—and most people will give you the same answer—it’s usually financial independence, travel, have a home, good health, then ‘I’d like to help people.’ If that’s really true, whatever your success is, if you make as your goal what you would do after you have that instant success, you might achieve your success a lot quicker.” As Woodford liquidated his assets, his mortgagor foreclosed, forcing him to file Chapter 11 until he could sell the studio four months later. By the end of 1987, he was out of the business of making hits; instead, he now devoted all of his energy to the research of his heartbeat music. After adding more songs to what he calls the Baby-Go-To-Sleep Tape, Woodford developed a sound mattress that connects directly to a tape player, allowing only the child to hear the music while the room remains quiet. The mattress is equipped with a speaker that pulsates gently with the

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heartbeat. Woodford supplies the tape free of charge to hospitals, day-care centers, foster-care centers, and other children’s assistance organizations. Hospitals get the mattress and tape recorder free as well. The tape is now used in 1,000 hospitals, 4,000 special care centers, and 200,000 homes. It is used in pediatric wards and units for neo-natal intensive care and gastro-intestinal care, and for calming premature infants, autistic babies, critical care babies, children with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and drugaddicted infants—the applications seem limitless. Woodford’s current company, Flying Colors, finances the free materials to child care organizations through the sale of tapes by mail-order, in record stores, and through baby and infant sections of department stores. As for Woodford himself, he takes ten percent of the profits to live on; everything over operating costs goes to charity and to the production of the materials needed by hospitals. “I don’t have any peers anymore,” Woodford says. “I never hear from the people I was in the music business with. The only thing I can figure out is that I didn’t do it like the rest.” When the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in early 1990 contacted Woodford requesting photographs and other memorabilia for use in the Hall of Fame museum, Woodford told the representative,“‘You know, I’ve been doing this [baby tape] for the past five years; it’s what I would prefer to be known for as opposed to being a songwriter.’ They said, ‘We don’t consider you as being in music anymore.’” Woodford’s tape has been the subject of numerous newspaper articles and television interviews, and he’s been a featured speaker at several national conferences concerning the effects of music on health. “It’s all music,” he says. “If you’re in the music industry, and you’re making music for money, you become very prejudiced against anybody who does anything in music in which they’re not making money. ‘Those people dealing with lullaby tapes just couldn’t make it.’ They can’t

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relate to anyone in music who isn’t doing it for money.” As for the mainstream music industry, Woodford says he doesn’t miss it at all. His research into using music to better one’s health continues beyond the Baby-Go-To-Sleep Tape. Woodford entered the 1990s by experimenting with music to be used in combination with conventional treatment of migraine headaches and personality disorders such as schizophrenia—which could indicate to some that he’s still searching for some yet to be realized level of success. “In what I’m doing,” he says simply, “when you help save the first baby’s life, you have [attained] success.”

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uesday morning, late May 1990. With fingertips lightly touching the headphones, his eyes on the lyric sheet before him, a lone vocalist stands in the middle of the studio where Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones recorded “Brown Sugar.” In the control room, engineer Mike Curtis rolls the tape; computer drums beat a funky rhythm through the monitor speakers; a synthesizer whines in; the singer, a rapper, draws a breath, leans toward the mike. One, two, and: “Ain’t no doubt about it, it’s digital.” “Yeah, we need to sample there,” Curtis says to the producer. And he imitates the sound he means: “D-d-d-d-dig-digital.” Music ain’t what it used to be when a good song, a singer, a talented group of session musicians, and a monaural recorder with only one shot at an overdub were combined to make a hit. Today, producers don’t need much in the way of live musicians, only some good computer equipment. Producers can avoid musicians completely and sample what they want from any existing recording. If a producer desires a drum lick by Steve Gadd or a guitar riff by Walter Becker, all he or she has to do is extract that instrument—sample—from any recording, file it in the sampler’s memory, then press a key to have it played back in whatever note desired, manipulated to fit in with the other instruments. That’s the down side. On the up side, thanks to the same advances in music technology, bands no longer necessarily require 94

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the services of recording studios and producers. For what it would cost to cut a few demos in custom sessions at a studio like Fame or Muscle Shoals Sound, artists can buy their own equipment and turn their garages into extremely functional home studios, much like Dexter Johnson did in the early 1950s—only the garage studios of today appear more like science fiction in comparison to Johnson’s mono studio. When parents ask Jimmy Johnson to suggest an instrument to start their child on, he tells them to buy the kid a personal computer simply because music is becoming more the world of technological wizards than the domain of musicians. With the click of a few buttons on a computer keyboard, you can create a symphony. As a producer, Johnson knows first hand the disadvantages and advantages of the new technology. Even he’s resorted to using gadgetry to improve poor recordings. In 1989, he and Roger Hawkins produced a television album of greatest hits on Connie Francis, and the project wasn’t without its problems. “We did twenty-four sides on her,” Johnson recalls. “She’s a manic-depressive, and we’d have to catch her coming off the lithium; she could really do it then. But when she’d take that lithium, she couldn’t sing for hours. Nobody had ever told her that she sang sharp and flat, but we didn’t know not to tell her. She would get mad and walk right out on us a lot of the time. Most people are cooperative because it’s their career you’re dealing with. And we’re at the point in life where if the person doesn’t want to work with us, we don’t want to work with them. We’d rather they be with someone they prefer. With Connie, there were a couple of times we offered to quit, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Finally, she had to give it up and let us have it. And when she did, we cut a great record on her, even though she was singing sharp and flat. But we got a little machine now that we can straighten that out with. We would’ve never made it without that machine.”

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Even though technology has affected some studios by taking away demo work, it’s certainly not the primary problem that confronts Shoals studios—or, for that matter, any studio in America. “We used to have more ways of making money than we do now,” says Jimmy Johnson. “The business has shrunk,” with increasing numbers of small record companies being swallowed up by conglomerates, “and you know that has to hinder people from getting record deals. They’ve all departmentalized to the point that a country guy runs the country division, a black guy runs the black division—I see nothing wrong with this, but before, you had an A&R group in the company, and you’d go to them to play them this record, and they could negotiate with you right there on the spot. You could leave the office with the ink drying on the check. And you’d know that record would be on the radio in two weeks. That day is over and gone with and probably will never return. “Now, [companies] don’t really want to take records from independent producers. They want to call you, ask you to take on a project. I think it’s an ego thing. They want to be fully in charge of it all. They want to put a liasion person with the producer that sits there and tells him how to cut the record to their standards. A producer can’t be himself today. I get all the music on there, all the mixes and everything, then I have to let a guy that has twenty years less experience than me tell me how the record’s supposed to sound. I know where everything is, where it should be, but they bring a guy in that’s never heard the record before, and, in one day, he mixes the song. Sometimes that can be good, sometimes bad because they leave important ingredients out. Sometimes they don’t even have the producer go to the session. Working with major record labels now is not a fun thing like it was in the past. “Have you noticed how many oldies stations there are now?” he asks. “There just aren’t enough records coming out with versatil-

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ity. And listen to those heavy metal groups. Have you ever heard a [heavy metal] singer that sounds different from the one just before that? [The record companies] set criteria: if the singer doesn’t sing like this, the drum doesn’t sound like this,” the song won’t make it. “It’s the most ludicrous thing. Remember ‘Woolly Bully’? It was a freak hit. There’ll never be another ‘Woolly Bully.’ They won’t let it. It doesn’t fit their criteria. A lot of the creativity is taken away, and the number of records being cut is down. That means the recording industry as a whole is suffering. Studios are going out of business around the country.” Studios in Muscle Shoals are no exception. But a few artists who grew up during the heyday of Muscle Shoals music are moving to the area in hopes of reviving the industry. One of those people is Michael Curtis, a 26-year-old songwriter who’s been writing country songs since age twelve. In 1987, after spending a year in Nashville, free-lancing on a per song basis, Curtis threw up his hands in disgust and came to the Shoals. “I just got tired of the same old clique” in Nashville, he says. “Seemed like everything up there was the same old same old. No feeling or nothing. Too digital.” While playing in the Shoals area with the band Shaker, Curtis signed on with Rick Hall’s Fame as a writer in 1989, but Hall, as tight with his money as in the early days, did not put the writer on draw—which was fine with Curtis; he had other plans anyway. In January 1990, he bought the original Muscle Shoals Sound studio, now simply called 3614 Jackson Highway Recording Studio. “I just had it set in my head to get a studio.” Although several area studios closed in the last decade, Curtis believes that the Shoals music industry is “about to make a 180degree turn-around and fly better than it ever did,” and he insists that his studio will have a lot to do with that revitalization. “To me there ain’t no studio nowhere that’s got the feeling of that place,” he says of the Jackson Highway studio. “I’ve done demos at Fame,

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and it kind of reminded me of the Nashville scene a little bit, gets too cliquey sometimes, too digital. But when we write something over [at Jackson Highway], it’s all done on feel. Guys from the old school are looking for the [Jackson Highway] kind of studios, looking for a place where they can go back and get that feel and not just so much the digital thing. With the history in that place, a lot of people are going to be wanting to come record just because of the other people that have. I’m trying to make everything that comes out of there—demos [like the “digital” custom rap session], everything—just sound great. I want people to know that place has still got the magic feel.” The only glitch in Curtis’s reasoning is that artists came to 3614 Jackson Highway not for the studio but for the Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section’s musical and production expertise. And, as Terry Woodford points out, people like Curtis have another problem to contend with: “If you’re not in Nashville, New York or Los Angeles, it is a hundred times tougher to make it because you’re not in the mainstream.” “I feel for the [small studios],” Johnson says. “I feel sorry for them. One of the reasons [Muscle Shoals Sound] is still successful, the company that owns it [Malaco] has a built-in business. They can maintain a studio here without outside business even though we still get outside business, but that business is dwindling and has been dwindling over the last five years. We’re survivable because of the Malaco roster: we’re a record company. It’s different when a record company owns a studio. We can cut our own deals. And Malaco has two types of music, secular and non-secular. I still play on records, and I’m almost fifty years old. You don’t find too many people my age playing on records. It’s a young man’s business.” Maybe it is a young person’s business where musicians are concerned, but for people like Rick Hall, it seems like they’ll go on forever. “There’s a new excitement here,” says Linda Hall, referring to Shenandoah and recently signed Tom Wopat. Even

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though Hall is apparently satisfied with his accomplishments, and even though he has threatened to retire several times, he continues to produce hits. “He loves the music,” Linda says. “When you get it in your blood, it doesn’t go away. You can’t be happy doing anything else. We’re hoping to be here forever,” she laughs, “until the Lord comes again. Rick wants to make it easier than it was for him for young talent to stay in Muscle Shoals and be successful, and he wants to give them the tool to do it. He says, ‘I made my mark, but I want to leave a legacy so others can carry on.’ Muscle Shoals music is not dead.” Curtis agrees wholeheartedly that Shoals music lives on, and he even goes as far as to suggest that the Alabama Music Hall of Fame will help create a renaissance in the area’s recording industry. But that’s doubtful since the Hall of Fame’s primary function is to attract tourists, not to act as a crutch for the industry it’s honoring. “About 1975,” says the Hall of Fame’s Dick Cooper, “strange people started showing up in front of the studios wanting to look. One day, a little Japanese guy ended up at the Greyhound Bus Station, and he didn’t speak any English except ‘Muscle Shoals Sound.’ Police brought him to the studio, but no one knew what to do with him. They let him watch a session, took him to dinner, gave him a T-shirt and took him to the bus station the next day. Then people started coming out of the woodwork. So the idea of a museum came up, basically to keep them out of [studio operators’] hair by giving them something to go see.” “We have a strong, rich heritage in music” in Alabama, says Woodford. “Black, classical, jazz—everything. And I think it’s something important that Alabama people can be proud of.” When he served as Hall of Fame board chairman, “Our idea was to give kids something to shoot for, show them you can have success: you can be from Alabama [and] have all these achievers to look up to. But there’s only one thing that started bothering me—

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and I’m not saying it’s wrong, but for me, it was something wrong—and that was this: we honor people for their achievements without any regard for what kind of people they were, what kind of character they had. And we’re setting these people up for kids: ‘I want to be like Hank Williams—and die at twenty-nine an alcoholic?’”

