Since the early 2000s, a trend has emerged where historically important studio and back-up musicians are receiving wider public recognition, and the accolades have come from a variety of sources. During the past ten years a limited number of documentary films have been made that focused on the contributions of highly influential but relatively unknown musicians. Standing in the Shadows of Motown, released theatrically in 2003, chronicled the story of the Funk Brothers, the group of studio musicians who performed on nearly every track recorded in the 1960s for the Detroit-based label. In 2008, The Wrecking Crew, a film about the Los Angeles studio musicians known by the same name and who appeared on hundreds of pop, rock, and jazz records, appeared in major film festivals across the globe.1 More recently, 2013 saw the release of 20 Feet From Stardom that highlights the stories and musical contributions of several backup singers who perform and are featured on many iconic pop and rock tracks.2 Collectively, these films shine a spotlight on individual
musicians who do not generally stand at center stage.
The music industry has also helped to raise the profile of accompanying musicians. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame created an award for sidemen, now known as the “Award for Musical Excellence,” in 2000. Musicians honored in this category include Bill Black and Scotty Moore, both of whom backed Elvis Presley; Hal Blaine, the drummer for the
1Due to legal complications over the music rights in this film, The Wrecking Crew has not been released
theatrically. For more information see the film’s website, http://wreckingcrew.tv/.
Wrecking Crew; Chet Atkins, guitarist; James Jamerson, Funk Brothers’ bass player; King Curtis, a saxophonist who appeared on numerous hit records; and others. Only in 2012, however, did the Rock Hall induct the backing bands the Blue Caps, the Comets, the Crickets, the Famous Flames, the Midnighters, and the Miracles long after their leaders, Gene Vincent, Bill Hayley, Buddy Holly, James Brown, Hank Ballard, and Smokey Robinson, respectively, had been enshrined. Among the numerous studio musicians that worked in Muscle Shoals and performed on hundreds of hit records, only keyboardist Spooner Oldham is officially honored by the Rock Hall: he was inducted in 2009. The Musicians Hall of Fame, located in Nashville, opened its doors in 2006 and inducted the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (MSRS) and friends in 2008.3
The value and importance of studio musicians has long been accepted among music industry insiders. The majority of the public, however, is likely unaware of who exactly, besides the star singer, also performs on the songs they have been listening to. Both the films and awards elevate the public status of these musicians, and may even intensify people’s curiosity about their personal histories. But the snapshots offered on film and brief biographies that accompany awards cannot adequately explain the journey taken by these musicians as they developed from novices into seasoned studio veterans.
This chapter details how a group of men born and raised during the 1940s and ‘50s in-and-around Muscle Shoals, Alabama became session musicians—the accompanying musicians who play on recordings. I am primarily concerned with the process these
Southern-born men went through on their way to extremely successful careers in the music
3The MSRS are Jimmy Johnson (guitar), David Hood (bass), Barry Beckett (keyboards), Roger Hawkins
(drums); their friends are Spooner Oldham and Clayton Ivey (keyboards), Randy McCormick, Pete Carr, and Will McFarlane (guitar). See <http://www.musicianshalloffame.com/2008-mhfm-inductees/the-muscle-shoals- rhythm-section-friends/>, accessed 28 June 2013.
industry. How did these individuals transform from teen-aged amateurs into world-class session musicians? Using recent interviews with many of the session players and industry personnel who worked in Muscle Shoals and drawing from archival sources, this chapter follows the development and maturation of these individuals within this relatively isolated musical community.
