I wonder how many times I have been asked that question. Why did great music happen in Muscle Shoals? Was it something in the river? Was it just such a small place there was nothing else to do but make records?
I've always reacted in several ways. First, when people talk about Muscle Shoals music they are, by and large, talking about the glory years. That period from the early to mid 60s that spanned about 10 years to the mid 70s is what is best remembered. Well, guess what? That period is the timeline of what any pop music historian would say was when the best music was made everywhere. It began around the British Invasion and lasted until the birth of disco. It encompassed The Beatles, Rolling Stones, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Sly and The Family Stone, Janis Joplin, The Allman Brothers and most of the really exciting and cool music that is still bought today. It was a convergence of influences, rebelliousness, technology and experimentalism that created the artists that, many of whom, are still the biggest concert tickets out there close to FIFTY years later.
Secondly, music was not just being recorded in New York, Los Angeles and Muscle Shoals. Phenomenal music came during that period from Stax in Memphis and Motown in Detroit. It was happening in Macon and Jackson. Philadelphia had people all over the world joining hands and forming a Love Train. It was even happening in Miami with Henry Stone and Steve Alaimo and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were reinventing country music in Bakersfield. Great music oozed out of the pores of the entire world for one, groovy 10 year span of time. It was not subjected to so many filters yet. It was unfettered and fearless.
Labels looked around for interesting and cheaper alternatives for music and found it all over the place. Recorded music was still a cottage industry where dreamers with a guitar and 25 bucks to pay a radio station to let them use their mics could make a recording.
In large part, the labels came to Muscle Shoals for the same thing they went to all the other places to find: a pool of good musicians and writers who would work cheap. And there was usually a ringleader in place that congregated the people. They were part musician, part salesman. They had talents as showmen and hucksters. Some saw them as visionaries and some as megalomaniacs. Their names were Berry Gordy or Sam Phillips or Al Bell or Kenneth Gamble or Leon Huff or Phil Walden or Henry Stone or Rick Hall or something else. But they were important as an interface between the musicians, artists and writers and the record labels. They knew how to talk to all of them. Because they had been record store owners and radio guys and car salesmen in previous lives, they knew the art of the deal. And in music in those days, the deal was king.
The real question that people should ask is this: Why is it STILL happening in Muscle Shoals? Stax in Memphis and Hitsville in Detroit are museums now. Macon is gone. No more Sound of Philadelphia. Nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds in most of these places now.
But after those other places were shuttered up, probably another 50 number one songs were written by Muscle Shoals folks. When the glory days were over, most of us around the Shoals were just getting started. Hits were about to be penned by Tommy Brasfield, Robert Byrne, Mac McAnally, Jerry Wallace, Terry Skinner, Ken Bell, Lenny LeBlanc, Ava Aldridge, Gary Baker, Steven Dale Jones, Brad Crisler, Mark Narmore, James LeBlanc, John Paul White, George Jackson, Eddie Struzick, Donny Lowery, Chris Tompkins, Mickey Buckins, George Soule, Darryl Worley, Mike McGuire and the list goes on.
And these days a wave of indy music is also affiliated with the Shoals. The Alabama Shakes, The Civil Wars, Jason Isbell, The Secret Sisters, The Drive By Truckers and other up and coming acts all have members calling the Shoals their home base.
For me the question is not only "Why did a music scene get started in a room over a drugstore in Florence, Alabama and grow into famous recordings by Aretha Franklin and The Rolling Stones and Wilson Pickett and Bob Dylan?" -not that it was not amazing and unusual for such a small, out of the way place. The million dollar end to the question is "And why is it not dead yet?"