The Future When the recession of the early 1980s sent the recording industry into a nosedive, forcing Shoals people like Barry Beckett to leave for Nashville and other recording centers, Johnson could have gone too, but he chose to stay in Muscle Shoals, his home. “I could be doing ten times what I’m doing if I went to Nashville, but I’m not looking to get back into the frying pan.” When the question comes around to his eventual retirement and the retirement of other shapers of the Shoals industry—when he and Rick Hall are no longer in the picture—Johnson replies, “I don’t know. I hope Mark Hall [Rick Hall’s son who runs the Nashville office] will carry it on on Rick’s side. The boy’s talented and a sharp guy. And then there’s my son, Jay. He ain’t going to carry on exactly what I’m doing, but he’s going to carry on as a player, an artist. And he’s got it—the charisma. You see him on stage, you can’t take your eyes off of him.” Jay Johnson is already making a name for himself. In the late 1980s, he manned rhythm and lead guitar in the Rossington Band. As for the chances of current and future studios establishing themselves in the Shoals, Curtis expresses only optimism: “It’s amazed me how much the musicians and writers really stick together in this area. It’s like, if I got in over my head, here they come, always there to help out. It’s just like one big family. When one brother needs help, we go right to him. Don’t nobody shut nobody out.”

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If true, that’s a far cry from the days when Buddy Draper headed the Muscle Shoals Music Association. “Inherently, there was too much jealousy—and may still be—among the studio owners. Very few of them would get in there and cooperate, even in the association.” Terry Woodford agrees. Having worked closely with all major studios in town, Woodford “never heard any of the competitors say anything good about each other, and that’s too bad because that’s one of the things that’s held this area back. The competitors never really cooperated.” The Muscle Shoals recording industry has been in an undeniable state of decline over the last decade, but that doesn’t hold true for the entire state. In Mobile, for instance, Integrity Music Inc. has thundered onto the contemporary Christian music scene with its highly successful Hosanna! record label, featuring songs by at least one former Shoals writer, Lenny LeBlanc. And though the established forces in Muscle Shoals appear content with the status quo, newcomers like Mike Curtis are determined to breathe new life into the waning industry. But not everyone is convinced they can do it. “Once Rick Hall closes his studio, and Muscle Shoals Sound closes its doors,” Draper warns, “it’s out.” In other words, Muscle Shoals music will be nothing more than photographs, museum relics and memories of past gold.

PART II Stars Who’ve Risen from Alabama

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s producer Terry Woodford says, Alabama has a rich musical heritage. Hundreds of movers and shapers be hind the scenes and before the audience have come from Alabama, people that include country music publisher Buddy Killen, owner of Nashville’s Tree Publishing; singer/actor Jim Nabors; William Lee Golden, former member of the Oak Ridge Boys; R&B artist Wilson Pickett; country songwriter and performer Jeanne Pruett; jazz trumpeter Erskine Hawkins; lyric soprano Irene Jordan; country star Vern Gosdin; soprano Lottice Howell; pop vocalist Pat Upton; classical flautist and conductor Ransom Wilson; banjo picker, songwriter and musical playwright Jim Connor; gospel star Jake Hess; jazz vocalist/pianist Ward Lamar Swingle—simply put, there are far too many outstanding music achievers to list here. In the following pages, you’ll meet a few of the artists who have helped shape the music we love to hear. Whether it’s blues, country, jazz, rock, classical or gospel, Alabama stars have done it all.

Alabama In the 1960s when the press revealed that the instruments heard on Monkees records were being played by session musicians and not the Monkees, fans were shocked and angry, feeling that they had somehow been cheated. But when news broke that the group

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Alabama also uses session musicians in recording, fans simply shrugged their shoulders “So what?” The different reactions can be attributed to two facts. First, unlike the Monkees, Alabama relies primarily on its vocal harmonies instead of its members’ musicianship. Second, Alabama’s music is not pure country, but rather a blend of country, R&B and pop—a highly commercial sound that caters to both radio and video. The Alabama story reads in some respects like a fairy tale. Teddy Gentry and Randy Owen are cousins who grew up on adjacent dairy and cotton farms near Fort Payne. The families were poor (as fairy tales like this usually go), and most of the music the kids were exposed to was gospel. Jeff Cook, another cousin, (here’s where the standard fairy tale veers slightly) was a “city” boy, not a poor country boy like Gentry and Owen, and his musical experience was a bit broader because he had already played in bands and worked as a rock ’n’ roll DJ by the time the three cousins hooked up. In 1969, the men formed their own band and began to work in earnest over the next year, becoming the house band at Canyonland, an amusement park near Fort Payne, covering tunes by other artists. But Cook, an electrician, must not have had much hope for his band’s future. In 1970, he moved to Anniston to take a government job. Owen and Gentry, determined not to let their cousin screw up their shot at the big time, followed Cook, finally convincing him to continue trying, at least after work hours. The three men became roommates, practicing their harmonies well into the night. In 1973, Cook gave in to his cousins to play full-time once again. The cousins, playing under the name Wildcountry, moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where they played six nights a week for seven years at the Bowery. In 1977, maybe because the cousins were feeling a little homesick,

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the band changed its name to Alabama. By 1980, the group had recorded several singles on small labels, but the cuts had not done much. Then they recorded “My Home’s in Alabama” for MDJ Records, and that song proved good enough to attract the attention of RCA, who quickly signed the act. Riding in on the popularity of the Urban Cowboy countryrock sound, the band’s first single for RCA, “Tennessee River,” went to number one. Although each of the band’s subsequent releases has done well on the charts, critics have been baffled. They find the band’s lyrics depthless and opportunistic (such as the group’s 1990 hit, “Pass It on Down,” an ecological anthem cashing in on the popularity of environmental causes). Fans of Alabama, on the other hand, like what they hear enough to journey to Fort Payne from all over the world each year for the band’s June Jam concert which features some of the best known names in country music. The proceeds from the concert are donated to charities. In return for their fans’ devotion in the face of bad reviews, the band doesn’t charge for fan club membership, and the members even wrote a song dedicated to their followers called, obviously, “Fans.” .

Jimmy Buffett Jimmy Buffett probably never thought he’d be a hit with the country music crowd—not with sarcastic lyrics that sometimes border on raunchy. As a kid, the Mobile native liked country music the least, but that was just a reflection of his contemporaries and the times—contemptuous of the conventional. When he graduated from high school, Buffett’s guitar playing wasn’t what one could call admirable. But by the time the lure of New Orleans pulled him away from college in Mississippi where he’d been studying journalism, his playing had improved enough

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that he was able to land a few jobs performing folk music in clubs along the Gulf Coast. As well as singing the day’s folk standards, he began to write and perform his own songs, but, in the late 1960s, he returned to college to finish his degree. Unable to shake the desire for a career in music, Buffett moved to Nashville after college, despite the fact that he harbored no desire to be labeled a country artist. When he arrived in Music City, Billboard magazine hired him as a record reviewer. On the side, he performed in local clubs and eventually landed a recording contract with Barnaby Records, which issued two of his albums in the early 1970s. With a taste of moderate success, he quit Billboard, moved to L.A. and auditioned for the New Christy Minstrels, but he missed out on the position because he apparently preferred to toke with close friends and to develop himself as a solo artist rather than devoting his time to a group. From L.A., Buffett headed for Key West, Florida, putting him completely out of the mainstream of the music business. But Buffett’s hard-nosed determinism finally convinced ABC/Dunhill to take a chance, and, in 1973, the company issued A White Sport Coat and Pink Crustacean. Although the album was far less than a smash, the reception it received convinced ABC to keep Buffett around for a while longer. Naming his backup group the Coral Reefer Band—an obvious reference to one of his favorite pastimes—Buffett didn’t strike it big until 1977 with the album Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude, which climbed both the pop and country charts, going platinum by year’s end. “Margaritaville,” a single from the album, went gold and fully established the artist. With each album that followed, Buffett’s popularity grew until he became a favorite in concert and on radio with such songs as “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” “Come Monday,” “Pencil Thin Mustache,” “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”

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In 1989, Buffett revealed yet another side of his writing ability—what he calls factional fiction and fictional facts—with the publication of Tales From Margaritaville, a collection of short stories loosely based on his life.

Nat King Cole Legend has it that someone in the audience at a nightclub where Nathaniel Coles was playing piano placed a crown on the performer’s head and immediately dubbed him “King Cole.” Years later, Cole (he dropped the S from his surname early in his professional career) confided that, even though the story wasn’t true, it sounded good, “so I just let it ride.” Born in 1919 in Montgomery, Nathaniel Adams Coles grew up in Chicago, in a family where music was just a part of life, like breathing. His mother, Perlina, who hoped he would someday be a classical pianist, gave him his start in music, teaching him the basics. With three brothers and a sister who were just as musically inclined, Nat, by age four, could belt out a rousing rendition of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” while accompanying himself on piano. By age twelve, he had earned the honor of singing and playing organ in the True Light Baptist Church where his father, Edward James Coles, served as pastor. But Cole’s musical interests lay not in religious or classical music; instead, they lay in jazz, and that meant nightclubs, not something that overly pleased his father, but something the elder Coles had to get used to. In high school, Cole joined the Rogues of Rhythm band at the invitation of the band’s leader, Eddie Coles, Nat’s brother. The Rogues later became part of the Shuffle Along, an all-black revue that featured dancer Nadine Robinson, who caught Nat’s eye. When Eddie decided it was time for his band to leave the revue, Nat declined. He headed west with Shuffle Along, his relationship

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with Nadine growing increasingly friendly. Feeling reasonably secure in the revue, Nat and Nadine married, but the show hit hard times when a member disappeared with $800 in cash receipts. The revue folded in Long Beach, California, leaving Nat and Nadine stranded and forced to scrape out a living in L.A.’s beer joints. Nat sometimes worked for as little as five bucks a night. In 1938, Cole formed the jazz group, the King Cole Trio, with Oscar Moore on guitar and Wesley Prince on string bass, who was later replaced by Johnny Miller. In the days before World War II, the trio worked for what they could get, sometimes a week’s pay of no more than $99 split three ways. In 1943, Cole made his first sell of an original song— “Straighten Up and Fly Right”—to Capitol Records for $50. About a monkey and a buzzard, the song became a wartime hit, and helped Cole develop strong ties with Capitol. While the King Cole Trio established itself in the 1940s as one of the hottest jazz combos around, some nightclub regulars had gotten a preview of Cole’s future success back in 1939 when a drunken nightclub patron insisted that Cole sing “Sweet Lorraine.” At first, Cole refused because he didn’t believe he had a voice good enough to carry a tune. But when the club manager pointedly explained to Cole that the patron was not only a regular customer, but one that liked to spend his money, Cole gave in. In the end, it would be the voice that would ensure Cole’s immortality, carrying such songs as “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and “Route 66.” In 1947, Cole’s destiny became a bit more defined when he recorded the hit “The Christmas Song.” The following year, Cole married again after a divorce from Nadine, this time to another singer, Maria Ellington, in an $18,000 ceremony conducted by Adam Clayton Powell in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. After honeymooning in Mexico, Cole recorded “Na-

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ture Boy” which fully established him as a balladeer. But life wasn’t about to give Cole an easy time. With new fame, with new riches, Cole would face new problems. The first hurdle came when he moved into Los Angeles’s exclusive Hancock Park area. Some residents panicked when their neighborhood suddenly became integrated. They complained hotly that they didn’t want any “undesirable people” moving into their neighborhood. Cole responded that he’d be one of the first residents to complain if any undesirables tried. After recording “Mona Lisa” in 1949 and “Too Young” in 1951, Cole found himself in hot water with the IRS to the tune of $150,000. Publicly surprised at the state of his finances, Cole set out to pay off the debt at $1,000 a week, but before he could finish, he collapsed on stage during a 1953 performance at Carnegie Hall. Ulcers and internal hemorrhaging required the removal of part of his stomach. Once recovered, Cole expanded the scope of his career by moving into acting. Movies included St. Louis Blues, in which he played fellow Alabamian W. C. Handy, and Blue Gardenia, for which he was paid $10,000 for a single day’s work. He last appeared in the 1964 film Cat Ballou which costarred Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin. Cole’s rise to fame with both black and white audiences came at a volatile period in U.S. history, a time when racial tensions were heightened by a strong civil rights movement. In early 1956, Cole returned to Alabama, to perform in an integrated show before a segregated audience in Birmingham. Not everyone in the audience was a fan, as Cole found out when three men jumped on stage and attacked him in a bizarre plot to kidnap the singer. The attackers threw him to the floor, but Cole wasn’t seriously injured, and the men were arrested.

