The Sound from Muscle Shoals

There is a small city in northwestern Alabama that, for about a decade in the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, produced more hit records per square foot than almost anywhere else on earth. The city is Florence, and the studio district just across the Tennessee River in the neighboring city of Muscle Shoals became one of the defining sounds of American popular music. It started with a man named Rick Hall, who co-founded FAME Studios in Florence in nineteen fifty-nine alongside Billy Sherrill and Tom Stafford, then moved it to Muscle Shoals in nineteen sixty.

Hall was a fiercely driven producer from the Alabama hill country, and he assembled a group of white session musicians, the Swampers, they eventually called themselves, who played with a feel that defied easy category. It was not quite country and not quite soul, though it borrowed deeply from both. The rhythm section was locked in a groove that artists from across the country kept coming back for.

Wilson Pickett recorded Mustang Sally and Land of a Thousand Dances at FAME. Aretha Franklin came in January of nineteen sixty-seven and cut the tracks that would become I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, though a backstage confrontation ended the session early, and she finished the album in New York. Percy Sledge recorded When a Man Loves a Woman in the Shoals area in nineteen sixty-six, finishing it at Norala Studio across the river in Sheffield; it reached number one on the pop charts, among the biggest soul crossover hits of the era.

The Rolling Stones came to record Wild Horses and Brown Sugar in nineteen sixty-nine. The Swampers eventually left FAME and opened Muscle Shoals Sound Studio across the river in Sheffield in nineteen sixty-nine, and the hit-making continued. Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded there.

Paul Simon came. Duane Allman worked these studios before he and his brother took their sound south to Macon. Alabama has produced an unlikely number of musicians for a state of its size, Nat King Cole, Hank Williams, W.

C. Handy, Tammy Wynette, Lionel Richie, and more. But the Muscle Shoals sound was something different: a specific place, a specific room, a specific combination of people who created a groove that artists of every background recognized as something essential.

Paul Simon, when asked why he came to Muscle Shoals, said the rhythm section had a miraculous sound. He was not wrong.