From the 1960s through the 1980s, hip-shaking soul, funky rock, and soaring pop blared out of a tiny little corner in rural northwest Alabama. Muscle Shoals—part of the Quad Cities area that also includes Sheffield, Florence, and Tuscumbia—gained a reputation for the studios that defined a Southern soul sound that blended gospel music with swampy rock and fueled by crisp, never-waste-a-note guitar work. In a segregated South, white rhythm sections and studio musicians, Black vocalists, and integrated horn sections played side-by-side in Fame, Muscle Shoals Sound, and Quivny studios, producing hits such as Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand Dances,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” Clarence Carter’s “Slip Away,” and the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” among many others. In the 1970s, these three studios and six others in the area turned out hits such as the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy,” the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple,” Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome,” Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” and Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo.”
Now, award-winning author Rob Bowman gives us the definitive history of Muscle Shoals in his exhaustive, page-turning Land of a Thousand Sessions: The Complete Muscle Shoals Story, 1951-1985 (The Malaco Press, November 25). Over 750 pages, Bowman draws deeply on interviews with nearly 100 of the musicians, producers, and engineers involved in making the music, as well as on deep archival research—including some long-lost historical documents—as he tells the stories behind the hits and the magic in the music.