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Race again was a factor in late 1956 when Cole became the first black host of a national network television show. Although critics hailed the variety show, national sponsors shied away. In December 1957, the network canceled the show when it failed to sustain advertising. Cole blamed ad agencies for seeing him only as a black man, not as an entertainer who drew in large television audiences each week. By 1963, Cole faced criticism from the opposite side of the struggle as civil rights advocates charged that he wasn’t doing his share in ending discrimination. The critics cited his willingness to play to segregated audiences. But Cole countered that the audiences he performed before—black and white—were music fans, that they could not break laws of segregation for one night’s performance. He maintained that his performances helped to ease tension between the races by earning respect from both whites and blacks. In part to quell criticism, in 1963, Cole performed several concerts to raise $50,000 for civil rights organizations. Despite the verbal attacks, Cole’s popularity never dwindled. In 1962, the single “Rambling Rose” and the album by the same name became million-sellers, followed by two more millionselling albums, Love is the Thing and Unforgettable. At the end of his career, Cole’s records had grossed some $50 million for Capitol. During the last years of his life, Cole returned to his early art form, the musical revue. I’m With You, his first attempt in 1960, which launched Barbara McNair’s career, began in California with plans for Broadway, but bad reviews in the Midwest prevented it from ever making New York. Undaunted by the show’s failure, Cole tried again, this time with Sights and Sounds, which successfully toured a hundred cities per year for the next three years. On December 8, two days after the last performance of Sights

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and Sounds of ’64, Cole checked into St. John’s Hospital in Los Angeles to discover there would be no more Sights and Sounds. He had cancer. On January 25, 1965, doctors removed his left lung, desperately trying to stop the disease’s progress, but the effort came too late. Cole died February 15, 1965, just twelve days after his father’s death. The family held a private funeral three days after Cole’s death. With five hundred in attendance, some of the most influential people in the history of show business—George Jessel, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny, and George Burns—bade farewell to Nat King Cole, the man with the velvet voice.

William Levi Dawson Some modern musicologists examine the body of work by composer and conductor William Levi Dawson and dismiss it offhandedly as too grandiose. They say the embellished symphonic arrangements smother the black folk song idioms on which the works are based. Maybe so, but the man’s compositions cannot be ignored so conveniently, so completely. Born in 1899, Dawson left his Anniston home at age thirteen to enter Tuskegee Institute where his studies in music began. After leaving Tuskegee, Dawson obtained degrees in composition and theory from the Horner Institute of Fine Arts, Kansas City, and the American Conservatory. He then spent a short stint playing trombone in the Chicago Civic Orchestra and taught music in several colleges before finally returning to his alma mater as its director of music. Over the next twenty-five years, Dawson shaped and conducted the 100-member Tuskegee Choir into a national treasure. By 1932, the singers had gained such a respected following that Dawson was asked to bring his choir to New York to perform at the grand opening of Radio City Music Hall.

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Dawson’s own compositions date back to the mid-1920s. An authority on religious and black folk songs, Dawson consistently based his works on black folk idioms. His compositions, however, were always written in a flowery neo-romantic style, which has alienated some modern critics who believe he should have stayed closer to the basic theme on which he built the music. His works include the 1928 Out in the Fields; the 1934 Negro Folk Symphony, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski; and the 1940 A Negro Work Song. Throughout his career at Tuskegee, Dawson’s choir performed countless concerts across the United.States and throughout Europe. After he retired from Tuskegee in 1955, the U.S. State Department asked him to tour Spain as a conductor representing the United States.

The Delmore Brothers Most anyone growing up in North Alabama in the 1930s and 1940s is well acquainted with the country boogie sounds of Alton and Rabon Delmore, better known as the Delmore Brothers. Born in Elkmont and reared on a farm, the brothers were both local champion fiddlers by the time they reached their teen years, but that wasn’t too surprising since they came from a musicallyinclined family. In fact, it was their mother who taught them how to play the fiddle. During their teens, the brothers added guitarpicking to their talents, making them favorites at local gatherings and on radio. The brothers continued to play radio programs around the South until they got a shot at stardom in 1931 when Columbia Records signed them. By 1932, their popularity had grown so widespread in the South that the Grand Ole Opry took them on as regulars, a stint that would extend into a six-year run. Their career in music didn’t end when they left the Opry in 1938, however. Over the next few years, they hosted several radio

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programs in states throughout the South and Midwest, including North Carolina, South Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Ohio, and Alabama. While both brothers were accomplished musicians, the thing that distinguished Alton more than his stage and radio presence was his prolific songwriting. During his career, he wrote more than a thousand songs, including the classics “Beautiful Brown Eyes” (cowritten with Arthur Smith), a song that hit number two on the country chart in 1949; “Blues Stay Away From Me” (cowritten with Rabon); and “Brown’s Ferry Blues.” After leaving Columbia, the brothers recorded for Decca, Bluebird, and Victor, but their biggest success came on the King label from 1940 to 1951. In the late 1940s, the brothers moved to Houston, Texas, and became members in the Brown’s Ferry Four, a gospel quartet whose members included Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis. When Travis could not make performances, another future country legend, Red Foley, stood in. The quartet disbanded after the brothers moved back to Alabama and Rabon died of lung cancer in 1951. Without his partner, Alton retired from performing to work on radio in Huntsville, teach guitar and work as a door-to-door salesman until his death in 1964. The legacy of the Delmore Brothers, who are unknown to many modern country music fans, isn’t so much the music they left behind, but rather the influence they had on the development of other artists, including Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers.

W. C. Handy He liked to take credit for inventing jazz music, but neither he nor anyone else could ever prove the claim, so William Christopher Handy had to settle for being known as the “Father of the Blues.”

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Born in Florence in 1873, Handy fought an uphill battle to play his music. His father and grandfather were both Methodist preachers, and they expected the young Handy to follow them into the pulpit. As for professional musicians, the ministers believed them to be nothing more than flagrant sinners. But even after his father forced Handy to trade in his first instrument, a guitar, for a dictionary, Handy never swayed from his determination to become a musician, and there was little the minister could do about it, especially when the boy got his hands on a cornet. For eleven years, Handy studied music in the Florence black public school as well as listened to the songs Southern blacks sang in the railroad yards and factories—haunting melodies about the harshness of life, of work, of love, songs laced with the sound of spirituals. At age eighteen, Handy fled home to pursue his love for music. He ended up in Birmingham, working in an iron mill, even though he’d passed the teacher’s examination; the mill, after all, paid better. All the while, he played his music, working out on his instruments the melodies he’d heard all of his life. Handy finally formed his own band and headed for Memphis, and, in 1909, he wrote “Mr. Crump,” a song for the political campaign of E. H. “Boss” Crump. Crump won, and so did Handy. He rewrote the words, renamed the song “Memphis Blues” and effectively created a new form of music—selling the rights to it for the laughable sum of $100. “Memphis Blues” was the first popular song written to include a jazz break, the basis for Handy’s later claim that he invented jazz. He left Memphis shortly after the publication of “Memphis Blues” and headed north, to St. Louis, where his luck seemed to run out. Sleeping on cobblestones and in poolrooms, he heard a man complain one night about how he hated to see the sun go down on another day. The complaint stuck in the composer’s mind, and eventually became the basis for his most famous song,

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“The St. Louis Blues,” which put Handy on the road to wealth and fame. A movie based on his life would later bear the same title and star fellow Alabamian Nat King Cole as Handy. The song itself, Handy once said, “reflects a life filled with hard times as well as good times,” a statement that could apply to most of his blues songs. In 1918, Handy moved to New York City and opened Handy Brothers Music Company Inc., a publishing company, where his fame continued to grow as songwriter and as conductor. Even though blindness had begun to set in, he appeared in 1940 as guest conductor at the New York World’s Fair Orchestra. By 1941, Handy had become disillusioned with the blues, remarking to one reporter that the market for the music he created had vanished. But that didn’t stop him from composing. Instead of songs of hard times and trouble, he now turned to a song of dignity, a proclamation of allegiance and patriotism. “We’re Americans, Too” rejoiced in the sacrifices blacks had made for America, the honor and pride they should take in being loyal Americans, the same pride Handy had taken in his country when he raised more than $1 million in a single Liberty Loan Bonds drive during World War II. But music wasn’t the only thing being published with Handy’s name on it in 1941. The Macmillan Company that year released the composer’s autobiography, and, as a testament to the man’s popularity, Macmillan had to print a second edition within thirty days of releasing the first. RCA Victor also cashed in with Handy that year, issuing the Birth of the Blues album, containing eight of Handy’s compositions recorded by Lena Horne and Harry Levine of the NBC Chamber Music Society. In 1943, Handy nearly died when he fell from a subway platform, landing on the tracks. The fall fractured his skull, putting him into the hospital for several weeks. Although seventy

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years old, upon his release from the hospital, Handy went straight back to work writing and publishing what he called “serious compositions and march music.” In 1955, a stroke partially disabled the composer, marking the beginning of a slow slide into failing health. In 1958, Handy had planned to fly to St. Louis for the April premiere of the movie St. Louis Blues, but he never made the trip; he died on March 28. When St. Louis disc jockey Bill Wells learned of Handy’s death, he devoted the last two hours of his all-night show to the memory of his old friend by playing forty versions of “St. Louis Blues.” On the Wednesday following Handy’s death, some 25,000 mourners lined the streets as his body was carried away from Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Emmylou Harris Like most “military brats” (her father was a U.S. Marines officer), Birmingham-born Emmylou Harris grew up around the country—mostly in North Carolina and Virginia—affording her a broad range of experiences. In high school, she played the saxophone in the marching band, performed as a cheerleader, and became the class valedictorian. By the time she graduated, she was no novice to being in front of an audience. After graduation, she entered college and got married, but neither situation suited her. By age twenty-four, Harris found herself a divorced mother of a year-old daughter, chasing after an elusive career. Disillusioned with college, Harris dropped out and ventured north to New York City where she played in folk clubs and cut an album, a folkish attempt that did little to help her career along. Leaving New York for Nashville, she again found her musical career seemingly stuck in place. Frustrated to the point of quitting, she left Nashville for Columbia, Maryland, where she became a

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model home hostess, an occupation that didn’t last long. Unable to stay away from music and crowds, Harris soon began performing in various Washington, D.C., clubs, and one night in 1971, Gram Parsons, formerly of the Byrds, happened to be in the audience. Sensing that Harris had a natural feel for country music, Parsons asked her to come to L.A. to help him with his first solo album, Gram Parsons, for Warner Brothers. Next came a tour and another album with Parsons, and when Parsons died, Harris went solo, carrying with her a core following she’d developed during her tenure with Parsons. Married again, this time to record producer Brian Ahern, she began to search out songwriters who penned the offbeat songs that have become her trademark. Her first major album release, Pieces of the Sky, came in 1975 and included the number one single “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” written by Ira and Charlie Louvin, which established Harris as a star. After nearly a decade of critical and popular success, things began to sour. Critics had begun to greet her new releases with little more than yawns, and her marriage had begun to fall apart. With little to keep her on the West Coast, Harris once again went to Nashville in 1984, this time teaming up with songwriter Paul Kennerley for her first major composing project, The Ballad of Sally Rose, a concept album loosely based on her life; its release met with critical praise that been missing in recent years. Harris scored big again in 1987 when she teamed up with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt on the Grammy winning album Trio. A popular concert and radio artist, Harris continues to release new work to both critical and commercial acclaim.