The musical journeys of these musicians began during the 1950s, a moment in American history that gave rise to a teen culture that bonded, particularly in the South, over the sounds of R&B and rock ’n’ roll; the careers of the Alabama musicians ultimately flourished in the 1960s and ’70s. Chronicling the often-elaborate series of transformative musical events reveals how these individuals developed from eager young musicians from northwest Alabama into seasoned music industry professionals. Also examined here are the roles these individual musicians filled during the recording of select tracks associated with star performers such as Arthur Alexander and Wilson Pickett. In order to address the process of becoming session musicians, I closely scrutinize the recording studio-practices utilized in Muscle Shoals in general and at FAME in particular. Rick Hall, the owner-chief engineer- producer of FAME, relied upon practices modeled after major studios located in Nashville and New York, but often took liberties, especially regarding the length of sessions, to achieve his desired results. As FAME began to produce a steady stream of successful recordings by the mid-1960s, music industry “outsiders” including veteran producers and “imported” session musicians from New York and Memphis became a frequent part of the Muscle Shoals hit-making process. Ultimately, this chapter details Muscle Shoals’ musical
leader by the late 1970s as seen primarily through the lens of multiple studio musicians who helped make that change occur.
The initial sections of this chapter provide necessary framework for comparing sessions in Muscle Shoals to other locations such as Nashville and New York City. The sections that follow chronicle and examine the progression of the Muscle Shoals musicians (Table 2.1) from musical novices to seasoned professionals by offering an account of the Shoals music industry during the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and how some musicians became involved in studio work. Next, I examine a few of the musical challenges faced by Hall’s first rhythm section, followed by an account of the first national hit recorded at FAME. I then chronicle the formation of Hall’s second house band. After that, I scrutinize Rick Hall’s rather unique recording practices. Finally, the last two sections address the working relationships between Muscle Shoals studio musicians and two different record producers, Hall and Jerry Wexler, and provide a detailed account of several historically important recording sessions, many of which included non Muscle Shoals-based session musicians.
Name Instrument/Position
Tommy Cogbill (1932-1982) Electric Guitar/Electric bass
Chips Moman (1936– ) Guitar
Jerry Masters* (1939– ) Engineer; Electric Bass
Marlin Green Guitar
Albert “Junior” Lowe (1940– ) Acoustic & Electric bass; Guitar
Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery* (1941– ) Guitar
Terry Thompson (1941–1965) Guitar
Harvey Thompson* (1941– ) Sax
Donnie Fritts (1942– ) Drums
Norbert Putnam* (1943– ) Acoustic & Electric Bass
David Briggs (1943– ) Piano
Jerry Carrigan (1943– ) Drums
Table 8.1 – A partial list of studio musicians that worked in Muscle Shoals. * indicates persons interviewed for this project.
THE RECORDING PROCESS &SESSION MUSICIANS
The recording of the most basic, elemental-sounding track often involves a complicated process that includes many participants. This process, along with the many contributors, typically remains completely hidden from the listener. Albin Zak, in the introduction to his seminal work The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, summarized the roles of those involved with the recording process as follows:
It is also clear that everything the team [those participating in recording a track] does is part of an inclusive process and that all involved are
contributors to the compositional project in some way, for all have some effect on its outcome. All employ both intuition and deliberation in a collective effort to produce the record, and all are responsible in some way for the sonic inscriptions that form the record’s essential identity. While their roles vary considerably, all of them fall under the rubric of
“recordist,” a term whose original meaning has been extended in common usage to include the work of songwriters, arrangers, performers, engineers, and producers and to account for the frequent overlaps among roles. For in
Barry Beckett (1943–2009) Keyboard (MSRS); Producer
Jimmy Johnson* (1943– ) Guitar (MSRS); Engineer, Producer
David Hood* (1943– ) Electric Bass (MSRS); Trombone
Eddie Hinton (1944–1995) Guitar
Roger Hawkins (1945– ) Drums (MSRS); Producer
Jerry Jemmott* (1946– ) Electric Bass
Duane Allman (1946–1971) Guitar
Tippy Armstrong (1947–1979) Guitar
Charles Rose* Trombone
Pete Carr (1950– ) Guitar
Randy McCormick (1952– ) Guitar
a production process that is complex and often unpredictable, roles that start out discretely defined may become quite fluid.4
Session musicians would typically be placed within the performer category. As the term recordist implies, an individual often moved between these five categories throughout the recording process.5 The hierarchical structure of the recording studio, particularly during the 1960s with the emergence of brand-name session producers such as Phil Spector and others, would have limited lateral movements among the five categories, but not entirely censured participating session musicians from making valuable suggestions.
