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<\/div>\n<\/div>\nJason Isbell speaks about the Muscle Shoals exhibit at the Country Music Hall of<\/p>\n
Jason Isbell speaks about the opening of the Muscle Shoals: Low Rhythm Rising exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn., Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/story-highlights> It\u2019s one of music\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n That question is explored in author Rob Bowman\u2019s new book, \u201cLand of a Thousand Sessions: The Complete Muscle Shoals Story 1951-1985.\u201d At 750 pages, it offers the first definitive history of how a tiny northwest Alabama hamlet became a musical juggernaut.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bowman\u2019s book arrived Nov. 25 and comes just as the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville has opened a major exhibit \u201cMuscle Shoals: Low Rhythm Rising<\/a>,” for which he also consulted and contributed. Although the scene has had its moment before \u2014 in 2013, the feature film documentary \u201cMuscle Shoals\u201d shone a spotlight on the region\u2019s music \u00a0\u2014 both Bowman\u2019s book and the Country Hall exhibit dig deeper into the rich history of the Shoals. \u00a0<\/p>\n 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,\u00a0\u201cSoulsville U.S.A.\u201d<\/a>, a landmark study of the label. In 2021, he trained his focus on Jackson, Mississippi, R&B label Malaco for \u201cThe Last Soul Company.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Bowman, who had done plenty of interviews with Muscle Shoals figures over the years, never seriously considered doing a book on the scene. \u201cI thought the story was too widespread, too large,\u201d Bowman said. \u201cAnd I was always waiting for somebody else to do it.\u201d Although a few Muscle Shoals books would emerge, none offered a complete picture. \u201cAnd it was still in the back of my mind that somebody should do it.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2019, Tommy Couch, one of the owners of Malaco \u2014 a studio and label inspired by the Muscle Shoals model \u2014 urged Bowman to consider taking on the project (which would eventually be published on Malaco\u2019s books imprint). \u201cTommy caught me at a good moment,\u201d recalled Bowman. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Built on new interviews and access to previously unexplored documents, \u201cLand of a Thousand Sessions\u201d 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 \u201ccreated in such an improbable place.\u201d<\/p>\n The central figure that emerges in Bowman\u2019s 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. \u201cRick Hall is an exceptional, very different individual, who had a hellish life,\u201d said Bowman. \u201cHe grew up in a level of poverty that you and I would never even be able to imagine, but he\u2019s a guy doesn’t understand the word no.<\/p>\n\n