Erskine Hawkins Once billed as “The Twentieth Century Gabriel,” Erskine Hawkins

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became one of the most talented and enthusiastic swing musicians of his generation, yet he has been largely ignored by jazz historians. Born in Birmingham in 1914, Hawkins learned to play drums at age seven; by the time he was thirteen, he was playing trombone and trumpet. After graduating from high school, Hawkins attended the Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery where his musicianship led to his appointment as leader of the Bama State Collegians, the college’s band. In 1934, the band and Hawkins went to New York to help generate funds to keep the college afloat. The band developed a reasonable following, and, by 1938, had become known as the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra. When it recorded “Tuxedo Junction” in 1939, the band’s popularity exploded and continued to grow into the ’50s. Adept in the blues and swing jazz, the band became known for its talented musicians rather than its originality. Paul Bascomb, Julian Dash, Haywood Henry, Avery Parrish, and Dud Bascomb all developed their talents with Hawkins. In the 1950s, Hawkins decided to trim the band’s size, the main ensemble coming together only for special “reunions.” Hawkins has continued to perform sporadically throughout the 1980s.

Sonny James As the story goes, Hackleburg native Sonny James—born Jimmie Loden in 1929—was only four years old when he made his stage debut with his show business family. They’d entered a folk contest in Birmingham and walked away with first prize. Supposedly, Kate Smith was in the audience, and, after the performance, gave the young Sonny a silver dollar, predicting that he had a great future in entertainment. That’s the way legends are made. If, in fact, the incident is true, Smith would have shocked by the accuracy of her prediction.

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Before James even entered high school, he had become a seasoned entertainer, performing throughout the South and on radio with his family. In the early 1950s, however, service in the Army briefly interrupted his music career while he spent fifteen months fighting in the Korean War. In his off-duty time, he entertained fellow troops and Korean orphans with the songs that he began writing while there. In 1952, he returned to the U.S. and picked up his career where he’d left off, hitting the club circuit, always looking for the break. It was during his travels that he met Chet Atkins who introduced him to producer Ken Nelson of Capitol. Nelson liked James’s style and signed him to a recording contract. Stardom was elusive at first, his early releases meeting with only moderate success. Then in 1957, his song “First Date, First Kiss, First Love” made the Top 10, and he quickly followed it up with “Young Love” which rose to number one on the pop charts and made the country Top 10. But then James hit a dry spell on the charts, and a career that had seemed so promising suddenly appeared in doubt. Undaunted, James continued to plug away, remaining a favorite with audiences throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, but his work didn’t make the Top 10 again until the mid-1960s when he hit with country songs like “You’re the Only World I Know” (cowritten with Bob Tubert), “Baltimore” (cowritten by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant), and the number one “Behind that Tear.” During the 1960s, James became not only a familiar face on concert stages around the country and on TV variety shows such as the Jimmy Dean Show and the Ed Sullivan Show, he also became a regular in movie theaters, starring in several films that included Las Vegas Hillbillies, costarring Jayne Mansfield, and Hillbilly in a Haunted House, costarring Basil Rathbone. In the 1970s as his songs continued to do well on the charts,

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James expanded his area of expertise by supervising the preparation of material for three of Marie Osmond’s albums, material that included her hit single “Paper Roses.” Throughout the 1980s, James, who has been dubbed the “Southern Gentleman,” continued to add credits to a career that has proved beyond doubt that Kate Smith knew what she was talking about.

Hugh Martin Hugh Martin didn’t get his first shot at Broadway until the age of twenty-three when he became a member of the quartet backing Kay Thompson in Hooray for What! Even though Thompson didn’t make the cut, the producers liked Martin and his jazzy arrangements, so they quickly recruited him to add swinging, modern choral parts to the shows The Boys From Syracuse, Dubarry was a Lady, and Cabin in the Sky. A Birmingham native, Martin trained at the Birmingham Conservatory of Music, then went to New York where he and Ralph Blane formed the quartet the Martins, which performed Martin’s arrangements in the 1940 production of Louisiana Purchase. The songwriting team of Blane and Martin had a spark of magic that impressed musical director/producer George Abbott, who repeatedly called on them for their ability to deliver modern, jazzy tunes. It was one of Abbott’s productions—Best Foot Forward—that helped Martin and Blane decide to go west to Hollywood, just as June Allyson, one of the show’s costars, had done. In 1944, the songwriting team secured a place in musical history when they wrote “The Boy Next Door,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and “The Trolley Song” for the 1944 MGM classic movie Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland. Liza Minnelli, Garland’s daughter, would later star in one of Martin’s stage productions, the 1963 New York revival of Best Foot Forward.

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By 1951, Martin had returned to New York, but that year his Broadway career virtually came to an end with the ill-fated Make a Wish, for which he wrote both music and lyrics. The musical, which ran at the Winter Garden Theater, became the first of eight failures for backer Alexander Cohen. After Make a Wish, Martin left New York to try his luck in London, where he scored quickly, hooking up with singer Jack Gray to write Love from Judy which became an immediate hit in 1952. The irony of the hit lay in the fact that Love from Judy and the failed 1951 Make a Wish were both centered around orphan girls who find happiness outside the orphanage. In the late 1950s, Martin returned to Hollywood where he reunited with Blane to write new songs for a stage version of their film Meet Me in St. Louis, aimed at stock and amateur productions, one of which starred Robert Goulet just prior to his Broadway debut in Camelot. Although the adaptation did not reach Broadway that year, it contained the new songs “A Raving Beauty” and “You are for Loving,” which were also used in the production of Best Foot Forward. After his work in film had been twice nominated for Academy Awards, Martin returned to Broadway once again in 1964 to work with Timothy Gray on High Spirits, based on Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit, but the musical was criticized as being a farce out of place among musical comedies. After 1964, his writing career became spotty at best, even though his jazz influenced melodies had once caused some critics to tout him as Gershwin’s possible successor. In 1989, a revival of Meet Me in St. Louis ran in New York, but critics were once again unimpressed. They preferred Martin’s original Hollywood work to the stage adaptations. One reviewer wondered why patrons would want to see the stage show when they could simply rent the movie.

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Sam Phillips Sam Phillips made no secret of his love for black music. Leaving his hometown of Florence in the late 1940s, Phillips began his music career as an engineer for a Memphis radio station and the owner of Memphis Recording Service, a custom service that recorded mainly social functions. On the side, though, he recorded such blues men as Howlin’ Wolf, Joe Hill Louis and B. B. King, leasing the songs to R&B labels that included Chess of Chicago and Modern of L.A. In 1952, he went into recording fulltime, opening the legendary Sun Records, its early successes coming with the same blues men he’d been recording for his Memphis Recording Service. Over the next two years, Sun moved away from the blues and more into country music, but the country music produced in Memphis didn’t sound quite like the country music produced in Nashville. Like the music that later brought attention to Muscle Shoals, the Memphis sound revealed both black and white influences. Country was only a phase for Sun, however, a slow move toward the sound that would eventually enter the recording studio into music history books. One day, Sun staffer Marion Keisker brought in a young man by the name of Elvis Presley to audition for Phillips. People would later say that Presley sounded black on his records, but it’s probably more accurate to say he sounded different—his wasn’t the typical white country singer’s voice. He could slur and moan, and put it all in a voice like none had heard before. The fact that he was white simply made it more acceptable. Phillips recognized the singer’s potential and signed him. With Presley’s first release, “That’s All Right (Mamma),” backed by Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” Sun had suddenly left country music behind in favor of rockabilly. Sun, distributing its records widely in eight states, began to

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have money problems, and those problems did not ease when some radio stations refused to play the Presley record because it had a “white” song on one side and a “black” song on the other. When RCA offered to buy Presley’s contract, Phillips seized the chance to get his company out of debt. He sold the contract for $40,000, using $5,000 of it to pay royalties to Presley. The rest of the money allowed Phillips to pay his bills and begin developing other talent that included Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Charlie Rich, creating a legacy of some of the most critically acclaimed rockabilly ever recorded.

Sun Ra “My Zodiac sign is Gemini,” he’s said, “month of May; arrival zone, USA. I studied music under the guidance of Nature’s God, and this study is yet in being; at college I studied under a private tutor, Mrs. Lula Randolph of Washington, D.C.” So says the Sun Ra—or Le Sony’r Ra—of today. But before there was Sun Ra, there was Herman “Sonny” Blount, born in 1914 in Birmingham. Blount’s musical interest first blossomed during his high school days, fueled by classmates he’s called “notable sponsors.” It was in high school where he formed his first band. After graduation, he attended Alabama A&M where he formed another band while majoring in music education. Influenced by artists such as Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith, Blount hooked up with Fletcher Henderson in 1946 in Chicago, where he had moved after graduation from A&M. Henderson and Blount were both working in bands at the Club de Lisa when they met. Blount wrote several arrangements for Henderson’s group while he and his own band set about establishing themselves in the Chicago jazz scene. By the late 1950s, Blount had become known as Sun Ra, and he had formed the core of his long-standing and influential band, the Myth-Science Solar Arkestra, with saxophonists John Gilmore,

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Pat Patrick, and Marshall Allen, all of whom remained part of his ensemble into the 1980s. Throughout his career, Sun Ra has veered away from traditional jazz, preferring to experiment with sound. When Chicagoans talked about jazz experimentalists, they talked about Sun Ra, even though his band’s early period was marked with little more than modal playing and slight experimentation. By the 1960s, however, Sun Ra’s music had grown completely experimental. His prominence in the genre led to the formation of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an experimental jazz society. By 1961, Sun Ra had tired of the Chicago scene, so he packed up the Arkestra and moved, setting up a communal living situation with his band members in Philadelphia while playing in New York. The Arkestra’s notoriety began to spread as he wrote and performed the music for the documentary The Cry of Jazz, performed with Bill Dixon, and performed in Cecil Taylor’s October Revolution in Jazz concert. With growing success, Sun Ra formed Saturn, his own record label, and recorded dozens of albums, including one of solo piano, Monorails and Satellites. While some critics have praised Sun Ra for writing music that goes beyond everyday consciousness, most 1960s audiences were not always receptive, despite the fact that his experimentation helped to shape the music of such jazz legends as John Coltrane. In the 1970s, Sun Ra’s music finally gained a sizable audience as “free” jazz grew increasingly popular. For concert audiences, Sun Ra did not disappoint, creating multimedia events that involved dancers and singers dressed in elaborately exotic costumes. And the Arkestra found itself to be one of the hottest acts at the 1976 Montreaux Jazz Festival. Sun Ra has survived the decades by wrapping himself in personal mystery while exploring new musical horizons. In de-

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scribing Sun Ra’s music, maybe composer Bill Mathieu said it best: “He senses other planes of existence known to musicians, poets, and sorcerers for as long as there has been man. Sun Ra is unique in the way he has tied up this age-old transcendentalism with current jazz and current life.”

Martha Reeves For a brief time in the mid-1960s, it became a toss up which group—the earthy, R&B flavored Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, or the smooth, pop-oriented Supremes—would prove the more popular. In 1967, the answer became academic. Just as quickly as success had come for Martha Reeves, it deteriorated, and Reeves found herself without a contract, without a label. Reeves was born in Eufaula in 1941, but her family moved to Detroit while she was still an infant. Her career in music came almost by accident after she landed a job as secretary in the artist and repertoire department of Motown. After being hastily recruited to sing back up on a Marvin Gaye cut, music took over. When she connected with the Vandellas, Motown signed the throaty-voiced Reeves, starting her and the group down a path of hits that would make them one of the most popular “girl groups” of the 1960s. Reeves and the Vandellas released twelve singles between 1963 and 1967, including the chart toppers “Heatwave,” “Dancing in the Street,” “Jimmy Mack,” and “Honey Chile.” Then abruptly the hits stopped coming, and Reeves and the Vandellas were released from the record company. Published reports said that Motown had labeled Reeves as a malcontent and simply did not want to continue the relationship. Although without a label, Reeves and the Vandellas (numerous personnel changes over the years occurred in the Vandellas’s line-up) continued to perform into the early 1970s, but drug use and depression

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finally took their toll on Reeves. The act split up, and Reeves floundered in a solo career until 1977 when she experienced a religious rebirth. As Muscle Shoals Sound’s Jimmy Johnson points out, interest in the music of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has spawned a proliferation of oldies radio stations and reunion tours of original stars— the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits, for example—and Reeves has not missed out on the nostalgia wave. During the 1980s, Reeves embarked on several tours, including highly successful engagements in England. During her long career, numerous vocalists have served as Reeves’s backup singers, but, in her recent years of performance, she has discovered that her audiences are just as versed in the songs as her professional backup singers. Throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, when not touring, Reeves has remained a popular entertainer in the Detroit area, performing regularly in local nightclubs.

