Rick Hall and the beginning of FAME Music Everything from Muscle Shoals comes back to the water that sang. As the blind singer Clarence Carter commented, “Helen Keller was from Muscle Shoals and it was always amazing to me the things she was able to accomplish being blind and deaf.” Famously, the first word that Keller learned was “water” – the well where she learned the word is a famous landmark. Muscle Shoals was in many ways the home of the blues, the home of rock’n’roll, and the home of soul music, even if the Alabama pioneers had to journey to the relatively more pluralistic city of Memphis, Tennessee, in order to bring the music they loved to a wider audience.
It’s not a big town – population some 13,000 – and yet it’s home to some of the greatest records in the history of popular music.īlues pioneer WC Handy and Sam Phillips, who would famously discover Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, came from close by. Life in Muscle Shoals is slow – it can feel as though time has stood still there. In 1924, Wilson Dam was completed, destroying the hazardous shoals that gave the new town and its neighborhood its name. Home to some of the greatest records in history The Yuchi Indians called the Tennessee “the river that sings.” Legend told of a woman who lived in the river and sang songs that protected her people. Men and birds alike fish in the river, as the sun beats down on the swampland where alligators wait.
To the casual observer, Muscle Shoals is just a quiet Alabama town, surrounded by verdant countryside and bordered by the vast Tennessee River. On the bank of the Tennessee River, about halfway between Memphis and Atlanta, lies the town of Muscle Shoals. The sleepy town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, would become the unlikely destination for America’s greatest recording artists, churning out classic hits like Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves a Woman” “I Never Loved A Man” by Aretha Franklin “Brown Sugar” by The Rolling Stones and “I’ll Take You There” by The Staple Singers.
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