In 1979, sociologists Richard Peterson and Howard White published a study on session musicians.6 Peterson and White intermittently gathered fieldwork over fourteen years between 1965 through 1979 at recording sessions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Nashville; their work coincides with the period under consideration for this dissertation. The authors likened working session musicians to members of “craft associations,” and defined session musicians as follows:
[O]rdinarily contracted to play for a three-hour engagement to augment the sounds of performers on phonograph records, TV and radio advertising jingles, and TV or movie sound tracks. Like movie or television production personnel, photographers, and most workers in the performing arts as well, session musicians function as one among a number of linked crafts which combine their different talents in producing artistic works. And as in the case of these other sorts of linked craft arrangements, the diverse efforts are coordinated by a charismatic figure or entrepreneur who melds their work in ever-novel ways. Among orchestra musicians this is the conductor; in
4Albin Zak, Poetics of Rock: Making Tracks, Cutting Records, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),
xii.
5In the case of the Muscle Shoals music industry, a very select few individuals profiled in this chapter would
also be considered songwriters. Dewey “Spooner” Oldham wrote songs and performed as a keyboardist. Dan Penn, a vocalist, primarily wrote songs with his partner, Oldham, but did not record as a session musician. Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery became a songwriter after he worked as a studio musician in Muscle Shoals.
6Richard Peterson and Howard White, “The Simplex Located in Art Worlds,” Urban Life 7, no. 4 (1979): 411-
the theater, television, and movies it is the director; in the phonograph record industry it is the producer.7
Peterson and White provide an almost clinical characterization of session musicians. Their viewpoint, however, discloses a few of the interwoven complexities regarding the work of session musicians, including their relationship to producers and the relationship of the session musician to the many others involved in the realizing of a particular track.
A network is formed between the individual musicians and between the musicians as unit and the producer while working on any given recording session, which is typically the case within the recording industry regardless of location. The “linked crafts” that combined different talents within the Muscle Shoals music industry became very tight-knit as members within this group (practically) grew up together.
The descriptions of studio musicians addressed above do not accurately account for a group of musicians that repeatedly worked together as a distinct unit within the same
recording studio. In the case of Muscle Shoals, two different groups of men (there were no women) formed musical units and initially worked for Rick Hall at FAME. These groups acted as translucent musical filters for the artists who came to record in Muscle Shoals. As the symbolic capital of the Muscle Shoals music industry grew through repeated success indicated by hits on industry sales charts, artists came to Alabama and recorded with these studio musicians in general and the MSRS in particular because the artists’ heard something in the sound of the rhythm sections that appealed to them. The session musicians working at FAME and the MSRS served as a conduit for the artists’ ideas while at the same time providing the artist with enough space to retain their own musical identity with more than a hint of the “Muscle Shoals sound.” As MSRS guitarist Jimmy Johnson stated in 1982, “We
are a band. When we play on someone’s record, we become that person’s band…We’ve been called chameleons, because we blend in with the artist we’re working with; we don’t
outshine them. We try to become his own band.”8 Star singers such as Wilson Pickett, Etta James, or Paul Simon utilized the particular talents of the in-house rhythm sections from Muscle Shoals in order to realize the potential of a given track.
Throughout the late 1950s and into the mid-1960s, the members of the various FAME house rhythm sections developed their craft. These musicians accrued cultural capital
through their countless hours of live performances in bars and at fraternity parities as well as their session work, and became integral in the development and success of the Muscle Shoals music industry. Exposed to numerous musical scenarios, many of the individual Shoals musicians acquired other music production talents on their way to embodying the term recordist; individual skill sets that would help convert this north Alabama region from a one- studio town in 1962 into a locale that boasted multiple studios by the mid-1970s.
