Muscle Shoals Sound Studio: How the Swampers Changed American Music by Carla Jean Whitley

No insider information, just recycled quotes

I was a fan of the Muscle Shoals sound even before I knew what it was. This unassuming region in the northwest corner of Alabama produced some of the best rock and roll records of the 1960s and ‘70s. Though the area has been home to dozens of recording studios, two companies in particular are responsible for the lion’s share of gold records to come out of the Shoals. The first was FAME studios, founded by Rick Hall. The second was Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, founded by four of Hall’s session musicians who struck out on their own. Barry Beckett (keyboards), Roger Hawkins (drums), David Hood (bass), and Jimmy Johnson (guitar) comprised the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, affectionately nicknamed the Swampers, as mentioned in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” These four musicians have played on hundreds of albums and singles by a diverse roster of artists that includes Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Traffic. Carla Jean Whitley’s 2014 book Muscle Shoals Sound Studio focuses mostly on the Swampers’ recording career, but also touches upon the broader history of the Muscle Shoals music scene as a whole.

If you’ve already seen the 2013 documentary feature film Muscle Shoals, then you already know most of what Whitley has to say here. In fact, I would recommend anyone see that film rather than buy this book. Whitley herself devotes a chapter to the film and references it frequently throughout her book. While the film features interviews and anecdotes from those who actually worked on the hit records, Whitley’s book contains almost no behind-the-scenes information of recording sessions whatsoever. A glance at the bibliography indicates that she only interviewed a handful of people, none of them rock stars. The bulk of her sources are magazine and newspaper articles, websites, and blogs. Thus, the text is largely a collection of quotes, most of which are merely people making general statements about how great it is to record in Muscle Shoals, without any personal reflections about their time spent there. Whitley has opted not to use notes in her text, so almost every paragraph is a quote followed by “so-and-so told Rolling Stone,” “as reported in Billboard magazine,” etc. Whitley is an editor for Birmingham magazine, but her prose doesn’t even measure up to a good magazine article. Instead, it reads like a research paper cobbled together for an undergraduate college course.

Something this research paper really could have used is an appendix. How about a comprehensive list of the albums and singles the Swampers worked on? It would be interesting to see not just the big-name artists but also some of the lesser-known figures who have recorded at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Instead, Whitley mostly talks about the same artists covered in the documentary film but offers less detail.

The glory days of Muscle Shoals basically ended in the 1980s, so the last few chapters of this book come across as rather depressing. The Sound Studio became a museum, which suffers from underfunding. The Black Keys recorded an album in Muscle Shoals and then complained that the experience was no big deal. Numerous small studios have sprouted up, mostly catering to unknown up-and-coming artists. Whitley tries to put a hopeful spin on all this, but instead the book really ends on a downer.

As a fan of the music discussed, I liked reading this summary account of Muscle Shoals history well enough. I can’t really say, however, that I learned a lot that I didn’t already know.
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