Muscle Shoals studios: Hit records in racial harmony

As a young disc jockey in the African country of Senegal, Idrissa Dia said he discovered in a stack of records, only by chance, the music of Wilson Pickett and other black American soul singers. He played them on the air.

The music — a change from the salsa and French pop music the station normally played — created an overnight storm in Saint-Louis, where the station was based. The same thing happened when Dia took the music to a station in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

Dia, now director of the French-to-Africa service for Voice of America in Washington, D.C., said the driving force of the music, which was recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, was the “righteous” performance by the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

“The name ‘Muscle Shoals’ became synonymous to ‘magical’ to me since that time,” Dia said, “as well as names like Jimmy Johnson, David Hood, Spooner Oldham, Barry Beckett and Roger Hawkins.”

It was those musicians who created a new sound, a blend of gospel, country and R&B music. “The Muscle Shoals Sound,” as it soon became known, revolutionized R&B and soul music, and in the process, attracted some of R&B’s biggest names to record in the small Southern town, from Pickett and Bobby Womack, to Aretha Franklin and Lou Rawls.

But something else was happening within the walls of recording studios in this northwest Alabama town.

Recording sessions brought together musicians and singers, black and white, during the collapse of the era of Jim Crow, a term used to describe segregation laws, rules and customs that were prevalent in the South. Alabama, especially, was known to the world as a haven for segregation, racism and hatred.

Leighton native Leo Cobb said things weren’t as bad in the Shoals area as they were in places such as Montgomery and Birmingham, places that evoked images of uniformed officials who turned snarling dogs and water hoses onto crowds of black men, women and children.

Though such overt attacks did not take place in the Shoals, blacks still were expected to follow the rules and regulations officials had in place.

This included “colored” signs present around town that indicated which doors, drinking fountains and businesses they were expected to use.

“We didn’t like it, but we accepted it,” Cobb said. “We knew automatically to get on the bus and get on the last seat.”

A studio is born

The origins of how Muscle Shoals became a major force in recording black music can be traced to the year 1959, when James Joiner, co-founder of Tune Records, helped Tom Stafford start a new business called Spar Music above the old City Drug Store in downtown Florence.

Later that year, Joiner left the music business and sold Stafford his share of the company. Local musicians Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill would enter as new partners to form Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, or FAME.

But the partnership had fallen apart by 1960, when Hall was forced out of the group by Stafford and Sherrill for “working too hard and caring too much,” said University of North Alabama English professor Terry Pace, who also is a music and film historian.

Hall would take the FAME name with him to Nashville in an attempt to convince music producer and Florence native Sam Phillips to hire him, just as Phillips had done with Sherrill, who went to Nashville to work for Phillips as an engineer for his Nashville studio.

But Hall was told that he’d never be successful there.

“(Phillips) said, ‘This town will eat you alive,’ ” Pace said. “ ‘Go back down to Muscle Shoals, dig in your heels and make it happen there.’ ”

Hall opened his own studio, with the FAME name, on Wilson Dam Road in Muscle Shoals in 1960.

Meanwhile, Stafford would try to mend his relationship with Hall after he discovered the musical talent of a young Sheffield man named Arthur Alexander.

A brand new day

Pace said that during this time, Alexander was the only black to hang out at the drugstore studio because his friend, Donnie Fritts, spent time there. Fritts was involved in the early recordings of the Shoals music industry and went on to become a respected singer, musician and songwriter.

A bellhop at a Sheffield hotel, Alexander was also a member of a gospel quartet, and his dad was a blues musician who played at some of Tuscumbia’s local restaurants.

Stafford heard that Alexander had written a song titled “You Better Move On,” which was based on personal experiences, and after hearing it, an impressed Stafford brought Alexander to Hall’s studio.

“Arthur stands there and he doesn’t play an instrument, can’t read music (and) snaps his fingers and sings ‘You Better Move On’ to Rick (Hall),” Pace said.

Hall then brings his first rhythm section in to record the song.

“You Better Move On” would later land on the national pop charts, peaking at No. 24 in 1961.

Although they didn’t realize it at the time, Alexander’s successful tune would be the beginning of a long stretch of hits from black artists who recorded at Muscle Shoals.

Muscle Shoals soon became known as “The hit recording capital of the world,” in its heyday during the 1960s and ’70s, with hits from Percy Sledge (“When A Man Loves A Woman”) to The Staple Singers (“I’ll Take You There”). What made it work was not only the musical harmony between the artists and musicians, but the racial harmony, as well, a rarity in the midst of the civil rights movement in the Deep South.

“It was just happenstance that the first major artist to come out of here was a black artist working with all white players,” Pace said. “It could just as easily ... have been a white singer who came in singing a song that was the first hit.”

Black artists, gold record, risky business

The success of “You Better Move On” affected both Hall and Alexander: Hall used the proceeds from the song to build a new recording studio on Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals, and Alexander bought a luxury car — an act that grabbed the attention of Jimmy Hughes, another unknown, as yet, black musician who earned his living at a local rubber company.

“All of a sudden, he sees Arthur Alexander driving a new Lincoln Continental through town and said, ‘Maybe I’d better go to see Rick Hall,’ ” Pace said.

Hughes, a Leighton native who received his musical beginnings by singing in his church choir and, later, with a gospel group, the Singing Clouds, went to FAME studios after receiving advice from Bob Carl Bailey, owner of the black radio station WZZA in Tuscumbia.

Hughes recorded “I’m Qualified,” a blues song. It received attention from radio stations and listeners throughout the region, but it wasn’t a big hit.

It wasn’t until “Steal Away,” a song written and recorded by Hughes, that his name was known across the country. The 1962 hit peaked at No. 17 on the pop charts about two weeks later.

According to Hall, “You Better Move On” and “Steal Away” were the first songs recorded in the state of Alabama to be significant hits.

“There were well-known pop artists from different parts of the South, some in Mobile (and) some in Birmingham,” Hall said. “But nobody to my knowledge had had a commercial hit record on a major label before we did.”

Pace said there was an awareness of how subversive or potentially dangerous it was for black and white artists to work together.

“You did have the Klan in this area and you certainly had segregation and the era of racism,” Pace said.

He said the studio sessions would be from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and then the musicians and artists, black and white, would leave the studio to go to lunch, only to find that they couldn’t sit together in restaurants.

“Then it would hit them,” Pace said. “It was just like waking up from a blissful dream.”

Percy Sledge, a legend in R&B and soul music and another native of Leighton, said musicians didn’t think about racial differences — inside or outside of the studio.

“The musicians and I, we went to churches and restaurants (and) I received the same respect as anybody else,” Sledge said.

He added that those musicians, who would later be known as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, “took him under their wings.”

“We were like brothers (and) like family,” Sledge said. “We were just as one.”

Dick Cooper, a music writer who wrote for Billboard, among other publications and who has a long history within the music industry, said the racial harmony was evident from the time he first arrived in the Shoals in the 1970s.

“You didn’t have the racial difference as you would in Birmingham,” Cooper said. “That’s what amazed me about this place when I came here because you didn’t have the cultural and racial barriers.”

Hall said black music was “welcomed with open arms” by all races. He said as a young musician with the local music group The Fairlanes, if you didn’t perform music by Little Richard, Fats Domino and others, you would probably not be invited back.

“We were taken by the Sam Cookes and the Jackie Wilsons. That was us,” Hall said. “That’s what we wanted to be.”