Lionel Richie He made his mark with the well-crafted love ballad, the hit song that sometimes brought a tear. In the mid-1980s, though, Lionel Richie’s ballads took on another characteristic: they made people think about the world they live in. Born in Tuskegee and reared in his grandparents’ house across the street from Tuskegee Institute, Richie grew up immersed in music—everything from R&B to country to classical. His grandmother, Adelaid Foster, an accomplished classical pianist and teacher, introduced Richie early on to Bach and Beethoven and taught him the basics of music. But a musical career wasn’t what Richie had always shot for. At one point, he had considered becoming a minister. Then came a turn of events after he entered Tuskegee Institute.

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Richie was walking across campus one day, carrying a saxophone, when Thomas McClary spotted him and, assuming Richie was a saxophonist, asked him if he’d like to join a band. Richie confided that he didn’t play the instrument extremely well, but he’d give it a shot. With four other students, Richie and McClary formed the Mighty Mystics, a group whose popularity in the area grew to be second only to the Jays, another campus band. At the end of the school year, two of the Jays’s members decided to remain at school to seek higher degrees while the others left to enter their chosen fields. The two men joined the Mighty Mystics with everyone agreeing that a new name for the band was needed. The group—which now included trumpeter William King and keyboardist Milan Williams—decided that the only fair way to choose a new name was to toss a dictionary into the air and let if fall open where it would. King’s finger came down the word commodore. That summer of 1968, the group gained a sizable following in the Montgomery area and finally decided to go to New York where they met marketing man Benny Ashburn. Ashburn was impressed enough to act as their representative, getting them booked at the Smalls Paradise in Harlem, and, later on, at the Cheetah, a downtown club. When they returned to Tuskegee that fall, Ashburn in New York lined up dates for the next summer that would include concerts in Europe. On their return home, the group added to its ranks drummer Walter Orange and bassist Ronald LaPread. The group made several demo tapes for Ashburn, but the tapes didn’t pay off until 1971 when Ashburn played them for Suzanne de Passe, who hired the group to open for the Jacksons during that year’s tour. The Commodores worked with the Jacksons until Motown signed them early in 1974. The group’s first release, the instrumental “Machine Gun,” topped out at number twenty-two.

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Three records later, “Sweet Love” hit the Top 10, and in 1978, Richie’s “Three Times a Lady,” inspired by a party celebrating his parents’ thirty-seventh wedding anniversary, became the group’s first number one hit. A turning point in Richie’s career came in 1980 when Kenny Rogers asked Richie to write and produce a song for him. The resulting “Lady” went to number one and stayed there for six weeks. Richie also produced Rogers’s next album and helped prepare the music for the movie Endless Love. That year, he became the first person to make Billboard’s singles Top 10 as composer, producer and performer of three different records that included “Endless Love,” Rogers’s version of “I Don’t Need You,” and the Commodores’s “Lady, You Bring Me Up.” In 1982, Richie decided to go solo, which immediately proved a good move when he won a Grammy for Best Pop Male Vocal Performance with his song “Truly.” In 1984, his style changed somewhat with “All Night Long,” which he performed in the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in L.A. while 200 break dancers surrounded him on stage. The performance was broadcast worldwide to an audience of 2.6 billion people in 120 countries. The next time his work touched the world so completely came with the song “We Are The World,” cowritten by Michael Jackson to raise money for drought victims in Africa. The single’s huge success around the world had a profound effect on Richie, and the next time he wrote a love ballad, the lyrics meant more than usual. “Say You, Say Me,” written for the movie White Nights, explored not only love, but also friendship, peace and partnership. It won an Oscar for best song. Besides the hits Richie has written for the Commodores and himself, numerous other artists have recorded his songs, including

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Alabama, who recorded “Deep River Woman.” But that success has not been without its criticism. Some critics charge that he has affected a light, racially unidentifiable sound for the sole purpose of attracting white listeners. Richie has responded that the assertion is absurd. The music he writes, he says, is a product of his feelings and simply reflects a varied musical background. If a song is a crossover hit appealing to both black and white audiences, all the better.

Toni Tennille It’s true. The songs of the Captain and Tennille never meant much to critics, but that didn’t bother Toni Tennille and husband Daryl Dragon. Simply put, they knew how to make hits—and it didn’t necessarily require pleasing the critics. Both Dragon and Montgomery native Tennille received a decade’s worth of classical training in piano, but they didn’t come together until well after Tennille moved to Southern California with her family in 1962. Nine years after the move, Tennille was performing in Mother Earth, an ecology-minded rock musical, when the show entered the final days of its San Francisco run before moving to L.A. When the keyboard player announced that he couldn’t make the move, Tennille didn’t panic. She had heard about another keyboardist, Dragon, who had been playing in the backing band for the Beach Boys, an act that was between tours. She called in Dragon to audition, she liked what she heard, she liked the man, she hired him. After Mother Earth closed in L.A., Dragon asked Tennille to tour with him in the Beach Boys’ backing band where she played piano and sang background while Dragon manned all other keyboards. After the tour, the two returned to Southern California and began performing as a duo, finding steady work at the Smoke

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House Restaurant in Encino while they recorded demos in a Burbank studio. The demo of Toni’s song “The Way I Want to Touch You” (which would later become a hit for the couple) finally garnered attention from A&M Records, who put Tennille and Dragon to work on their first album. A&M’s move proved a smart one. The couple’s cover of Neil Sedaka’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” sold more than 2.5 million copies in 1975. Seemingly to underline the song’s message, Dragon and Tennille married that same year on Valentine’s Day. And to complement the phenomenal sales of “Love Will Keep Us Together,” the song won the 1975 Grammy for Record of the Year. But that wasn’t all the accomplishments 1975 would offer. The duo also recorded its premiere album in Spanish and released the cut “Por Amor Viviremos” (“Love Will Keep Us Together”) as a single. It charted August 16 that year while the original English version was still on the survey—the first time two versions of a number one single appeared on the Hot 100 simultaneously in different languages by the same artist. Following a trend that began with Sonny and Cher, ABC Television signed Dragon and Tennille to host a weekly primetime series, The Captain and Tennille Show, that held its own in the ratings for two seasons. Meanwhile, the couple kept producing hits, including the song that brought them to A&M, “The Way I Want to Touch You,” as well as “Lonely Night (Angel Face),” “Muskrat Love,” “Shop Around,” “Can’t Stop Dancin’,” and “You Never Done It Like That.” When not in the studio cutting her and Dragon’s own songs, Tennille was helping others, such as Elton John, singing backup on “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” and Pink Floyd on The Wall. In 1979, the Captain and Tennille charted their last Top 10 hit with “Do That to Me One More Time.” When their recording careers as the Captain and Tennille came to an abrupt halt in

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1980, the duo had sold more than 23 million records. As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. In the case of the Captain and Tennille, it wasn’t one of the most pleasant exits an act has made from recording. A personnel shake-up came at their label, Casablanca. Problems ensued between the new people in charge and the duo, and Dragon and Tennille left for Columbia, where they didn’t find the situation much better. They placed their recording careers on hold while Tennille returned to television to host a syndicated daytime talk show and Dragon designed and supervised Rumbo Recorders, a recording studio in California’s San Fernando Valley. The couple continued to perform in nightclubs and resorts, and, in 1984, with Dragon on production, Tennille recorded an album of big band standards. To finance the recording of More Than You Know (which critics did like), distributed on the Mirage/Atlantic label, the couple raised the necessary $70,000 themselves. By 1986, the duo had recorded several new songs for another Captain and Tennille album, but when they sent the tape to various record companies, the ones that bothered to respond at all said they weren’t interested in remakes. Shrugging it off as the fickle taste of record producers, the two released yet another solo album for Tennille, which garnered the same critical acclaim as her first.

Dinah Washington Blues. It’s a style of music often tinged with elements of gospel, with good reason: many of the greatest blues artists in history began their careers in gospel music. In the case of Tuscaloosa native Ruth Jones, gospel music served as her basis, but the blues would rule her life, straight to its tragic end. Born in 1924, Jones grew up in Chicago where she began

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playing piano and singing in the choir of a Baptist church. The girl was good, the proof coming when she won an amateur contest at Chicago’s Regal Theater at the age of fifteen. She later took a job as a washroom attendant to support herself when she wasn’t standing in as singer at Chicago’s famed Down Beat Room. Her break came when agent Joe Glaser happened to be in the club one of the nights she was standing in. Glaser recommended her to Lionel Hampton who auditioned and hired her into his band in 1943. Glaser, who had never cared for the sound of Jones’s name, suggested she change it to something more catchy; hence, Dinah Washington. Reflecting the influence of Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, Washington sang with Hampton’s band until 1946 when she decided to pursue a more commercial solo career. Her early efforts did not meet with overwhelming success, however. During the mid-1950s, critics dismissed her as nothing more than a pop stylist, ignoring her jazz recordings for Mercury-EmArcy from 1954 to 1955, recordings that now stand out as some of the era’s best examples of the genre. By 1958, her work began receiving wider acceptance, leading to an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival which was filmed and later included in the 1960 movie release Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Washington’s biggest pop hit came in 1959 with “What a Difference a Day Makes,” following such hits as “Trouble in Mind,” “Good Daddy Blues,” and “Our Love is Here to Stay.” Washington’s voice has been described as sweet and creamy, but a voice that can just as quickly and adeptly grow menacing. Her vocal prowess made her a favorite of the jazz instrumentalists she worked with, musicians that included Clark Terry, Jimmy Cobb, and Wynton Kelly. In May 1963, Washington hit again with “Soulville” on the Roulette label, but, even though her songs had charted high, her

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personal life had always been in turmoil. By the time “Soulville” began its rise, Washington had gone through six marriages. In July that year, she entered her seventh, this time repeating vows with Detroit Lions football star, Dick “Night Train” Lane. This marriage didn’t last long either, but it wasn’t divorce that ended it. Lane found Washington later that year lying on the bedroom floor, dead from a lethal combination of alcohol and diet pills.

Hank Williams Probably every family from Montgomery to the Florida/Alabama border has a story about Hank Williams: “My uncle (or cousin or grandparent or brother) jammed with him in his hometown of Georgiana”; “Daddy helped him out when his car broke down on the way to a show”; “My friend’s Uncle Eber showed him a lick on the guitar.” Stories abound, some true, most apocryphal. That’s the way it is when respect and admiration for an entertainer reaches proportions in death that could never have been attained in life. Williams, born in 1923, didn’t realize that he could make money with music until he became a teenager. The son of a railroad engineer and a mother who played organ in church and at gospel singings, Williams learned the gospel side of music early, singing in the church choir as its youngest member by the time he was six. For his eighth birthday, he received a guitar, but he never took a lesson; instead, he learned through experimentation and by watching other musicians, including Tee-Tot, an old black street musician. By age fourteen, Williams had formed his first band, playing local hootenannies. And it was in his teens that Williams began to develop what would eventually be his downfall: an inability to control his liquor. His band’s first break came in an amateur contest in Montgomery. The band won, and when the group

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auditioned at Montgomery’s WSFA radio, the manager gave them a job. The band, which became known as the Drifting Cowboys, remained as regulars on WSFA for more than a decade. Somewhere in there, Williams reportedly hooked up for a short time with another Alabamian, Wing native Pappy Neal McCormick. According to McCormick, Williams had heard McCormick’s band perform on a Pensacola, Florida, radio station and came south to join up. McCormick liked the boy’s singing and hired him. Even then, Williams’s drinking had become an evident problem to people close to him. According to McCormick, who invented a four-neck version of the steel guitar (the original is now displayed in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville), Williams’s mother would occasionally ask him to convince her son to sober up, but McCormick had little success. Throughout their tenure at WSFA, Williams and his band played county fairs and beer joints mainly in the southern part of the state, with no notice from people in the music recording business. Then came Audrey Williams, Williams’s first wife. Fervently believing in her husband’s talent, she took over the jobs of booking agent and road manager, constantly increasing the band’s play dates and expanding the area they covered into other states. She lit a fire of desire in Williams, and they both began to seek out contacts in hope of landing a recording contract. All the while, Williams was writing the songs that would eventually catapult him into immortality. In 1946, they landed in Nashville and made contact with Fred Rose who had formed the publishing company Acuff-Rose with Roy Acuff. Williams was reportedly in nervous shambles the day he auditioned. He sang five songs for Rose, who liked the songs well enough, but the publisher could not make himself believe that a nervous young country man could write such catchy and touch-

