Chapter 3 (Percy Sledge): Unpublished history of the Muscle Shoals AL recording business

8/6/2019 Chapter 3 (Percy Sledge): Unpublished history of the Muscle Shoals AL recording business

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Excerpt: unpublished history of the Muscle Shoals AL recording business, circa 1995-97

3'And that's where the monster was cut...'

Percy Sledge

Peanutt Montgomery sits in the attic of his house in Sheffield, flipping through scrapbooks and

making occasional commentary. Shortly after looking at a picture from Stafford's studio, he starts

talking about the sound that came out of Muscle Shoals after the first band left FAME for

Nashville. "What they were doing was different than what we were doing," he recalls, before

beginning to think about that one song.

That eerie, instantly recognizable organ part, the one that has been described as "Bach-like."

(Compare it to Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale," which was released about a year later,

and was based on a Bach composition. Discuss.) The drums kick in ever-so quietly behind and then

suddenly, it comes -- that voice. It was, he says, distinctively different. "Everything just kind of fell

together just right, didn't it?" he said, shaking his head and smiling upon just thinking about it.

Millions of listeners agreed, at least as far as that song, Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a

Woman," being nearly perfect. It was, in the words of Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, a


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"holy love hymn," albeit one with a dark edge, with the jarring stab of truth. So much has since

been said about it since, at least from a critical standpoint, that there is little that could be added. It

has also become a pop reference of the sort easily understandable to millions of people in America,

not to mention millions who live in other parts of the planet. The song is alluded to or played with

in jokes, news, headlines. A 1994 movie that starred Meg Ryan even borrowed its title. Then there

was a Harper's magazine headline in 1994, sitting above a totally absurd account of a new-age gay

wedding, "When a Man Loves a Shaman." Sure everyone remembers that one.

None of this should obscure the fact that the song would come to hold an enormously important

position in the history of modern pop music as well. It would be, after all, the very first southern

soul record to make it to the top of the pop charts, at a time when Motown, British rock and Dylan-influenced American folk-rock and pop was all the rage. Sledge's No. 1 hit thus brought the music

to a much wider audience, and paved the way for the future success of R&B records that were not

almost exclusively written for, and aimed at, a white teenage audience.

Perhaps just as notable is what the rise of "When a Man Loves a Woman" would be mean to the

Muscle Shoals music industry: It would bring Wexler and Altantic to town and thus begin what

could only be accurately described as a long boom period. A less likely story would be hard to find.

Still, the boom did not come out of a vacuum.

Wexler and others have jokingly referred to Muscle Shoals and the work done there in ironic

"crime" talk -- as in "site of my previous crimes," "my partners in crime," and so on. And there

were many obvious clues as to why what went down did go down, evidence easily available for

inspection -- even if some are the sort of clues that people would rather not deal with. Loving eyes

can never see, yes, but the clues are there.

There is no way the clues could not have been so evident. The song's glorious heist of the pop

charts' top spot was years in the making.


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Exhibit A would have to be the big stunner for many soul fans from parts of the country other

than the South, despite its being gone over quite well before. For those not aware of this, welcome

to the vertigo-inducing world of irony: This clue is -- the all-white southeastern fraternity party

scene. And it intersects with Exhibit B. The latter was the fact that liquor and beer were illegal in

the Shoals area. There were no local clubs at which musicians could play, so they were forced to

look for other ways to make money. Those ways included heading elsewhere, perhaps Nashville, or

staying at home and playing for FAME or -- and in some cases and/or -- playing for a frat party

band. Most young local musicians chose the latter route since, as keyboard player Spooner Oldham

pointed out, you had to "be somebody" to play at the Nashville studios. But most of the musicians,

it should be added, were teenagers and probably would not have had a shot at playing anywhere

otherwise.

To find Exhibit C, look back at the previous chapters. In no way was the recording that was

being done in the area lost on the musicians. In fact, nearly all the musicians who were in the

FAME house band during the boom years had some sort of previous connection or look into the

music industry.

There is also one more, less noticable piece of evidence: WLAC, a Nashville station that

broadcast rhythm and blues and flat-out blues throughout the southeast. It was, for thousands of

listeners, to black music what WSM, which broadcast the Grand Ole Opry shows, was to country.

Two star witnesses for the defense would have to be Roger Hawkins and Jimmy Johnson, both

of whom, after the success of Sledge's record, would be major players in the industry for the next

three decades. Hawkins is a drummer, while Johnson is a rhythm guitar player and sound engineer.

Both recalled going to Tom Stafford's studio above the City Drug store in their pre-teen years,

though they were not regulars -- in Hawkins words, "We were aware of the studio, but we weren't

really hanging around."


