Little Muscle Shoals, Alabama, boasts a significant legacy as the birthplace of blue, “Brown Sugar,” and miraculous American icons. W.C. Handy, Helen Keller, and Sam Phillips were each born along this sleepy stretch of the Tennessee River in northern Alabama. Keller’s story of overcoming deafness and blindness to become an author and icon was told in “The Miracle Worker.” Handy, “The King of Blues,” is one of the most influential musicians in history. Both are still celebrated in birthplace museums around Muscle Shoals.
Phillips changed the course of pop culture when he founded Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee and discovered a young singer named Elvis Presley. Millions of people around the world know the name Muscle Shoals, however, and its hit-making musicians, the Swampers, from the Southern-rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama.” Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant rhapsodized in the band’s biggest chart hit, “Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers/And they’ve been known to pick a song or two.” The Swampers was the common nickname for the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
They were the house band first at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, then later at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio just down the road in neighboring Sheffield. They recorded some of the biggest hits by the biggest stars in music history: the Rolling Stones, Etta James, Wilson Pickett, Bob Seger, Percy Sledge, Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin, to name just a few. “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones, “Mustang Sally” and “Land of 1000 Dances” by Pickett, “Kodachrome” by Simon, and “Old Time Rock and Roll” by Seger are just some of the global rock and R&B anthems recorded at FAME or Muscle Shoals studios. The Swampers played on almost every major hit by Queen of Soul Franklin. Among them: “Respect,” “Think,” and “Chain of Fools.”
Members of the group toured with Steve Winwood and the “Dear Mr. Fantasy” British hitmakers Traffic in 1973. Duane Allman was a Muscle Shoals musician when his guitar work on Pickett’s version of “Hey Jude” caught the ear of Eric Clapton. The British guitar star was more than impressed by Allman’s work in Muscle Shoals, according to McFarlane. Clapton invited the Nashville-born musician to play the iconic slide guitar masterpiece heard on the rock epic “Layla.”
“The Swampers, they were legendary. They were world-class,” Gene Odom, Van Zant’s childhood pal and longtime security manager for Lynyrd Skynyrd, told Fox News Digital. Keller is another local icon. She was born in neighboring Tuscumbia, Alabama. Ivy Green, her birthplace, has been open since 1954 as a “permanent shrine to the ‘miracle’ that occurred in a blind and deaf seven-year-old girl’s life,” according to HelenKellerBirthplace.com. Blues master Handy was born in a log cabin just across the river from Muscle Shoals in Florence, Alabama. His birthplace has been preserved as the W.C. Handy Home and Museum.
The annual W.C. Handy Music Festival, with events across the region, is celebrated this year from July 19-28. “W.C. Handy, won’t you look down over me?” musician Marc Cohn pleads with the spirit of the bluesman in his 1991 hit, “Walking in Memphis.” Handy, like The Swampers, was immortalized in pop music. It’s a tribute to the influential sounds that appear to seep from the soulful soil around Muscle Shoals.