AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Music made in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, first grabbed attention in the 1960s. It was a homegrown scene in the Deep South where Black and white musicians and country and R&B sounds mingled. That history still holds lessons today, and those studios still draw musicians. Jewly Hight of Nashville Public Radio reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M YOUR PUPPET")
JAMES AND BOBBY PURIFY: (Singing) I'll do funny things if you want me to. I'm your puppet.
JEWLY HIGHT, BYLINE: "I'm Your Puppet" landed the R&B duo James & Bobby Purify on the charts in 1966.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M YOUR PUPPET")
JAMES AND BOBBY PURIFY: (Singing) I'm yours to have and to hold. Darling, you've got full control of your puppet.
HIGHT: One of the songwriters behind it is a white guy who grew up plowing the family farm in rural Alabama and secretly listening to R&B radio at night.
DAN PENN: I'm Dan Penn.
HIGHT: After Penn showed songwriting promise, he was hired by a local named Rick Hall intent on building a studio called FAME. Many decades and hits later, Penn still sports denim bib overalls that reflect his down-home roots. One of his old pairs is behind glass in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's new Muscle Shoals exhibit in Nashville. Penn was one of many in that scene, including country-loving Black recording artists who transcended the color line between genres.
PENN: It was white people and Black people playing together, and a lot of respect both ways, and that came through on the tape and the songs. You know, we've written some pretty good songs, and then the whole town started writing, it seemed like.
HIGHT: Not that their aims were that lofty at the start.
R J SMITH: They were like, well, we can work in the aluminum factory, or we can find a way to make a hit record. I know which is more fun (laughter).
HIGHT: That's curator R.J. Smith. He says the state of Alabama had no professional recording studios before FAME.
SMITH: They had the gift of making it up as they went because there was nobody there to tell them they were doing it right or wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARTHUR ALEXANDER SONG, "YOU BETTER MOVE ON")
HIGHT: The very first hit made at FAME belonged to another local singer-songwriter.
MICHAEL GRAY: I would say our story really gets going with Arthur Alexander, a Black singer who was working with white musicians and kind of set that template for country soul.
HIGHT: That's the other curator, Michael Gray.
GRAY: I mean, he was kind of part R&B, part country storytelling and putting it together.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU BETTER MOVE ON")
ARTHUR ALEXANDER: (Singing) But who are you to tell her who to love? That's up to her. Yes, and the Lord above. You better move on.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I NEVER LOVED A MAN (THE WAY I LOVE YOU)")
ARETHA FRANKLIN: (Singing) You're a liar, and you're a cheat. And I don't know why I let you do these things to me. My friends keep telling me...
HIGHT: Eventually, an executive from New York-based Atlantic Records began bringing artists down to Alabama to get the lean, earthy sound that had become a local specialty. At one 1967 session, Aretha Franklin shook hands with the white studio band known as The Swampers, sat down at the baby grand piano, and cut her first Number 1 hit.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I NEVER LOVED A MAN (THE WAY I LOVE YOU)")
FRANKLIN: (Singing) 'Cause I ain't never, I ain't never, I ain't never, no, no, loved a man the way that I, I love you.
HIGHT: Michael Gray again.
GRAY: Boy, that session really did transform her career and the town. In the '70s, just everybody was flocking to Muscle Shoals. I mean, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and The Staple Singers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT AIN'T EASY (REMASTERED)")
BETTYE LAVETTE: (Singing) And you jump down to the rooftops, and you look out across the town.
HIGHT: And Bettye LaVette, a no-nonsense soul-singer from Detroit. She felt she held her own working with the Muscle Shoals musicians.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT AIN'T EASY (REMASTERED)")
LAVETTE: (Singing) It ain't easy. It ain't easy. It ain't easy to go to heaven when you're going down.
In the studio, it was limitless. You could do whatever you wanted to do. But it's the commercial side of it that's the thing.
HIGHT: LaVette's talking about barriers Black artists faced in the industry. Her Muscle Shoals album got shelved for decades, and a single she hoped would become a pop hit was beat out by a white artist's version.
LAVETTE: When you hear me sing, what you hear is that I am still upset about all of those things.
HIGHT: It wasn't just LaVette whose commercial prospects were eclipsed by white counterparts. That was Arthur Alexander's story, too. But Muscle Shoals also represented opportunity. Scholar Francesca Royster wrote about another Black artist in the exhibit, Candi Staton, who credits her Muscle Shoals albums with launching her solo career.
FRANCESCA ROYSTER: That work that she did allowed her to make a living as a professional musician in a way that I don't think she would have otherwise.
HIGHT: Royster says the array of country and soul material Staton recorded showed her multifaceted leanings. Long before Beyonce reinterpreted Dolly Parton's classic "Jolene," Staton recorded her own fierce version of the song in Muscle Shoals.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JOLENE")
CANDI STATON: (Singing) Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.
HIGHT: And exhibit curator R.J. Smith sees lessons for today in that legacy.
SMITH: It's where we are in country music, where people will talk about, is that person really country? Is Beyonce country? It gives us a chance to maybe lead people into the museum to think about people coming together from across racial lines, cultural lines, parts of the country, and making amazing music together.
HIGHT: New generations of artists are still making pilgrimages to record in Muscle Shoals.
For NPR News, I'm Jewly Hight in Nashville.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JOLENE")
STATON: (Singing) Talks about you in his sleep. There's nothing I can do to keep from crying... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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