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According to Johnson, though, they did get noticed once. He remembered that occasion with a

wry laugh. "One night Tom Stafford sat up and told me and Roger that we should never ever get in

the record business, that me and Roger was too nice of a guys to do it. And we couldn't wait to get

in it after he told us that. He shouldn't have told us that, 'cause that just made us want it more."

Both would first become players on the fraternity party circuit. And they would not have the

roughest time finding a band to join. There were about eight or nine bands that came from the area

alone in the '60s, and at least seven or eight during the "thick of it" in the early part of the decade,

Jimmy says. Among them were Hollis Dixon and the Keynotes, by far the most popular, the Del-

Rays (Jimmy played in both), and the Mark V, who later would claim Dan Penn as lead singer --

but back to that later.Those bands traveled throughout the Southeast. "We went to Ole Miss, Auburn, Alabama,

Sewanee -- Athens, Ga. to Brunswick, Ga., even up to Memphis, Memphis State, Mississippi State,

Southern Mississippi, Alabama and of course Florence State. Certain high-school lead-outs that

could afford us," Johnson explained. "Sometimes, we'd be playing in the same place as another

band from here, and we had a lot of fun. And you know, we made good money. If we worked two

nights, I would bring back more money than my daddy would make in a week, after working at

Reynolds Aluminum. That always kind of amazed him, you know."

The "thick of it" time he just referred to, by the way, was also hugely crazy. Just how insane?

Well, let Hawkins and Johnson explain.

"Remember the movie Animal House?" asked Johnson.

Hawkins: "It was just like Animal House."

But, hey, what about the opinion of the other musicians?

David Hood, who would eventually end up playing bass with Johnson and Hawkins, and was a

member of the Mystics, another of the most popular bands on the circuit: "It was like Animal

House.' It was like they took a picture of my life when they played the fraternity scene in Animal

House."

This could go on and on.

Johnson had a visual to go along with his claim. Visuals are always helpful in an investigation.

The picture shows his band, the Del-Rays. "Remember (in Animal House) the band with the blue


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and green jackets?" he asked, with a barely contained smirk, as he picked up the picture. He, as

usual, peppered his quotes with laughter. "Well, that was us. And we always wore bow ties.

Always. If a band member showed up without one, you know, 'Oh, I forgot it, and... ,'I would go,

'Well, whadd'ya know, I have one right here.' (He makes a mock Mr. Happy smile.)

Johnson's memories, by the way, are generally more specific than anyone's. As a result, he is the

one Muscle Shoals musician most often quoted. ("I'm the only one who wasn't on drugs," he said,

perhaps only half--jokingly, when asked why this was the case.)

"I remember we were playing at Kappa Sig in Alabama. They claimed that we cracked the

building. There were so many people there, they claimed the house cracked from top to bottom and

that it happened during the encores of ''m All Right, Hell Yeah,' hich is an unbelievably wild song.

Just the audience participation of them saying 'Hell yeah!' The average good group at breakneck

speed was beyond being even able to play it at some points. And at this house, they claimed we

cracked it. I don't know if that's true, but we always got accused of that."

For Johnson, however, the constant weekend travels were also a musical education.

"I used to see Slim Harpo at the universities. We'd all go down and play and we'd be playing

next door to Slim Harpo. And during our break we'd all go down and listen to him -- it would be a

four piece band. Everybody would be plugged into one guitar amp and he'd be singing through the

amp too ... You'd be outside the fraternity house, and it would sound like 15 people were playing in

there. Then you'd walk in and it would be four people singing through one guitar amp, and there'd

be a set of drums. It was fantastic."

Yet life on the road was not always so merry. The musicians sometimes faced near disasters.

Johnson recalled one. It occurred after the band had played at the Downtowner Hotel in

Greenville, Miss. When heading back to Alabama, the band's touring vehicle had a flat in the

nearby small town of Indianola, Miss -- a conversative small town surrounded by cotton fields and,

like the rest of the Delta, a town with a totally flat landscape, giving it an empty, gloomy ambiance.In other words, the kind of place that would usually send blues afficianados like Jimmy into a

dream-like state, but not this time. "We were stuck in Indianola on a Sunday morning. In 1963. On

a Sunday morning, in Indianola, Mississippi. Can you imagine that?"


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The band's members waited and waited, and eventually ended up -- do not ask how -- with an

ambulance tire. "We put the tire on, and drove all the way back to Alabama with the car turned

sideways."

Such stories of creative repairs or magical comebacks from disaster are commonplace.