A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF RECORDING CENTERS: NASHVILLE & NEW YORK
Several cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Nashville had established themselves by the mid-1950s as centers for the recording industry. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were home to the major record labels and their production operations; Nashville was home to the country music industry.9 Other cities including Cincinnati, Memphis, and New Orleans were home to independent record labels that produced recordings in locally
8Dan Forte “Jimmy Johnson: Rhythm Guitar Artistry at Muscle Shoals,” Guitar Player, April 1982, 83. 9New York had 21,036 members in the American Federation of Musicians in 1942, while Chicago had 9,685,
and Los Angeles had 6,465. Twenty-eight percent of AFM members lived in these three cities by 1942. By comparison, Memphis had only 236 AFM members in 1942. See, James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians
and the Sound Revolution, 1880-1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 196. Kraft only
operated studios as well.10 The protocols established at New York and Nashville studios in
conjunction with local musicians union will provide the necessary framework to interpret recording practices used in Muscle Shoals during the 1960s and ‘70s.
During the 1940s through the 1960s, New York City remained the center of the national recording industry. The numerous studios, including the Columbia 30th Street studio, RCA’s Webster Hall, Atlantic Records 57th Street studio, A&R studio, and others located
across the city cut classical, jazz, pop, country, and R&B tracks for many major and independent record labels.11 The abundance of recording studios also attracted many
musicians seeking work, as New York would become home to the largest local union of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). Recording sessions in New York typically lasted three hours. It is likely that the policy determining the length of recording sessions originated in New York, with other recording centers including Nashville quickly adopted the rules established by the New York local.
The recording industry of 1950s Nashville was relatively young compared to the same industry at the same time located in New York City. It took root in a substantial way after the end of World War II, when three engineers at Radio WSM (home of the Grand Ole Opry) established the Castle Recording Company.12 The Castle Recording Company, like many other independent studios, leased their studio to any interested label. By the mid-to-
10For more information see, Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, Little Labels–Big Sound: Small Record
Companies and the Rise of American Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
11For an overview of New York City as a recording center, see David Simons, Studio Stories (New York:
Backbeat Books, 2004).
12John W. Rumble, “The Emergence of Nashville as a Recording Center: Logbooks from the Castle Studio,
late-1950s several other recording studios opened in Nashville, including one built by RCA.13
The growth of the Nashville recording industry during the late 1950s and ‘60s gave birth to the “Nashville Sound”; a sound that utilized the talents of a small group of elite studio musicians, known as “The ‘A’ Team,” and a handful of producers such as Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley.
The early 1950s music industry in Nashville did not initially follow the three-hour session format.14 After hits were repeatedly produced using the “Nashville Sound” musical formula, studios adopted the New York session model. In an article detailing the activities of studio musicians during the “Nashville Sound” era, Morris Levy described a standard
recording session:
A typical recording session in Nashville lasted three hours. It was expected that four songs would be completed by the end of the session. The songs were chosen by the producer and the artist beforehand, but the studio musicians only heard them for the first time at the session. Sometimes the songs were played for the musicians on demonstration discs or tapes supplied by the publishing companies controlling the rights to the song or by the artist on the guitar or piano. The players would then sketch out the melody and song structure on scraps of paper and work out an arrangement between themselves, sometimes with input from the artist or producer. After a few run-throughs of the song to solidify the arrangement and allow the engineers to balance the sound levels, the song would be recorded. For most of the 1960s and certainly before then, Nashville’s studios did not have the equipment necessary to do a lot of overdubbing, so any mistakes that were too big to be ignored would require the song to be
redone…Sessions were held at 10:00 A.M., 2:00 P.M., 6:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. every day, and an in-demand session player scheduled fifteen