Muscle Shoals music history focus of new book by Rob Bowman

A new book and a Country Music Hall of Fame exhibit explore the history of Muscle Shoals’ music scene.
Rob Bowman’s new book, “Land of a Thousand Sessions,” details how the small Alabama town became a global music powerhouse.
Muscle Shoals continues to influence modern music and remains a destination for artists and music tourism.

It’s one of music’s great mysteries: How did Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and its neighboring towns, an area with a small population, produce more great recording studios, more accomplished session musicians and more hits per capita than any city in the world?

That question is explored in author Rob Bowman’s new book, “Land of a Thousand Sessions: The Complete Muscle Shoals Story 1951-1985.” At 750 pages, it offers the first definitive history of how a tiny northwest Alabama hamlet became a musical juggernaut.

Bowman’s book arrived Nov. 25 and comes just as the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville has opened a major exhibit “Muscle Shoals: Low Rhythm Rising,” for which he also consulted and contributed. Although the scene has had its moment before — in 2013, the feature film documentary “Muscle Shoals” shone a spotlight on the region’s music — both Bowman’s book and the Country Hall exhibit dig deeper into the rich history of the Shoals.

Bowman is well suited to tell the Muscle Shoals story. A longtime professor of ethnomusicology at York University in Toronto, he spent several years in the Bluff City in the 1980s, eventually getting his Ph.D. at the University of Memphis. In 1997 he published the first history of Stax Records, “Soulsville U.S.A.”, a landmark study of the label. In 2021, he trained his focus on Jackson, Mississippi, R&B label Malaco for “The Last Soul Company.”

Bowman, who had done plenty of interviews with Muscle Shoals figures over the years, never seriously considered doing a book on the scene. “I thought the story was too widespread, too large,” Bowman said. “And I was always waiting for somebody else to do it.” Although a few Muscle Shoals books would emerge, none offered a complete picture. “And it was still in the back of my mind that somebody should do it.”

In 2019, Tommy Couch, one of the owners of Malaco — a studio and label inspired by the Muscle Shoals model — urged Bowman to consider taking on the project (which would eventually be published on Malaco’s books imprint). “Tommy caught me at a good moment,” recalled Bowman. “I didn’t have a big project in the works, and so I thought, ‘Well, it’s either now or never because more and more people involved in the story keep dying.’ And I decided to do it.”

Built on new interviews and access to previously unexplored documents, “Land of a Thousand Sessions” offers colorful context in its early chapters, laying out the roots of the Shoals, and exploring the social, cultural and racial conditions that allowed so much important music to be “created in such an improbable place.”

The central figure that emerges in Bowman’s tale is FAME studios founder Rick Hall, a determined and often obsessed producer who would shape the history of Muscle Shoals starting in the late 1950s. “Rick Hall is an exceptional, very different individual, who had a hellish life,” said Bowman. “He grew up in a level of poverty that you and I would never even be able to imagine, but he’s a guy doesn’t understand the word no.

“Nashville turned him down, he gets kicked out of [the first iteration of FAME studio] by Tom Stafford and Billy Sherrill, but he doesn’t stop. Hall’s attitude is, if everybody else is working 12 hours a day, I need to work 24 hours a day. And he does that — he does that with his musicians, and he drives them crazy, but he gets results.”

Over the next two decades Hall — who was mentored by fellow Alabamian and Sun Records founder Sam Phillips — would make Muscle Shoals, scoring hits with homegrown Alabama talent before the world began beating a path to his door.

“It’s astonishing what came out of that city,” said Bowman. “What’s also astonishing is it starts as an R&B town, a soul town, and then pivots to pop. The same guy who produces Clarence Carter, Candi Staton, Etta James and Wilson Pickett would go on to produce the Osmonds and Paul Anka, and not only doing it, but having phenomenal success.”

In the ‘80s, Muscle Shoals shifted again, becoming a country music town. “And Rick Hall again becomes one of the most sought-after producers,” said Bowman. “There’s no producer in American music history that has had that success with Black music, white pop and country.”

In the process, Hall also would help shape multiple groups of session players who had become the best in the business. “There’s really four major rhythm sections that come out of Muscle Shoals and Rick Hall develops all of them,” said Bowman.

“Now, they eventually leave Hall and do various things — three of them go to Nashville and become A-list players. Then another group becomes the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, who start their own studio in town. Hall could take these good musicians, who could play in frat bands and clubs up at the Tennessee line, and turn them into A-studio players, which is remarkable in and of itself.”

Bowman’s narrative encompasses the stories of all those musicians, and the many studios that developed in the area that would come to define the larger Muscle Shoals sound. But as he also notes, there’s a major Memphis connection to Muscle Shoals. Had R&B singer Wilson Pickett not fallen out with the musicians he was working with at Stax Records in 1965, Hall, FAME and Muscle Shoals may not have gotten their big break.

“If Booker T. and the MGs hadn’t disliked working with Wilson Pickett as much as they did, the Stax studio never would have been closed to Pickett and he wouldn’t have gone to Muscle Shoals,” said Bowman. “Pickett going there and the unbelievable records that Rick Hall was able to engineer and co-produce — ‘Land of a Thousand Dances,’ ‘Mustang Sally,’ ‘Hey Jude’ — that opened up the floodgates of outside artists coming there. But if Pickett had been an easier-going guy, if he’d kept on working at Stax, who knows how quickly the Muscle Shoals thing happens at the level it does, or if it ever gets there?”

Today, more than 60 years after Hall’s first hits, the Shoals is in the midst of an ongoing renaissance. “It’s still a city — or four cities, a quad city area — producing lots of hits,” said Bowman. “Songwriters based in Muscle Shoals, they’re cutting their demos locally and they’re pitching them in Nashville, and Nashville’s been wide open to them because it’s been hit after hit since the early 1980s.

“The other thing, of course, is we get these self-contained bands, whether it’s The Civil Wars, John Paul White on his own, Drive-By Truckers, the Secret Sisters, even Alabama Shakes, just down the road, who are very influenced by what happened in Muscle Shoals, and who are among the best Americana bands in existence.”

Meantime, Fame studios remains a hot spot for artists to come record at, while the city’s music tourism is growing as well. As Bowman noted, “The Muscle Shoals story just continues on.”

‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’