"There's always the stories of leaving your instruments at home," David Hood explained. "We

knew somebody who had a hearse. They had a hearse they'd travel in to go to their gigs. They were

on their way to Ole Miss to play at a fraternity party and the bass player had one of these Ampeg

amps, a small one about fifteen inches tall, a square cube -- it was this cube, you know, and it had

wheels on it. Well, the rear door came open and the amp fell out and they got to Ole Miss and it

was like 'Where's the amp?' But someone saw the amp, picked it up and brought it to them. Thatwas the freakiest thing in the world. The idea of seeing an amp lying on the side of the road would

be pretty weird anyway, but..."

The band with the hearse, by the way, was perhaps the most legendary Shoals act on the circuit:

Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, a renamed Mark V that was led by the man who had been the top

songwriter in Muscle Shoals since the Stafford days. Penn was also known, and is still regarded as

a top-caliber singer, although he has never fervently pursued a solo career. Among the others in the

Pallbearers were former FAME players Jerry Carrigan, Norbert Putnam and David Briggs.

According to Hood, it was definitely Penn who stood out: "He's a well-known and respected

writer now, but he was a wild ass then. He used to roll around and lie on the floor, sing on his mike,

hunch the mike. Things that the kids are doing now, we were all kids and we were doing the same

stuff."

Other memories?

Well, Oldham recalled that the wildest audiences he played for were those at the University of

Alabama. "Man, they were hell-raisers."

As for Hawkins, he said, "I do remember lots of beer."

He and Johnson would share one other immensely memorable experience during their fraternity

party days that would have nothing to do with seeing beer-sloshed stages or watching college


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students get sloshed. It was an occasion the two describe in almost mystical tones, as if it were a

hallowed, life-changing event. And to be honest, that is exactly what it was.

The occasion was the Del-Rays' visit to Hi Recording Studio in Memphis, the studio where the

Bill Black Combo, an Elvis spin-off band, had turned out several rock 'n' roll hits in the early '60s.

The Del-Rays traveled there to do some recording. The reason for this was not that Hi producer

Willie Mitchell ( the one who would go on to head the studio, and produce all of Al Green's soul

hits there the '70s) thought they were the next big thing. Instead -- well, let Jimmy explain it.

"My uncle was friends to Bill Cantrell. He was the maintenance engineer there. Plus, he like

built the studio, was a stockholder in the Hi Studio with Willie Mitchell. So my uncle and Bill had

played together in a band called the Blue Seal Pals. He asked Bill could we come up some time on

the weekend, maybe put a few of our own songs down, just so we could hear what we sounded like.

At the time, we had never recorded anything. So he set all that up, and we carried air mattresses up

there, nearly froze to death that night. They left the air conditioning on, liked to froze us to death.

We didn't bring enough cover."

"Some of us could sleep and some of us couldn't," Hawkins said, not adding anything about the

temperature. ("We were just blown away by the studio," he explained.)

A bit of wildly interconnecting trivia here, for the soul and Memphis music nuts: As stated

before, Johnson's uncle, Dexter Johnson, was the man who did the first commercial recording in the

Shoals -- in his garage during the early '50s. Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill's Fairlanes had also

recorded at Hi in the late '50s. Shoals area native Quinton Claunch, who recorded them there, was

also a member of the Blue Seal Pals, a country band that included Dexter Johnson and Bill Cantrell.

As for Claunch, he would go on to form Memphis's Goldwax Records, the label that produced

James Carr's original version of "The Dark End of the Street," the greatest of all soul's "sneakin'

around" standards. It was co-written by Memphis producer (and one-time Shoals session guitarist)Chips Moman and Dan Penn.

Anyway, back to the Del-Rays' visit. Hawkins recalled, "About two o'clock in the morning, I

was trying to go to sleep and I saw that there was a light on in the control room. And the control

room was upstairs and Jimmy Johnson sat there looking at the console. So I noticed that Jimmy was

in the control room. I walked in and sat down. We were both looking at all the knobs and buttons


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and just the surroundings of the control room. And we just looked at each other at that point, and

we decided that night we sure wanted a recording studio sometime in the future."

The two then began having semi-high level discussions and intensive negotiations late at night

when driving back home from fraternity parties.

Johnson: "The rest of the band trips, the rest of the band members would fall asleep, and me and

him would sit up and build studios all the way back, while we listened to John R. play the blues

records on WLAC in Nashville. And we'd keep each other awake driving back. Make all these

plans, how we were going to build these studios."

Their chance would come later, though things would not go exactly as planned. But a few years

later -- Hawkins was 14 at the time of the Hi visit, Jimmy about 15 or 16 -- they would get a chanceto work at a studio. In this case, Rick Hall's FAME. Johnson and Hawkins, along with Spooner

Oldham and Albert "Junior" Lowe on bass, would form the core of the studio owner's second house

band.

