{"id":14287,"date":"2018-03-29T05:30:03","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T09:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=14287"},"modified":"2018-03-30T08:38:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T12:38:00","slug":"muscle-shoals-has-got-the-swampers-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/03\/29\/muscle-shoals-has-got-the-swampers-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Muscle Shoals Has Got the Swampers, Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section \u2013 also known as the Swampers \u2013 were important players in the development of American popular music in the 1960s and beyond. Their collectively seamless, almost telepathic musical quality helped create some of the most enduring music in rock, soul, country and other genres. Working first at northern Alabama’s FAME Studio (co-founded and run by Rick Hall, who passed away in January) and later at their own Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, the Swampers lent their skills to literally hundreds of recordings, dozens of which would become gold- or platinum-selling hits.<\/p>\n

Malaco Records \u2013 run by Tommy Couch, the man who bought the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio from the Swampers in the late 1970s \u2013 recently released a new compilation CD, Muscle Shoals Has Got the Swampers<\/i>. The disc takes its title from the lyrics of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s \u201cSweet Home Alabama,\u201d and features previously-unheard recordings the group made in its own studio. While those 14 songs are recordings from the 1970s and later, the Swampers’ history goes back much farther.<\/p>\n

The founding members of the Swampers \u2013 keyboardist Barry Beckett, drummer Roger Hawkins, David Hood on bass, and guitarist Jimmy Johnson \u2013 were largely self-taught musicians. \u201cWhen I started,\u201d says David Hood, \u201cI didn\u2019t know about song construction. I didn\u2019t know that there was a verse, and a chorus, and a bridge, and things like that. I learned all that stuff while I was learning my instrument and playing sessions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hood learned fast because he had to. He had played trombone in his high school band (\u201cthat gave me a little familiarity with the bass clef,\u201d he says) and by his late teens had learned a few songs on guitar. But he soon discovered that many of his friends \u2013 future Swamper Jimmy Johnson among them \u2013 were far more skilled on guitar than he was. \u201cI thought, ‘Wow. Since these guys are ahead of me on the guitar, I\u2019ll play the bass,\u201d Hood recalls. At that time, the town of Muscle Shoals was home to only one or two other electric bassists, and one of them was willing to lend his instrument to Hood.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Hood was already married and working at his father’s tire store. Once he developed his bass-playing skills enough, he started hanging around Hall’s FAME Studio. \u201cSince I was one of the few people in town that played the bass guitar, I started picking up a little extra work,\u201d he says. Times were good; By age 20, Hood was able to leave his job at the tire shop. \u201cI could do two sessions and make what I was making at the tire store in a whole week,\u201d he says. \u201cI was in high cotton!\u201d<\/p>\n

But Rick Hall was one who wouldn’t suffer mistakes, Hood says. \u201cI had to really kick it up a notch and learn quickly.\u201d He notes that the sessions were recorded in monaural, often with all the musicians and singers playing live in the studio. \u201cIf you messed up, they had to do the whole thing again. And the wrath of Rick was pretty terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back, Hood is amazed that he got to play on so many important recordings so early in his own musical career. While noting that his partners Hawkins and Johnson had both been playing awhile, Hood readily concedes he was pretty green when he started out. He says that the same was true for Beckett. \u201cBarry had played at a club down in Pensacola [Florida], but we had to tell him, ‘Go [listen to] a Ray Charles record; you need to sound more black!’ We all had to learn how to do that, and we did it by listening to records.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Swampers never considered limiting themselves to a particular style of music. But it wasn’t so much that Hood and his band mates were musical omnivores; there was a much more practical reason. \u201cThere weren\u2019t anybody else to do it,\u201d he admits with a good-natured laugh. \u201cWe had to at least act like we knew what we were doing, and we were pretty good actors,\u201d he says. \u201cWe learned to emulate what we heard quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

In very short order, the Swampers found themselves playing on hit after hit record. And while Hood is quite modest, he does admit that he and his fellow Muscle Shoals players quickly developed a sense of what songs would succeed. Even before Hood got in on the session work, Arthur Alexander and Pickett had both scored hits with tracks cut at FAME.<\/p>\n

In 1966, Percy Sledge had just topped the charts with \u201cWhen a Man Loves a Woman,\u201d and Hood played on sessions for the follow-up single, \u201cWarm and Tender Love\u201d (#17 pop, #5 R&B). He admits, \u201cWhen you\u2019re following a hit record like ‘When a Man Loves a Woman,‘<\/i> you know the next ones are gonna be hits. But hit singles are one thing; songs that endure are something else entirely. \u201cHere I am, 50-some-odd years later,\u201d Hood says. \u201cAnd who would\u2019ve known that those songs would be classics?\u201d<\/p>\n

Occasionally, though, the Swampers would play on a song and then later be surprised when it topped the charts. One example is R.B. Greaves’ 1969 single, \u201cTake a Letter Maria\u201d (#2 pop, #10 R&B). \u201cThat was the first big hit we recorded after we left FAME and started our own studio,\u201d Hood recalls. \u201cWe did a session with Ahmet [Ertegun], and he brought R.B. in. But hat one just didn\u2019t stand out to us. Of course, it was a great song; it told a story. And then he added those mariachi sounds and horns to it after they got back to New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section \u2013 also known as the Swampers \u2013 were important players in the development of American popular music in the 1960s and beyond. Their collectively seamless, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14292,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,69],"tags":[3366,3365],"class_list":["post-14287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-soul","tag-david-hood","tag-swampers","cat-41-id","cat-69-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14287"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14350,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14287\/revisions\/14350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}