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ing tunes. Before deciding what to do with the musician, Rose told Williams to write a song there on the spot to prove his ability. Supposedly, fifteen minutes later, Williams sang out “Mansion on the Hill,” a song that would become one of his most recorded classics. Rose signed him, and Williams became the company’s most important writer over the next five years. In 1947, Williams signed a recording contract with MGM Records, and, in the following year, he became a regular on KWKH’s Louisiana Hayride show in Shreveport, which, at the time, was almost as popular as the Grand Ole Opry. The next year would prove even bigger for Williams. His son, Hank Jr., was born, and the Drifting Cowboys achieved their first hit on the country charts, “Move It on Over.” More hits that year were to come, including “Love Sick Blues,” “Mind Your Own Business,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” and “You’re Gonna Change,” all of which convinced Opry officials that it was time Williams became a member of their show. Williams made his Opry debut on June 11, 1949, and, from then until he left the Opry, he scored at least six hits a year. In the public eye, Williams could have hoped for nothing better, but his personal life began to fall to pieces in the early 1950s. His drinking had become common knowledge among those around him and had begun to affect his personality. Along with the booze, Williams began experimenting with other drugs— pills of different kinds. Friendships ended. And he began to suspect his associates of disloyalty. As for his wife, he accused her repeatedly of cheating on him, which led to fights and reconciliations and more fights and, eventually, divorce. As he continued to drink heavily, his private turmoil began to affect his professional life. He became increasingly unreliable, showing up late for concerts, often inebriated to the point he

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couldn’t play, or he’d simply fail to show up at all. After several warnings, officials suspended him from the Opry. Williams knew he had a problem, but instead of consulting medical professionals, he sought advice from quacks, and the problem continued to worsen. In September 1952, he married again, this time to nineteen-year-old Billie Jean Jones. The two took their vows on an auditorium stage and charged fifty cents a head for people to attend. Williams continued to perform, but the Drifting Cowboys refused to go on the road with him. Although Pappy McCormick knew Williams to be as good-hearted as the next fellow, others viewed him differently. Few people at the time recognized Williams’s drinking problem as a sickness. To them, he was just ornery, a man who couldn’t control himself. They figured that the only way to deal with that kind of man was not to deal with him at all. On New Year’s Day, 1953, after a series of one-night stands, Williams died at the age of twenty-nine in West Virginia in the backseat of his Cadillac after consuming a lethal combination of alcohol and prescription drugs. In the years since his death, Williams’s songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists, and his own recordings continue to be successfully reissued. In six short years of recording, Williams produced a legacy rarely matched by artists who spend decades at their trade.

2005 Epilogue

T

he more things change, the more they stay the same, so it’s said. No matter how the world changes, from left to right, back to the middle and upside down, we’re always going to love music, rewarding the artists and producers behind it with our hard earned dollars for a few good riffs and rhymes. Since first publication of Music Fell on Alabama, the fame of the Muscle Shoals music industry has been detailed and celebrated in television documentaries, in magazine articles, in books, and on the Internet. Gradually, through embellishment by vocalist, musician, producer, and fan alike, some of the stories have taken on mythological qualities. Music Fell on Alabama attempts to avoid mythology in favor of fact, shunning star worship in preference of history, but it’s obvious how such history can easily become bigger-than-life when it’s told and retold again and again, especially when times change and an industry’s present may no longer be as glitzy as its past. Even so, no one’s writing the “Hit Capital of the World’s” obituary yet. The music industry has changed considerably in the past decade. Switch on your radio today, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear the same voice coming from the local station that you heard coming from a station in another part of the country. That’s the centralized mentality of conglomerate radio. Save a few bucks by putting one guy behind a central microphone to do multiple shows in multiple cities each day. Spice each “local” show with 139

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local weather and a few area references, thanks to advertisers, and you have “local” flavor delivered from hundreds of miles away. As much as the boardroom brains may wish, it ain’t local. And the music? Call up and request something by a regional band—that is, if anyone actually answers that toll-free request line. Even if the central DJ knows who you’re talking about, if the band’s not on the list, you’re not going to hear the music on your radio. All that’s decided by people in the corporate home office, virtually eliminating any chance for regional, non-label bands and/or producers to get their tunes heard on “local” radio. The media hogs have successfully eliminated local appeal, sound, and choice, converting those once local stations into clones that stretch across the country, presenting us, the listening, buying public, homogenized picks-of-the-week, whether those picks are certain artists, songs, politicians, or political points of view. Whatever happened to individuality, to choice? Even with the changing landscape of modern music production and the making of “hits,” the Muscle Shoals music industry has maintained at least some of its once-magic touch. Without doubt, Muscle Shoals is far less than it was in the 1960s and ’70s when it served a seemingly never-ending stream of country, rock, folk, and gospel recording stars, but the industry is not dead yet. The two main studios, Fame and Muscle Shoals Sound, continue to contribute in a variety of ways. After selling the company’s publishing catalog to EMI in 1989, Fame’s Rick Hall and his sons Mark, Rodney, and Rick Jr., formed a new company that continued to publish hits throughout the 1990s by Fame songwriters such as Mark Narmore, Brad Crisler, and Tony Colton. One of its biggest successes during the ’90s was “I Swear.” Cut by John Michael Montgomery, the song soared to and remained at country’s Number 1 spot for four weeks. Then Atlantic’s All-4-One covered the song, reaching

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Billboard’s Number 1 spot for seventeen weeks. The song won ASCAP country and pop “Song of the Year,” a Grammy for “Country Song of the Year,” and ACM’s “Country Song of the Year.” Fame was named “Publisher of the Year” by American Songwriter Magazine. Since then, Fame Publishing’s list of hits has continued to grow with songs covered by Pam Tillis, Blackhawk, and Reba McEntire, among others. In 1999, Fame went through a few changes, selling some of its catalog to Music and Media while Rodney and Mark Hall bought the remaining shares of Fame Publishing from Rick Hall, affording Rick more time to devote to record production. In 2000 as the publishing company brought aboard writers James LeBlanc and Victoria Banks, Rick Hall produced part of the Alabama CD When It All Goes South. As Fame entered the 21st Century, the company established a subsidiary label, Muscle Shoals Records, and signed Amazing Rhythm Aces’s Russell Smith and The Decoys as its first acts. Meanwhile, Fame Publishing writers continue to pen hits for such artists as the Dixie Chicks, George Strait, Aaron Tippin, Cyndi Thomson, and many others. On the other side of town, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, under the continuing ownership of Malaco, provides production services to a variety of artists, though the pace has slowed considerably since the heyday of the ’70s. Although Malaco uses the studio to produce primarily gospel artists now, artists from other genres still gravitate to the studio. In the past decade, Melissa Etheridge, Sawyer Brown, Percy Sledge, The Angelics, and Little Milton are just a few of the artists who’ve recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound. What’s in store for the area as corporations grow larger and further drown out independent voices? No one can predict anything with much certainty, especially in these days of instant communication and gratification. Obviously, music production,

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technology, marketing, and outlets have all changed in many ways never anticipated since the peak of “The Hit Capital of the World.” Even so, Muscle Shoals mavericks are demonstrating that some things can remain the same even as they change, especially when it comes to making hits. Finally, we’ve had to say goodbye to three more “Stars Who’ve Risen From Alabama” since first publication of Music Fell on Alabama. Erskine Hawkins died in 1992 after suffering a heart attack, Sun Ra in 1993, and Sam Philips in 2003. Their contributions to music were enormous, and we hope you will seek out their work. For more information about these and other performers detailed in Music Fell on Alabama as well as other Alabama music industry greats, please visit the Alabama Music Hall of Fame Website at http://www.alamhof.org.

Bibliography

Bronson, Fred. The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, Revised Edition. New York, NY: Billboard Publications, 1988. Cioe, Crispin. “The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section: Still Breaking Records.” High Fidelity, November 1980. Clarke, Donald. The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. London, England: Viking, Penguin Group, 1989. Diehl, Irwin. “Muscle Shoals Sound Studios.” db—The Sound Engineering Magazine, January 1980. Feather, Leonard. The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties. New York, NY: Horizon Press, 1966. Flans, Robyn. “Roger Hawkins: The Drums of Muscle Shoals.” Modern Drummer, May 1981. Flippo, Hon. Ronnie G. “Muscle Shoals Music a Proud History.” Congressional Record, May 16, 1979. Flippo, Hon. Ronnie G. “Ten Years of the Muscle Shoals Sound.” Congressional Record, May 17, 1979. Forte, Dan. “Muscle Shoals: The Band Attitude.” Guitar Player, November 1982. Forte, Dan. “Rhythm Guitar Artistry at Muscle Shoals.” Guitar Player, April 1982. Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music—Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1986. 143

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Hitchcock, H. Wiley, and Sadie, Stanley. The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Volume One. London, England: Macmillan Press Limited, 1986. “Hosanna! Highlights.” Business Alabama Monthly, June 1990. Kernfeld, Barry, editor. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. London, England: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988. Lyons, Len, and Perlo, Don. Jazz Portraits, the Lives and Music of Jazz Masters. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co., 1989. “Martha Reeves Without the Vandellas.” Ebony, February 1988. Mason, Michael. The Country Music Book. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985. McLane, Daisann. “Muscle Shoals’ Southern Hospitality.” Rolling Stone, March 8, 1979. Mills, Steven, and Mehagh, Melanie. “Rock Stars Score the Future.” Omni, June 1990. Morthland, John. The Best of Country Music. New York, NY: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1984. “Muscling In.” Newsweek, September 15, 1969. Nash, Alanna. Behind Closed Doors. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Nite, Norm N. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock ’n’ Roll, Volume I. New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Publishers, 1974. “Record World Salutes the Tenth Anniversary of Muscle Shoals Sound Studios.” Record World, May 1979. Robinson, Louie. “Death Stills Voice of World-Famed Master Balladeer at Age 45.” Ebony, April 1965. Shaw, Arnold. Dictionary of American Pop/Rock. New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1982. Slonimsky, Nicolas. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Seventh Edition. New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1984. “The Sounds from Muscle Shoals.” Cash Box, August 27, 1977. Stambler, Irwin. The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul, Revised

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Edition. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Stambler, Irwin, and Grelun, Landon. The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Suskin, Steven. Show Tunes, 1905–1985. New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986. Topar, Leon. “Muscle Shoals.” Musician, April–May 1981. Weiner, Sue, and Howard, Lisa. The Rolling Stones A to Z. New York, NY: Grove Press Inc., 1983. “Where are They Now?” Rolling Stone, September 10, 1987. Whitaker, Charles. “Superstar Copes with Crossover Problems.” Ebony, February 1987.

Newspapers: Birmingham News. Dallas Times Herald. Detroit News. Florence/Tri-Cities Times-Daily. Huntsville Times. Medical Post, newspaper for the Canadian medial profession.