Hall had known them already by the time he hired them on as regular players. Hawkins, for

instance, had been hanging around at FAME for some time. Penn and Oldham, he said, let him do

this after noticing his interest. They would also let him play on the demo sessions of songs the two

had written. "So that's how I got experience in the studio, because playing in the studio and playing

live are two different things."

David Hood, who was not a part of the band yet but was determined to be in it eventually,

recalled that this difference was something that excited all the musicians. He too had hung out at

FAME when the Carrigan, Briggs and Putnam were playing. "They were a cool band, so we'd go

hang out at the studio and hear them. When I heard them doing that stuff, I thought, 'Wow! That's

cool as hell.' Just the idea of recording it and playing it back. Sounded like a record or something."

That indefinable "something" is what his friends who made the new FAME band did for the

longest time, however. Rick did not let them do much of anything except demo work for about a

year-and-a-half, because he considered them to be in training. They did not, for instance, work on

the biggest hit to come out of FAME during this period -- Joe Tex's "Hold What You've Got," a No.


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5 pop chart hit that would help pave the way for Sledge's. (Tex's song was also the first in a series

of his singles with the long, church sermon-like raps that he introduced to R&B.)

But Buddy Killen, Tex's producer, said his not using the FAME musicians had nothing to do

with their inexperience. The reason was much simpler -- his artist had different ideas. Still, his

work would play a role in the future success of FAME. In fact, he had already played on by pulling

strings for Rick and Billy Sherrill in the studio's beginning days, and his work with Tex there would

help more.

More notable, perhaps, is how strikingly close the Joe Tex part of Killen's story was to that of

Rick Hall and the FAME musicians'.

Killen, who spent his formative years in Florence, was doing the unusual in producing Tex then.

He was associated with country music since he was an executive at Tree Publishing, the largest

publishing house in Nashville -- but the main act he worked with when not handling publishing

affairs was Tex, a black R&B singer. He would form Dial Records just to handle Tex's product.

In his 1994 autobiography, By the Seat of My Pants, he wrote that he only thought about how

unusual this was later. "I wasn't thinking about integration when I took on Joe Tex. I just knew that

he was one of the most exciting talents I'd ever seen."

Yet he did not end up sounding too exciting during the sessions at FAME in November 1964.

The lineup included three professional session musicians, among them Ronnie Wilkins, a piano

player and the man who would write Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man" and guitarist Joe

South, who had of course worked at FAME before. They were joined by two musicians Tex

brought along.

"It was the worst band that had ever been put together," said Killen, interviewed from his office

in Nashville. "They couldn't hold a groove. The drummer couldn't hold a groove and the bass

player sounded like he had only been playing professionally for a week. It was a disaster."

Killen said that he would never have minded using Rick's own house band, contrary to pastaccounts. "They would've been better, but that' s not what Joe wanted to do."

After this session, it even looked as if Killen and Tex would soon part ways, since the affiliation

had not produced a hit yet. He recalled Rick telling him that he was sorry he did not get a good cut.

Tex was so unhappy with the result that he did not want "Hold What You've Got" released, and

was angry to learn later that it had been. But his attitude changed once he learned that Killen had


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put together, through serious editing, a record that -- in the early part of 1965 -- was headed toward

the top of both the R&B and pop charts. It was the first deep-fried southern R&B record to break

the Top 10 since Rufus Thomas' "Walking the Dog" did in 1963, just months before the Beatles hit.

Tex would not have another significant hit, however, until October, and "I Want To" only made it

No. 23. Stax's records, including ones by Otis Redding, would not place much higher.

Even if Tex's hit may have seemed to be a fluke, Rick Hall still concentrated on soul -- sure it

was the next hot thing. And he kept Johnson, Hawkins and working mainly on demos, and kept

training them until he felt that they were ready to do some real, high-caliber recording. Heeventually decided that the musicians had reached the required level of proficiency, and decided to

begin developing a roster of artists for his FAME label. He also began turning down requests for

demo work.

The kind of artists he would be seeking this time would be solely R&B. Not Motown R&B, but

real black, southern R&B. Hall had noticed long ago that there was a market for the music, but now

it was making big strides in popularity, thanks mainly to James Brown. His revolutionary records,

including "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" had both broken the Top

10 in 1965.

J.B.'s records constituted a category of their own, of course -- the brainchildren of the Amazing

Mr. Please Please Himself. Brown had also been working harder than anybody in show bidness

since the mid-'50s, and just could not be ignored anymore. Yet Hall was convinced and, in his own

words, began to dig deep into black music. His band's influences were also markedly different than

those of his first. They were, for instance, players who had come of age during an era in which

R&B was considered cool among young, college-age white people in the Southeast. It was just a

totally different era, period.

