“That old deep-down-into-your-stomach-coming-up-out-of-your-heart sound, that’s the Muscle Shoals sound.” Or, at least, that’s how Candi Staton puts it at the beginning of this award-winning documentary about one of the most influential, yet least trumpeted locations in music history.
Muscle Shoals, a small town in Alabama, sits on the banks of the Tennessee River – sometimes known as the “singing” river, according to Native American folklore. The place was also – and, perhaps there’s a link – home to the legendary FAME recording studios, founded in the 1950s by producer Rick Hall. And this film, directed by newcomer Greg Camalier, is the story of how FAME and its subsequent off-shoot came to be quite so staggeringly significant to modern music history.
To give you a flavour of the place’s legendary stardust, when Columbia Records – much to their subsequent regret, no doubt – dropped Aretha Franklin, she came to FAME. Rick Hall, who naturally features heavily in the interviews (along with Bono, Keith Richards, Alicia Keys and Clarence Carter amid a glittering cast of witnesses) explains how she had previously been singing “smooth songs you couldn’t get your teeth into”. But with FAME’s in-house rhythm section, The Swampers, Aretha recorded I Never Loved a Man. It was her first million-selling record and the rest, of course, is history.
But Aretha was just one of the many huge stars to record at FAME: pretty much ever soulful act of the era cut records there, including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Tom Jones, Percy Sledge, Etta James and the Rolling Stones. And the Swampers – who are famously referenced in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, Sweet Home Alabama – were key: “When you hear them,” says Bono, “you expect them to be a bunch of black guys, but instead they were a bunch of white guys who looked like they worked in the supermarket.”
Then came the inevitable: defection. In 1969, three of the Swampers left to set up their own operation, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, going on to record with yet more huge names including Elton John, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Millie Jackson. “It was war,” says Rick Hall.
A muso’s movie? Perhaps, but with tragedy to triumph, in Rick Hall’s personal history; success for the underdog; in-fighting; betrayal; the breaking down of racial preconceptions; gossip and – of course – a kick-ass soundtrack, it’s also got all the ingredients of, simply, a damn fine cultural documentary.
Words: Kate Burt