Index

3614 Jackson Highway 62

A A Negro Work Song 114 A White Sport Coat and Pink Crustacean 108 A&M Records 132 Abbott, George 122 ABC 37, 108, 132 Abyssinian Baptist Church 110, 118 Academy Awards, the 123, 130 “Aching, Breaking Heart” 23, 31. See Hall, Rick Acuff, Roy 136 Acuff-Rose Publishing Company 136 Ahern, Brian 119 AIDS 92 Alabama 81, 83, 105–107, 131 Alabama A&M 125 Alabama Music Hall of Fame, the 74, 87, 92, 99 Alabama State Legislature, the 74 Alabama State Teachers College, the 120 Alexander, Arthur 29, 33, 36, 37, 39 “All Night Long” 130 Allen, Marshall 126 Allen, Randy 33 Allman Brothers Band, the 67 Allman, Duane 67 147

Allyson, June 122 American Conservatory, the 113 American Studio 54 Andy Williams Show, the 67 “Angel in Your Arms” 87 Anka 76 Anka, Paul 76, 77, 78 Anniston, Alabama 106, 113 Army 27, 42, 121 Ashburn, Benny 129 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musici 126 Atkins, Chet 121 Atlanta, Georgia 37, 90 Atlantic Records 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57, 62, 133 Auburn University 27 Audio Consultants 80 Avalon Boulevard 35

B “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me” 69 Baby-Go-To-Sleep Tape 91, 93 Baez, Joan 79 Ball, Noel 34 Ballad of Sally Rose, The 119 “Baltimore” 121 Bama State Collegians, the 120 Bank of Leighton. See Draper, Buddy Barnaby Records 108 Bascomb, Dud 120

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Bascomb, Paul 120 Beach Boys, the 131 Beatles, the 41 “Beautiful Brown Eyes” 115 Becker, Walter 94 Beckett, Barry 53, 54, 65, 66, 79, 81, 100 “Behind that Tear” 121 Bell Records 53 Belmont, Mississippi 20 Benny, Jack 113 Berlant-Concertone recorder 29 Best Foot Forward 122, 123 Better Birth Foundation 90 Bevis, Fred 55 Billboard 69, 108, 130 Producer of the Year award 69 Billboard’s Hot 100 34, 48, 54, 64, 68, 121, 132 “Bird, The” 83 Birmingham, Alabama 29, 54, 90, 111, 116, 118, 120, 122, 125 Birmingham Conservatory of Music, the 122 Birth of the Blues 117 Blane, Ralph 122, 123 Blithe Spirit 123 Blount, Herman “Sonny.” See Ra, Sun Blue Gardenia 111 “Blue Moon of Kentucky” 124 Blue Seal Pals 20 Bluebird Records 115 “Blues Stay Away From Me” 115 Bowery, the 106 “Boy Next Door, The” 122 Boyce, Jesse 58

“Brahms’ Lullaby” 89 Brasfield, Rod 20 Briggs, David 30, 33, 34, 41 Brown, Freeman 58 “Brown Sugar” 62, 63, 64, 94 “Brown’s Ferry Blues” 115 Brown’s Ferry Four, the 115 Bryant, Boudleaux 121 Bryant, Felice 121 Buckins, Mickey 43 Buffett, Jimmy 107–108 Burns, George 113 Byrds, the 119 Byrne, Robert 83, 84, 87

C Cabin in the Sky 122 Cale, J.J. 65 California 86 Camelot 123 “Candy Apple Red” 40 “Can’t Stop Dancin’” 132 Canyonland 106 Capitol Records 41, 55, 56, 57, 110, 112, 121 Carnegie Hall 111 Carrigan, Jerry 30, 33, 34, 41 Cartee, Al 58 Casablanca Records 133 Cash, Johnny 125 Cat Ballou 111 Cattle Records 21 CBS Records 33, 83 Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude 108 “Cheeseburger in Paradise” 108 Cheetah club, the 129 Cher 62 Cherokees 17 Chess of Chicago 124

Index Chicago Civic Orchestra, the 113 Chicago, Illinois 40, 109 Chickasaws 17 “Christmas Song, The” 110 “Church on Cumberland Road, The” 83 City Drugstore 23, 29 Clark, Steve 40 Cleveland, Ohio 26 Club de Lisa, the 125 Coates, Odia 76, 77 Cobb, Jimmy 134 Cocker, Joe 65 Cogbill, Tommy 50 Cohen, Alexander 123 Colbert County 17 Colbert County Hospital 46 Cole, Nat King 109–112, 117 Coles, Eddie 109 Coles, Edward James 109 Coles, Perlina 109 Coltrane, John 126 Columbia, Maryland 118 Columbia Mill and Elevator Company 20 Columbia Records 114, 115, 133 “Come Monday” 108 Commodores, the 86, 129, 130 Connor, Jim 105 Cook, Jeff 106 Cooper, Dick 10, 99 Coral Reefer Band, the 108 Corey’s Bluff Tavern 27 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the 136 Country Pals, the 28 Coward, Noel 123 Cowboy Copas 20

149

Cross, Hansel 32 Crump, E.H. 116 Curb, Mike 67, 68 Curtis, King 52, 53 Curtis, Michael 10, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101

D Dan Penn and the Pallbearers 38 “Dancing in the Street” 127 Dash, Julian 120 Davis Jr., Sammy 113 Davis, Mac 37, 69, 83 Dawson, William Levi 113– 114 de Passe, Suzanne 129 Decca Records 115 “Deep River Woman” 131 Delmore, Alton 114 Delmore Brothers, the 114– 115 Delmore, Rabon 114 Denton, Bobby 22 Dexter Johnson 95 “Diana” 76 Dire Straits 80 Dixon, Bill 126 “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” 51, 52 “Do That to Me One More Time” 132 “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” 41. See Beatles, the “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” 132 Doobie Brothers, the 88 Dot Records 34 Dowd, Tommy 50, 51, 53 Down Beat Room 134

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Dragon, Daryl 131, 132, 133 Draper, Buddy 10, 35, 67, 70, 71, 74, 101 Drifting Cowboys, the 136, 137, 138 Dubarry was a Lady 122 Dylan, Bob 80

E Ed Sullivan Show, the 121 Elkmont, Alabama 114 Ellington, Maria 110 Endless Love 130 Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, the 120 Esquires, the 46 Everly Brothers, the 115 Exile 83

F Fairlanes, the 22, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 38 “Fallen Star, A” 28. See Joiner, James Fame 9, 19, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 77, 80, 83, 84, 86, 91, 95, 97 new rhythm section 58, 69 rhythm section 33, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66, 78, 79, 80, 81, 98 “Fans” 107 “Father of the Blues” 115 First Colbert National Bank 71 “First Date, First Kiss, First

Love” 121 First Federal Savings and Loan 35. See also Florence First National Bank 35 Florence 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 27, 35, 42, 71, 116, 124 Floyd, Pink 132 Flying Colors 92 Foley, Red 115 Fonda, Jane 111 Ford Motor Company 18 Foster, Adelaid 128 Francis, Connie 82, 95 Franklin, Aretha 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 76 Freedom Hills 25 Fritts, Donnie 30, 37, 38 Ft. Campbell, Kentucky 33 Ft. Payne, Alabama 106, 107 “Funky Broadway” 50 Fuqua, Bonnie 11 Future Farmers of America 26, 27

G Gadd, Steve 94 Galkin, Joe 47 Gardner, Dave 21 Garland, Judy 122 Gatlin, Larry 83 Gaye, Marvin 127 Gentry, Bobby 76 Gentry, Teddy 106 Georgiana, Alabama 135 Gibbs, Terri 83 Gilmore, John 125 Gimme Shelter 64 Glaser, Joe 134 Golden, William Lee 105 Goldsboro, Bobby 69

Index “Good Daddy Blues” 134 Gosdin, Vern 105 Goulet, Robert 123 Grammy Awards 130, 132 Grand Ole Opry 26, 70, 114, 137 Gray, Jack 123 Gray, Timothy 123 Greaves, R. B. 62 Greene, Marlin 44, 46, 48 Gulf Coast, the 108

H Hall, Linda 10, 25, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47, 51, 54, 55, 58, 67, 69, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 98, 99 Hall, Mark 84, 100 Hall, Rick 9, 10, 19, 22, 24, 25–30, 27, 31, 32, 33–36, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 97, 98, 100, 101 Hamilton, Alabama 22 Hampton, Lionel 134 Hancock Park 111 Handy Brothers Music Company Inc. 117 Handy, W. C. 19, 111, 115 Handy, William Christopher. See Handy, W. C. Hard Times 79 Hardin, Gus 83 Harlem, New York 110 Harris, Emmylou 118–119 “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” 122

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“Having My Baby” 76, 77 Hawkins, Erskine 105, 119– 120 Hawkins, Roger 31, 43, 52, 53, 54, 55, 61, 65, 66, 81, 95 “Heatwave” 127 Helen Keller Hospital 89 Henderson, Fletcher 125 Henry, Haywood 120 Herman’s Hermits 128 Hess, Jake 105 High Spirits 123 Hillbilly in a Haunted House 121 “Hit Capital of the World” 79. See Muscle Shoals Holiday, Billie 134 Homemade 68 “Honey” 69 “Honey Chile” 127 Hood, David 31, 54, 61, 65, 81, 85 Hooray for What! 122 Horne, Lena 117 Horner Institute of Fine Arts, Kansas City 113 Hosanna! Records 101 Hot 86 Houston, Texas 115 Houston, Thelma 86 Howell, Lottice 105 Howell, Reuben 86 Howlin’ Wolf 124 Hughes, Jimmy 39, 47 Huntsville, Alabama 88, 115 Hurston, Kelson 22 Husky, Ferlin 22

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Music Fell on Alabama

I “I Don’t Need You” 130 “I Never Loved a Man” 51 “If I Could Only Win Your Love” 119 “I’ll Be There” 68 “I’ll Take You There” 65 “I’m Qualified” 39. See Hughes, Jimmy I’m With You 112 “I’m Your Puppet” 54 Integrity Music Inc. 101 Internal Revenue Service 111 “Is a Bluebird Blue?” 30. See Penn, Dan “It’s Only a Paper Moon” 110 Ivey, Clayton 58, 70, 85, 86 Ivy, Quin 10, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49

J Jackson, George 68 Jackson Highway studio 55, 57, 80, 97 Jackson, Michael 91, 130 Jacksons, the 68, 87, 129 Jagger, Mick 63, 94 James, Sonny 120–122 Jamie-Guyden Records 39 Jays, the 129 Jazz on a Summer’s Day 134 Jessel, George 113 Jimmy Dean Show, the 121 Jimmy Johnson 95 “Jimmy Mack” 127 John, Elton 132 Johnson, Dexter 10, 19, 27, 59, 60 Johnson, George 80

Johnson, Grace 10 Johnson, Jay 100 Johnson, Jimmy 9, 10, 31, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 70, 73, 78, 80, 81, 82, 95, 96, 98, 100, 128 Johnson, Ray 10, 20, 59 Joiner, James 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 70, 76 Joiner, Judy 22, 23 Jones, Billie Jean 138 Jones, Brian 62 Jones, Grandpa 115 Jones, Ruth. See Washington, Dinah Jones, Tom 76 Jordan, Irene 105 June Jam 107

K KDA 44 “Keep Her in Her Place” Award. See National Organization of Women, the Keisker, Marion 124 Keller, Hellen 18 Kelly, Paul 45 Kelly, Wynton 134 Kennerley, Paul 119 Key West, Florida 108 Keynotes, the 59 Killen, Buddy 43, 105 King 115 King, B. B. 124 King, Bill 74 “King Cole” 109. See Cole, Nat King King Cole Trio, the 110 King Curtis Plays the Great

Index Memphis Hits 52 King, William 129 “Kodachrome” 66 Korean War, the 27, 121

L “Lady” 69, 130 “Lady, You Bring Me Up” 130 “Land of 1,000 Dances” 50 Lane, Dick “Night Train” 135 LaPread, Ronald 129 Las Vegas Hillbillies 121 Lauderdale County 17 Lawler, Tammy 10 Laxton, Ken 51 LeBlanc, Lenny 101 Lee, Brenda 23, 28 Leighton 45 Leighton, Alabama 35, 39 Lennon, John 81 Lennon, Julian 81 “Let’s Do It Over” 41 Levine, Harry 117 Lewis, Cameron 45 Lewis, Jerry 113 Lewis, Jerry Lee 125 Liberty Loan Bonds 117 Loden, Jimmie. See James, Sonny London, England 123 “Lonely Boy” 76 “Lonely Night” 132 Long Beach, California 110 Los Angeles, California 67, 80, 82, 98, 108, 110, 111, 113, 119, 130, 131 Louis, Joe Hill 124 Louisiana Hayride 137 Louisiana Purchase 122 Louvin, Charlie 119

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Louvin, Ira 119 Love from Judy 123 Love is the Thing 112 “Love Sick Blues” 137 “Love Will Keep Us Together” 132 Lowe, Junior 43, 50, 58 Lowery, Bill 37, 38, 40, 41, 69 Lulu 65 Lynyrd Skynyrd 49, 62, 82