Spooner Oldham, who was a little older and a holdover from the first lineup, was very much

into black music, although he also was into all kinds of pop. "I loved the Drifters, the Coasters, the

Atlantic records. I loved listening to the songs of the individual writers off Tin Pan Alley, the Neil

Diamonds, the Carole Kings, they were starting off at that time too."


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Jimmy Johnson also recalls having been a big fan of Buddy Holly, the blues greats and the Doo

Wop groups. "But I guess we all loved them," he said.

The musicians also picked up much of their sound from the previous band, even though theirs

was different. Former FAME drummer Jerry Carrigan said the members of the previous band, who

were just a couple of years older than those in the new one, were friends with the new guys -- and

that all played in one another's bands sometimes. Roger Hawkins, he noted, would sometimes sit in

for him. ("This is around the time I started to get interested in girls," Carrigan said, by way of

explanation.)

This band's sound, in short, would feature a heady combination of influences and experience. As

fate would have it, however, the chance the new lineup would have to prove this to a national

audience would be on a record produced at another studio.

"When a Man Loves a Woman" was recorded at an almost brand new studio -- Norala Sound

Studio, which was owned by local disk jockey, and a record and music store owner, Quin Ivy. His

radio show on WLAY -- the station where Sam Phillips got his start -- featured an eclectic mix.

Country, R&B, rock 'n' roll, pop -- Ivy played them all. And his show was highly popular.

It was through all this work that he began to be interested in starting a studio.

Ivy, who is now an accounting teacher at the University of North Alabama (formerly Florence

State), talked about the studio's beginnings from his campus office -- one done up in that

unmistakable accounting-world style, with degrees and none-too-colorful books. Not a music

related souvenir in sight. But he smiled frequently when recalling his days of massive musical

glory.

"I was a disk jockey for 10 years. I started at WSUH in Oxford (Miss.) and began working atWLAY in 1961, and that's where I was when I really got interested in the music business. I put in a

little music store down in Sheffield, downtown, sold instruments and records and accessories,

phonograph needles. I went from playing the records to selling them too and somewhere along the

line I said, 'Why not record music too?' We were just having so much fun. It was just 'Boom!'"


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Ivy did see an actual market, though. He noticed that his friend Rick -- he and Ivy knew each

other well, and had even written together -- was turning down many people who wanted to record

at FAME, and thought that maybe he could give them a place to go. Hall agreed that it would be a

good idea, and said that he would even make referrals.

Then, Ivy started building a decidedly non-lavish studio in Sheffield. "I characterized it as spit

and bailing wire. It was a total investment of $7,000. I got all the used equipment I could find in

Nashville and around here, went in on a shoestring." He broke into laughter. "And that's where the

monster was cut."

The story of the "monster," by the way, is directly linked to the fraternity party scene. Percy

Sledge, the cousin of Jimmy Hughes, was a singer on that circuit.Among the first to encounter Sledge on a professional basis was Tommy Couch, a native of

nearby Tuscumbia who would go on to form Malaco Records of Jackson, Miss., which today is one

of the best-known R&B and blues labels in America -- not to mention the owner of Muscle Shoals

Sound. When he met Sledge, Couch was running a fraternity party circuit booking agency.

Jimmy Johnson explains: "Tommy was the social chairman of the Pikes (at Ole Miss), and

wanted us to come down for a party. When we were through, he brought my check to give me, and

he was doing his good nights and all that, 'Y'all did a great job' and all this. I then told him, 'If you

want some extra money, we'd pay you 10 percent to book us down here.' And I noticed there was a

funny little look in his eye. Other than that, he didn't respond to us too much. Next thing I noticed

was, two or three weeks later, he sent me a letter, and in the top left hand corner was 'Campus

Attractions.' He said, 'Hey, I took your advice, and I'd like to book your band. Do you have any

good ideas for a good black band out of the Shoals too that we could book along with y'all?' I said,

'I sure do.' The band director of the black high school, James Richards, had a real good band called

the Esquires. Guess who the lead singer was? Percy Sledge. So Tommy called James Richards,

books 'em, and they start playing the circuit like us. He starts booking them all over."

Couch can still recall one Sledge incident particularly well. The singer, he said, would not take a

break one night. He stayed on stage, even when not performing, just to watch the crowd. The

record company owner soon found out that the singer just wanted to see the crowd do what he


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called the "mop dance" again. Around this time, Couch explained, there was a very popular dance

called the Alligator, one that called for dancers to drop to the floor and flail around.

But Percy was not going for Couch's explanation. "He couldn't believe it was called the

Alligator. He said, 'They're doing the mop dance,'" Couch remembered, with a laugh. "He was

convinced that he was right."

