With Jimmy Johnson on guitar, David Hood playing bass, Roger Hawkins on the drums, and Spooner Oldham playing keyboards, the group came to be known as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, or The Swampers. Hall’s second house band would, however, prove to be worth their weight in gold. But as Hall began to establish a reputation and scored more hits, the regular musicians he had been using grew tired of their poor wages and left. Soon FAME studios began to attract musicians and songwriters looking to make a name for themselves, Dan Penn, Donnie Fritts, and Percy Sledge among them. A chance encounter with a young singer-songwriter called Arthur Alexander led to Hall’s first hit, “You Better Move On,” which made it to No.24 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in early 1962. Backed by his new father-in-law, Hall built a studio in an old warehouse. When Hall returned to Muscle Shoals, it was with a determination to immerse himself in the business of making records. According to Hall, the problem sprung from him being too much of a workaholic, when his partners wanted to have fun: “I was so very aggressive and fired up,” he told Peter Guralnick, author of the definitive account of soul music in the south: Sweet Soul Music. This was the beginning of FAME Music (FAME standing for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises).Īfter less than a year, however, Hall had fallen out with his partners, and he was let go. The three young men set up an improvised recording facility above a drugstore in nearby Florence, Alabama, in order to demo their songs. Together with a local hunchbacked young businessman, they formed a publishing company. Hall struck up a songwriting partnership with another local musician named Billy Sherrill when the pair played together in a band, and they began selling their songs to the likes of Brenda Lee and Roy Orbison. He lost himself in drink and in music, joining a local band and writing songs in the car he now called home. The death of his first wife in a car accident hit Hall hard, and he turned to the bottle. Unsurprisingly, this chain of events had a profound impact on Hall, who became determined to make something great of his life. Before long, his mother left the family, taking up work in a house of ill repute.
His parents’ marriage collapsed in the aftermath, each blaming the other. When he was still a boy, his three-year-old brother died in a tragic accident after falling into a tub of scalding water as their mother was doing the washing in the backyard. “We just kind of grew up like animals,” he recalled. Rick Hall grew up in a house with a dirt floor in the nearby Freedom Hills. Rick Hall and the beginning of FAME Music Everything from Muscle Shoals comes back to the water that sang. As the blind singer Clarence Carter commented, “Helen Keller was from Muscle Shoals and it was always amazing to me the things she was able to accomplish being blind and deaf.” Famously, the first word that Keller learned was “water” – the well where she learned the word is a famous landmark. Muscle Shoals was in many ways the home of the blues, the home of rock’n’roll, and the home of soul music, even if the Alabama pioneers had to journey to the relatively more pluralistic city of Memphis, Tennessee, in order to bring the music they loved to a wider audience. It’s not a big town – population some 13,000 – and yet it’s home to some of the greatest records in the history of popular music.īlues pioneer WC Handy and Sam Phillips, who would famously discover Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, came from close by. Life in Muscle Shoals is slow – it can feel as though time has stood still there. In 1924, Wilson Dam was completed, destroying the hazardous shoals that gave the new town and its neighborhood its name. Home to some of the greatest records in history
The Yuchi Indians called the Tennessee “the river that sings.” Legend told of a woman who lived in the river and sang songs that protected her people. Men and birds alike fish in the river, as the sun beats down on the swampland where alligators wait.
To the casual observer, Muscle Shoals is just a quiet Alabama town, surrounded by verdant countryside and bordered by the vast Tennessee River. On the bank of the Tennessee River, about halfway between Memphis and Atlanta, lies the town of Muscle Shoals. The sleepy town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, would become the unlikely destination for America’s greatest recording artists, churning out classic hits like Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves a Woman” “I Never Loved A Man” by Aretha Franklin “Brown Sugar” by The Rolling Stones and “I’ll Take You There” by The Staple Singers.
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