Sam Phillips was born there but went to Memphis, where he founded Sun Studios and worked with Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, and Elvis Presley to produce the records that invented rock and roll. ![]() And not only were big hits coming from this small town, but those hits were mostly the result of Southern white and African American artists working together at a time when they couldn’t dine together in a public place.Īctually, lightning struck the Muscle Shoals area twice. In the 1960s and ’70s this wild American lightning struck Muscle Shoals and made that town of 8,000 into an international recording center that produced some of the greatest and most influential popular music in American history. Think of Mark Twain in Hannibal, Missouri Sinclair Lewis’ Sauk Centre, Minnesota William Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi Flannery O’Connor’s Milledgeville, Georgia or Woody Guthrie in Okemah, Oklahoma. In fact, much of our greatest and most uniquely American art has come from the hinterland, and much of that has been made by people who seemed to have been dropped into their provincial backwaters from outer space. But it could be argued that our Greenwich Village or North Beach were only pale imitations of their European counterparts. The mystery of how so much greatness could emerge from such an obscure location is the subject of director Greg “Freddy” Camalier’s debut documentary, Muscle Shoals, which began showing on the PBS series Independent Lens in late April.Īmerica has always had its great urban districts where artists and intellectuals collide. What do these songs all have in common? Well, they’ve all got a good beat and you can dance to them, and they were all recorded between 19 in the tiny Tennessee River town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. “I’ll Take You There” by the Staples Singers. ![]() “Land of 1,000 Dances” by Wilson Pickett. ![]() “I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You)” by Aretha Franklin. Some of America’s best-known musicians have come from its least-known places.
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