Ivy first met the singer in a much calmer setting -- at his record store. One of his friends, Leroy

Black, met Sledge, an orderly at the local Colbert County Hospital. The friend had broken his back

in a rodeo fall. Later, he was in the store at the same time Sledge was, and introduced Ivy to the

singer. After hearing that Sledge could sing, Ivy told him to come down to the studio sometime. He

showed up soon afterward with a whole band. And he sang a song that Ivy says would become

"When a Man Loves a Woman."

Yet Dan Penn says that he had run into Sledge before that when the singer and the Esquires

visited FAME. Penn said he was substituting as an engineer on the day the band arrived, and cut a

few demos on them that included the original version of what would become his big hit.

"They had the descending line in the chorus. It went, (he begins singing), 'When a maaan loves

a woman," he recalled, adding that the title was not the same but that he cannot remember exactly

what it was. "But then it just went to nowhere. Like, 'When a maaan loves a woman,' crappy,

crappy, crappy, crappy..."

Penn said the keyboard player had an intro similar to the one that Oldham played too. "He had it

swimmin', like they just got out of the church. He was knockin' me out! They had the song started.

And I thought, 'This guy here, I could get a hit on him. Let me play this tape for Rick.' And he was

all, 'OK, y'all talk about it.' I said, 'Rick, check this guy out, man.' He said, 'Naah, I don't think so.' I

said, 'Rick this guy's good,' but he was was saying, 'I'd rather not. I don't believe in this thing.'"

The songwriter later told Percy the bad news. 'I said, 'Percy, I hate to tell you this, but Rick

didn't hear it.' So I said, 'Look, there's a studio that's just opened in Sheffield. Go over there rightnow and you'll find Quin Ivy. Tell him I sent you over there and tell him you wanna make a record.

I believe he'll hear what I hear.' They were just brand new, and so Quin did want to record him.

They signed him right up. They were like, 'He's black! He's good enough for me.' I was that way

then. I wasn't lookin' for no white people, I wanted to work with black people. I thought they all

could sing. Course I found out later it was different."


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How the transformation of the song took place is still a topic of much debate.

The idea for the song, Sledge says, came about after he broke up with a girlfriend. He was

distraught, and started crying out, "Why did you leave me baby?" as the players behind him

improvised.

Whatever the case, Ivy says that a reshaping of the lyrics and refinement of the song then began,

although he declines to say how long that process took. He will only say that most songs, even

published ones used by studios, undergo some sort of refinement. Quin only takes credit for coming

up with the title. He said it came to him when listening to a Joe Tex record. On that one, Tex was

singing about "the things a man does when he loves a woman," the accounting instructor explained.

Sledge has since been quoted as saying that he wrote the song, and let two of his band members,Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright, take the credit for it. And they are credited as the songwriters to

this day. But Sledge's manager, Steve Green, contends that his client wrote the melody and that he

was wronged by not being given credit.

One of the men involved in the recording of the song, Marlin Greene, has a very different story.

Greene was Ivy's right-hand man at the studio. Ivy had asked Hall about the possibility of hiring

Dan Penn for that position, but Hall wanted Dan at FAME. So he advised that Ivy hire Greene, who

played trumpet and guitar and had been playing at FAME. Greene, it turned out, had much previous

experience. He had, while still in high school, written a couple of songs that were recorded by

country star Jim Reeves. He also recorded for RCA when just 15 years old.

Greene also found himself doing some writing at Norala, almost immediately. He says today, in

regard to "When a Man Loves a Woman, "Unbeknownst to most people, we wrote most of that

song."

By "we" he is referring to himself and Ivy. Greene says that the two of them sat down in his

living room one afternoon, along with Norala's Pug Jenkins, and wrote all the lyrics. But they

declined to take formal credit, and agreed only to accept production credit.

Johnson concurred. "Jerry Wexler told them, 'Guys, you know, this is forever.' But they

wouldn't do it."

Greene said that, years later, he would even lose the fee he was to receive for co-production. He

decided to head to Los Angeles in 1971, mainly for personal reasons, and said he was told by Ivy


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that the only way he could gracefully leave was to sign over any future royalties over to him.

Greene said his boss then had an attorney draw up a document saying that any future revenue he

earned as a producer on the record would go toward paying off debts incurred in renovating his

studio. He signed.

Ivy confirmed that he did ask Greene to sign over the production rights.

Today, Greene -- who lives in Seattle -- recalls his days in Muscle Shoals with a heavy dose of

bittersweetness. "It seems ironical that every time I seem to be financially strapped, I hear 'When a

Man Loves a Woman.' But that's all water under the bridge, I guess. I just want the story to come

out to keep anybody from letting something that stupid happen to them in the future. But it opened

a lot of doors for me. Overall, I have a lot of things to be grateful for. As far as my karma's

concerned, I'm happy with it."

