Jim Crow and white supremacy weren’t abstract to the black singers and white musicians who collaborated to make Rick Hall’s Muscle Shoals, Alabama, studio one of the two most influential locations in Southern soul. Muscle Shoals wasn’t all that far from Birmingham, which may have been the most deeply entrenched bastion of white supremacy. New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury described the city in the early sixties: “Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police, and many branches of the state’s apparatus.” Telephones were routinely tapped, mail intercepted and opened—”the eavesdropper, the informer, the spy has become a way of life.”
Contact between blacks and whites, in private homes or musical studios, was subjected to intense scrutiny. In his invaluable Sweet Soul Music, Southern soul chronicler Peter Guralnick describes the dangers and tensions that went along with making music that redefined racial conventions. Songwriter Donnie Fritts remembered traveling with white organist Spooner Oldham and black soul singer Arthur Alexander to play a date in Birmingham. “Birmingham was dangerous back then, and I mean dangerous, son. As best I can remember the show was for some high school graduation, and it seems to me like it was at the Jewish Community Center. Which was two strikes against us right there. It wasn’t long since those three little colored girls had been blown away, and we got some bomb threats that night. . . . Arthur was scared to fucking death. He wouldn’t get out of the car.”
Fritts recalled another time when Alexander, Oldham, guitarist David Briggs, and a couple of black friends went over to Birmingham. Briggs wanted to stop off and visit a friend in a white section of town. Fritts remembered “waiting on him, and me and Spooner got out and went into this cafe, and the lady behind the counter said, ‘Are you guys with those niggers out there?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Why?’ She said, ‘Look, it’s none of my business, but I been watching this car that’s circled the block twice with some guys in it, and if I was you, I wouldn’t be here the next time they come around.’ I said, ‘Nuff said, ma’am.’ ”
Wallace’s words echoed clearly throughout the mid-South—a loosely defined region incorporating northern Alabama, and Mississippi, western Tennessee, and eastern Arkansas. They were in the heads of the white supremacists who used dynamite and guns without a second thought to enforce racial divisions. They thundered beneath the declarations of the Alabama White Citizens Council, which established a committee “to do away with this vulgar animalistic nigger rock and roll bop.” The executive secretary of the council declared: “The obscenity and vulgarity of the rock and roll music is obviously a means by which the white man and his children can be driven to the level of the nigger.”
That was the racial backdrop for the unlikely group of musicians who came together to mount a challenge to segregation that was less ideological, but more far-reaching, than what the folk revival had in mind. As deeply grounded in the gospel impulse as anything coming out of Chicago or Detroit, Southern soul had no tendency to downplay the harsh realities at the heart of the blues. That might have been because the Southern soul singers stuck closer to their black audiences. Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Sam and Dave always did much better on the R & B than on the pop charts. Redding, for example, never placed a record in the pop top twenty during his lifetime. Careful not to stray from their core audience even when they experienced mainstream success, the Southern soul singers felt much freer to deal with the places where it was hard to tell salvation from damnation than the singers who made Motown’s upbeat sound a constant presence in the top ten.
Both the black audiences and the local white folks had their impact on the sound of Southern soul. No one was about to mistake the mid-South for the promised land. When Wilson Pickett, who was born in Alabama but moved to Detroit as a teenager, arrived in Muscle Shoals looking for producer Rick Hall, he was shocked by what he found: “I couldn’t believe it. I looked out the plane window, and there’s these people picking cotton. I said to myself, ‘I ain’t getting off this plane, take me back North.’ This big Southern guy was at the airport, really big guy, looks like a sheriff. He says he’s looking for me. I said, ‘I don’t want to get off here, they still got black people picking cotton.’ The man looked at me and said, ‘Fuck that. Come on, Pickett, let’s go make some fucking hit records.’ I didn’t know Rick Hall was white.” Recording at Hall’s Fame Studio, Pickett laid down the classics “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Mustang Sally,” and “Funky Broadway.”
The history of Southern music contains hundreds of similar scenes involving the sometimes friendly, sometimes tense contact between black and white musicians. Carl Perkins provides the archetypal version of the story when he credits his musical education to a black sharecropper, “Uncle John” Westbrook, who worked in the same cotton fields as Perkins’s poor white family. “He used to sit out on the front porch at night with a gallon bucket full of coal oil rags that he’d burn to keep the mosquitoes off him, and I’d ask my daddy if I could go to Uncle John’s and hear him pick some.” When Perkins began developing his version of the rockabilly style he shared with the young Elvis Presley, he took Uncle John’s style to heart. “I just speeded up some of the slow blues licks,” he remembered. “I put a little speed and rhythm to what Uncle John had slowed down. That’s all. That’s what rockabilly music or rock ‘n’ roll was to begin with: a country man’s song with a black man’s rhythm.” Two decades later Dan Penn, one of the real aces of both Muscle Shoals and Memphis, echoed the point: “We didn’t know nothing until black people put us on the right road. I never would have learned nothing if I’d have stayed listening to white people all my life.” Putting a slightly sardonic spin on the situation, Memphis drummer Jim Dickinson commented, “Everybody learned it from the yard man.”
Which doesn’t alter the reality that Southern soul, like early rock and roll, really was an interracial collaboration. Soul singer Solomon Burke, whose country/R & B hybrid “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)” predated Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by a year, summed up the underlying connection between the musics of the black and white South: “Gospel is the truth. And country music is the truth.”
In some ways, what happened musically in Memphis might have happened almost anywhere in the South. Several of the central figures in Southern soul—Booker T. Jones, Duck Dunn, Aretha Franklin—were Memphis natives. But most grew up elsewhere: Otis Redding in Macon, Georgia; Sam Moore in Miami; James Brown in South Carolina and Georgia; Wilson Pickett in Alabama. Aretha, Pickett, and Al Green all moved north with their families before they were adults. The same pattern held for the white musicians who helped build the city’s musical tradition. Elvis was born in Mississippi, Jerry Lee Lewis in Louisiana, Carl Perkins in rural Tennessee, Steve Cropper in Missouri. Sam Phillips, whose Sun Studio became the magnet for the musicians who established Memphis as the cradle of interracial rock and roll in the fifties, didn’t arrive until he’d spent his first sixteen years in northwest Alabama, a hundred miles north of Greenville, where a black street singer named Tee-Tot (Rufus Payne) had taught a young Hank Williams to sing the blues. And the hard truths of Williams’s “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard)” and “A Mansion on the Hill” responded to the example of Jimmie Rodgers, the first star of country music, whose “Waiting for a Train,” “In the Jailhouse Now,” and “T for Texas” echoed the blues and gospel traditions of Louisiana and Texas. Rodgers frequently traveled with black sidemen.
The pieces that came together in Memphis were available elsewhere, in part because the black and white Souths were closer culturally than anyone wanted to admit. In a slightly different universe, you can imagine rock and roll or Southern soul developing out of the Piedmont