M MacAnally, Mac 87 MacGregor, Mary 79 “Machine Gun” 129 Macmillan Company, The 117 Make a Wish 123 Malaco 81, 98 Malone, Janna 10 Mann, Herbie 65 Mansfield, Jayne 121 “Mansion on the Hill” 137 “Margaritaville” 108 Martin, Bennie 27 Martin, Dean 113 Martin, Hugh 122–123 Martins, the 122 Marvin, Lee 111 Mathieu, Bill 127 McClary, Thomas 129 McCormick, Pappy Neal 136, 138 McDonald, William 18 McNair, Barbara 112 MDJ Records 107 Meet Me in St. Louis 122, 123 Mel & Tim 66, 79 “Memphis Blues” 116 Memphis Horns, the 48 Memphis Recording Ser-

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vice 124 “Memphis sound” 53, 61, 124 Memphis, Tennessee 54, 116, 124 Mercury-EmArcy Records 134 MGM 68, 122, 137 Miami, Florida 55, 57, 86 Mighty Mystics, the 129 Miller, Jimmy 63 Miller, Johnny 110 Milsap, Ronnie 84 “Mind Your Own Business” 137 Minnelli, Liza 122 Mobile, Alabama 101, 107 Modern of L.A. 124 Moman, Chips 54 “Mona Lisa” 111 Monkees, the 105, 128 Monorails and Satellites 126 Monroe, Bill 124 Montgomery, Alabama 109, 120, 129, 131, 135 Montgomery, Melba 21 Montgomery, Peanut 21, 34 Montreaux Jazz Festival, the 126 Moore, Oscar 110 More Than You Know 133 Mother Earth 131 “Motorcycle Mama” 70 Motown 86, 127, 129 “Move It on Over” 137 Muscle Shoals 17, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37, 38, 41, 44, 45, 51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 79, 80, 86, 97, 99, 100, 101, 124 history of 17

industries of 17 music industry of 9, 17, 24, 25, 28, 32, 43, 49, 50, 58, 59, 67, 69, 74, 75, 78, 84, 85, 96, 97, 101 musical influences of 18, 51 Muscle Shoals High School 71 Muscle Shoals Horns, the 58 Muscle Shoals Music Association 101 Muscle Shoals Music Celebration 70 Muscle Shoals Sound 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 86, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 128 “Muscle Shoals sound” 54, 61 Muscle Shoals Sound Recording Studio 9, 69 Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section. See Fame: rhythm section “Muskrat Love” 132 “Mustang Sally” 50 “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” 137 “My Home’s in Alabama” 107 Myrtle Beach, South Carolina 106 Mystics, the 54, 85, 86 Myth-Science Solar Arkestra, the 125, 126

N Nabors, Jim 105 Nathaniel Adams Coles. See Cole, Nat King Nathaniel Coles. See Cole, Nat King

Index National Organization of Women, the 76 National Recording Corporation 37 “Nature Boy” 110 Naval Reserve Center 80 NBC Chamber Music Society 117 Negro Folk Symphony 114 Nelson, Ken 121 New Christy Minstrels, the 108 New Orleans, Louisiana 107 New York 52, 53, 54, 80, 82, 98, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 126, 129 Newport Jazz Festival, the 134 Newsweek 54, 58 Newton, Wayne 71, 76

O Oak Ridge Boys, the 105 Oakland City, Indiana 85 October Revolution in Jazz 126 “Old Time Rock & Roll” 80 Oldham, Spooner 30, 41, 43, 52, 54 On the Road 65 “One Bad Apple” 68 “One for the Money” 83 “One Man’s Ceiling, Another Man’s Floor” 66 Orange, Walter 129 Orbison, Roy 23, 28, 125 Osmond, Marie 83, 122 Osmonds, the 67, 68, 69, 76, 83 “Our Love is Here to Stay” 134 Out in the Fields 114 Owen, Randy 106

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P Panoply of the Arts Festival 88 “Paper Roses” 122 Parrish, Avery 120 Parsons, Gram 119 Parton, Dolly 119 “Pass It On Down” 107 Patrick, Pat 126 Pearl, Minnie 20 “Pencil Thin Mustache” 108 Penn, Dan 24, 29, 30, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 54 Pensacola, Florida 53 Perkins, Carl 125 Phil Campbell 22, 30, 31, 32 Philadelphia Orchestra, the 114 Phillips, Sam 18, 30, 124 Pickett, Wilson 50, 67, 105 Pieces of the Sky 119 “Pirate Looks at Forty, A” 108 “Please Please Me” 41. See Beatles, the Powell, Adam Clayton 110 Presley, Elvis 69, 115, 124, 125 Prince, Wesley 110 Princess Theater, the 29 Pruett, Jeanne 105 Purify, Bobby 54 Purify, James 54 Purifys, the 54 Putnam, Norbet 36, 41

Q Quinvy Studio 44, 45, 55, 70

R R&B 31, 39, 50, 53, 57, 58, 62, 66, 68, 82, 83, 84, 105, 106, 124, 127, 128

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Music Fell on Alabama

Ra, Sun 125–126 Radio City Music Hall 113 “Rambling Rose” 112 Randolph, Lula 125 “Raving Beauty, A” 123 RCA 107, 117, 125 Reed, Jerry 83 Reeves, Martha 127–128 Reynolds Aluminum Company 18, 27, 60, 77 Rhythm Swingers, the 28 Rich, Charlie 33, 125 Richard, Little 76 Richards, Keith 63, 64 Richie, Lionel 128–130 “Road Runner” 65 Robbins Rubber Company 39 Robinson, Nadine 109, 110 “Rock-a-bye Baby” 89 Rocker Clutch Division 27 Rockford, Illinois 27 Roe, Tommy 37, 38 Rogers, Kenny 69, 130 Rogues of Rhythm, the 109 Rolling Stones, the 34, 62, 63, 94 Ronstadt, Linda 119 Rose, Fred 136 Rossington Band, the 100 Rossington, Gary 82 Roulette Records 134 “Route 66” 110 “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” 88 Rumbo Recorders 133 Russell, Leon 65

S Sailcats, the 70 Sanford and Townsend 80

Saturn Records 126 “Say You, Say Me” 130 Scaggs, Boz 65 Schroeder, Papa Don 53, 54 Second Street. See Quinvy Studio Sedaka, Neil 132 Seger, Bob 65, 80 Senn, Charles 33, 38 Shaker 97 Shawnees 17 “She got the Goldmine and I got the Shaft” 83 Sheffield, Alabama 17, 19, 35, 44, 71, 79, 80 Sheffield Chamber of Commerce, the 67 Sheffield Hotel 34 Shenandoah 83, 98 Sheppard, T. G. 83 Sherrill, Billy 22, 24, 28, 29, 32, 33, 68 Shootout at the Fantasy Factory 65 “Shop Around” 132 Shuffle Along 109 Sights and Sounds 112 Simon, Joe 41 Simon, Paul 65, 66 Sinatra, Frank 113 Singing Clouds, the 39 Sledge, Percy 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 “Slip Away” 62 Smalls Paradise, the 129 Smith, Arthur 115 Smith, Bessie 125, 134 Smith, Kate 120, 122 Smoke House Restaurant, the 131

Index “Son of a Son of a Sailor” 108 Sonny and Cher 132 “Sorry I’m Late, Lisa” 38 “Soulville” 134 South Carolina 86 South, Joe 37 Southern gospel music 26 Southern Pacific 83 Spar Music 30, 31, 33, 37 St. John’s Hospital 113 “St. Judy’s Comet” 66 St. Louis Blues 111, 116, 118 Stafford, Tom 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 68 Staple Singers, the 65 Starting All Over Again 79 “Starting All Over Again” 66 Stax studios 50 “Steal Away” 41, 47, 69. See Hughes, Jimmy Stevens, Ray 37 Stewart, Jim 50 Stills, Stephen 80 Stokowski, Leopold 114 Stovall, Walter 22 “Straighten Up and Fly Right” 110 Sun Records 124 “Suspicious Minds” 69 Swampers. See Fame: rhythm section “Sweet Home Alabama” 62 “Sweet Lorraine” 110 “Sweet Love” 130 “Sweet Soul Music” 65 Swingle, Ward Lamar 105

T “Take a Letter, Maria” 62 “Take Me to the Mardi

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Gras” 66 Tales From Margaritaville 109 Tams, the 37, 38 Taylor, Cecil 126 Tee-Tot 135 Temptations, the 86 Tennessee River 9, 17, 80 “Tennessee River” 107 Tennessee Valley 17 Tennessee Valley Authority 20 Tennille, Toni 131–133 Terry, Clark 134 Terry, Gordon 27 Tex, Joe 43 Texas in My Rearview Mirror 83 “That’s All Right (Mamma)” 124 The Boys From Syracuse 122 The Captain and Tennille Show 132 The Cry of Jazz 126 The Osmonds 68 The Road Not Taken 83 The Wall 132 There Goes Rhymin’ Simon 65, 66 “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me” 62 “There’s No Getting Over Me” 84 Thompson, Kay 122 Thompson, Terry 33, 34, 41 “Three Times a Lady” 130 Times of Your Life 77 “Too Young” 111 “Torn Between Two Lovers” 79 Traffic 65 Travis, Merle 115 Tree Publishing Company 43, 105

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Music Fell on Alabama

Trio 119 “Trolley Song, The” 122 “Trouble in Mind” 134 True Light Baptist Church 109 “Truly” 130 Tubert, Bob 121 Tucker, Tanya 21, 33 Tune Records 22, 23, 25, 28, 29 Tuscumbia, Alabama 17, 35, 71 Tuskegee, Alabama 128, 129 Tuskegee Institute 113, 128 “Tuxedo Junction” 120 “Twentieth Century Gabriel, The” 119. See Hawkins, Erskine Twitty, Conway 30

U U.S. State Department, the 114 Unforgettable 112 Uni Records, MCA's 68 United Artists 77, 78 University Hospital 90, 91 University of Alabama 90 football 77 University of Mississippi 49 University of North Alabama 42, 44, 60, 87 Upton, Pat 105 Uttal, Larry 53

V Vandellas, Martha Reeves and the 127 Vee Jay Records 41, 69. See Clark, Steve Victor Records 115 Virgin Islands, the 55

W Warner Brothers 119 Washington, D.C. 119 Washington, Dinah 133–134 Waters, Ethel 125 “Way I Want to Touch You, The” 132 “We Are The World” 130 Wells, Bill 118 “We’re Americans, Too” 117 Wexler, Jerry 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57 “What a Difference a Day Makes” 134 “What Kind of Fool” 38. See Tams, the “When a Man Loves a Woman” 45, 49, 65, 70. See Sledge, Percy White Nights 130 White, Ted 51, 52 Widget Studio 70, 91 “Wild Horses” 62 Wildcountry. See Alabama Williams, Audrey 136 Williams, Hank 100 Williams Jr., Hank 81, 137 Williams, Milan 129 Wilson Dam 18 Wilson Dam Highway 32 Wilson Dam Highway studio 39. See Fame Recording Studios Wilson, Marvin 22 Wilson, Ransom 105 Winter Garden Theater, the 123 Wishbone Recording Studio 70, 85, 86, 87, 90

Index WJOI 20 WLAY 22, 39, 44, 45 WMAK 34 Wood, Randy 34 Woodford, Terry 10, 70, 71, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101, 105 “Woolly Bully” 97 Wopat, Tom 98 World War I 18 World War II 80, 110, 117 World’s Fair 117 Wright, Andrew 45 Wright, Leroy 46 WSFA 136 Wynette, Tammy 33

Y Yale University 65 Yarrow, Peter 79 “Yes, We Have No Bananas” 109 “Yo Yo” 68 “You are for Loving” 123 “You Better Move On” 34, 36, 39, 41 “You Gotta Move” 62 “You Never Done It Like That” 132

Young, Faron 27 “Young Love” 121 “You’re Gonna Change” 137 “You’re the Only World I Know” 121

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About the Author

C. S. Fuqua’s published books include Divorced Dads, Notes to My Becca, and the four-novel audio book series Deadlines. His poems and short stories have appeared widely in publications such as Chiron Review, Pearl, Oasis, The MacGuffin, Dark Regions, Brutarian, Christian Science Monitor, Cemetery Dance, Bogg, and Year’s Best Horror Stories XIX, XX and XXI.