What is not in dispute, and remembered only with sweetness, is how magical "When a Man

Loves a Woman" would turn out to be. The visceral impact that the song had stunned even its

singer, in a secondhand way.

He explains: "'When a Man Loves a Woman' was a song that ... that comes along every once

and a while. It was -- you take people like Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra... it's a

fantastic song, with the strings. But 'When a Man Loves a Woman,' it's just something that doesn't

very often happen with artists. 'When a Man Loves a Woman' was me. It excited me. It really

excited me. But I didn't know if I could do it or not, 'cause I had never been approached by

anything like that, on record. And so we goes over there and we've got a couple of microphones,

and boy we cut some hell of a songs in there."

"We had something like an eight-track, smaller -- and so I'm there, barefooted, short pants on

(he had been playing baseball earlier). Quin said 'Percy, come a little closer to the microphone,'"

Sledge recalled, pausing a second and then breaking into a whisper. "'That's it. That's it! We got a

monster. We got a hit! I said, 'What in the world are they talking about?' You know, 'cause when Igrew up, I had never experienced nothing about having a hit record. And when Quin and them

started acting the way they were acting that day when we got through with 'When a Man Loves a

Woman' it was shock to me 'cause I didn't know what they were talking about."

Among those playing on the record were Greene on guitar, Hawkins on drums, Junior Lowe on

bass, and Oldham on "the little red organ," a rented Farfisa. Backup singers included Greene's then-


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wife, Jeannie (who would become a Shoals session regular), and Sandy Posey, who would have

four top 40 hits recorded in Memphis over the next two years.

Jimmy Johnson, who had been a clerk at Ivy's record store, engineered the session, and would,

with Ivy, overdub the semi-infamous out-of-tune horn-fueled ending and more background vocals

later.

When Ivy had the finished master in hand, he visited his friend Rick. Hall listened to the song,

thought it was a No. 1 hit, and soon decided -- with Ivy's blessings -- to call Jerry Wexler of

Atlantic Records. Immediately after Quin left. It was that severe.

He had talked to Wexler before, though only shortly, over the phone. Joe Galkin, a freelance

promoter, a "song plugger," had made the call. He was trying to get Wexler interested in comingdown to FAME to record.

"I'd stay with Joe when I was selling records," Hall remembered. "Galkin was my mentor. He

was always talking about Atlantic and Jerry Wexler. He was devoted to them and convinced that

Wexler and I needed to get together. He got Jerry on the phone for me, but I didn't know what the

hell to say. 'Call me if you find something you're excited about,' Wexler said. Never heard anyone

get off the phone as fast as Jerry Wexler."

Rick picked a bad time to take him up on his invitation, however. Remember, it was a Sunday

afternoon. And it just so happened that Wexler was throwing a poolside party.

"He was a grump," according to Linda Hall. "He said, 'You better have a hit for calling me on a

Sunday.'"

The producer would soon cheer up. After hearing the tape Hall sent him, he called Atlantic

president Ahmet Ertegun, and told him he had found a song that would pay for their entire summer.

Wexler then called Ivy. He told the studio owner that he would have the single put out on

Atlantic, on one condition: he wanted the song redone. According to Sledge and Ivy, Atlantic

wanted the song recorded again because Percy's pronunciation was not clear enough, while several

other accounts have it that the out-of-tune horns were the culprit. Whatever, Ivy brought in the

musicians again, worked on it for a few weeks, going so far as to bring in the vaunted Stax horn

section from Memphis to town.


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Johnson did not do the engineering, though, since he had a dispute with Ivy after recording the

first version and was fired. But his work would not be in vain.

The record was released on March 13. And Atlantic had accidentally released the original

version, with the out of tune horns at the end. Penn got quite a kick out of the original version's

being released, as did Johnson. "Jerry and Quin thought they could do a better version. And the

record they cut was just so stiff," the songwriter recalled. "But some little guy back in the tape

room at Atlantic got 'em mixed up, and they sent out the wrong cut."

Jimmy remembered that he was driving when he first heard the record on the radio, and

immediately knew which cut it was. He immediately began banging the roof of his car with his

fists.

"When a Man Loves a Woman" went on to hit No. 1 on May 28.

But Greene was not around to share in the celebration. He had committed himself to serving six

months duty in the Army Reserve, and was in basic training. Being in the reserve, he noted, kept

him from being "fried, burned, whatever, in Vietnam."

When on duty, Greene added, the reservists had almost no idea what was going on in the outside

world, except in one area known as the PX. "The PX had soft drink machines and magazines and

candy bars and things like that. They give you a break at the PX. It was there where I had first

encounter with the record. I didn't know it was top 10 and rising toward No. 1. That got me through

my Army career."

Shortly after seeing the song on the PX jukebox and hearing it played, he recalled, "Quin very

kindly gave me copies of the record to give to all of my friends."Still, having such a big hit was not without its drawbacks. The studio would never have such a

big hit again.

"In hindsight there's obvious reasons it became a hit," Greene said. "Everybody we played it to

was very excited about it. Atlantic Records wanted to redo the horns on it because they were out of

tune, and they finally went the version we first cut. The general feeling was that we had done


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something and we wanted to do more. That was the first record I had been involved in. I wasn't that

experienced with the studio. It was just something that I felt all the ingredients came together so

easily. Some of those other records I liked as much as that song. I guess we thought it was too

easy."

Ivy agreed. "I thought, 'It's awfully easy.' When it's that easy -- it wasn't the first one we cut, but

certainly one of the first -- I guess it's easy to get the idea that, 'Hey, this is so easy I can do this

forever. I can cut world-beaters from now on.' Of course, that's not reality."

Ivy's operation -- which moved to bigger quarters in Sheffield later, and was renamed Quinvy

Studio -- still cut hits for years afterward, but only with Percy. Not that they were unsubtantial hits.

Four more of his songs would hit the top 40. Of those, "Take Time to Know Her," was the biggest,landing at No. 11. All featured the musicians playing at FAME, along with Greene.

Otherwise, he never had an artist record a song at Quinvy that would hit the Top 40, although he

would score regional hits. And he even had higher hopes for Sledge. He just thought that seeing

them come to fruition would have entailed marketing him differently.

Ivy wanted Sledge to go country.

This may sound crazy, but Ivy was convinced, and not without good reason. "I tried to tell

Atlantic for years to make him a country artist. I had been out on the road with him and seen his

audience. They were white country people. The blacks, by and large, did not care for Percy Sledge.

Of course, some did; you can't generalize. But I was in the record-selling business down there too

when 'A Man Loves a Woman' was big, and I saw the kind of people who came in and bought it --

primarily white people. And they were the same people who were buying country records. Not

entirely, but out there on the road, it seems that his audiences were primarily white country people.

I even put together a show for him that mixed in a lot of country songs. I said, 'If you'll reach back

there and get a cowboy hat and go into 'Kiss An Angel Good Morning,' you'll kill 'em.' (Pause.) He

wouldn't do it."

"Take Time to Know Her," he added, was a country song, straight from a Nashville publishing

company.

Ivy later pitched the idea to Phil Walden, who had managed Otis Redding and Sledge, among

many other soul artists -- and later signed Sledge to his Capricorn label (The Allman Brothers and


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Marshall Tucker bands) -- and received a positive reaction. "I said, 'Phil, you've got to let me cut an

out-and-out country album on Percy. I mean, with a pedal steel, fiddles, in Nashville.' He said, 'Oh,

that's a great idea.' (Pause.) Never got around to doing it."

Again, though, Ivy kept going, and even had his studio renovated and updated a few years later.

But he decided to sell his studio in the early '70s, and headed to Ole Miss. He earned his masters in

accounting there, and would eventually settle into life in the academic world.

The real spoils of "the monster" would go to Hall. Wexler, who had been pitched the idea of

working at FAME before, would begin bringing already-massive R&B star Wilson Pickett down to

the studio to cut one bit of screaming madness after another. Other record companies would follow,

and Hall's studio would become a hit factory.

It was, again, the beginning of a music industry boom. And Spooner Oldham was, quite frankly,

absolutely amazed -- baffled really, as he had been for a while. But there was almost no way he,

like the other musicians, could have been anything but startled.

"We were just 18, 20 years old, basically coming from hardly any music industry," said

Oldham, in his lethargic southern drawl, while finishing off a watermelon. "There were no hits. I

thought, 'What are we doing? I thought you had to go somewhere.' We were doing it here at this

remote place with no airport. All the things you had to have weren't there. All of what I think of as

the great calling cards weren't there."

He shrugged his shoulders, and rolled his eyes. Then, in his usual, endearingly half-a-beat off

way, he started to get tickled.

But Oldham would not let his confusion overcome him. However unlikely it may have been,

people from those big cities that most of the players had never been to, and even from other parts of

the world, were wanting to follow their beat -- off a bit or not.

"It was like this...," Johnson would describe it as soon becoming, acting as if he were trying to

get control of a speeding car with steering problems. "And we didn't know where we were going."But before all this happened, they would not have time to ponder the strangeness and

significance of it all, given what would come next. It was, if ever there were such a time, a good

one for a seatbelt.


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Interviews with Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, Jimmy Johnson, Marlin Greene, (telephone

conversation with) Percy Sledge manager Steve Green, Buddy Killen, Quin Ivy, Linda Hall, theRev. Earl "Peanutt" Montgomery, Jerry Carrigan, Roger Hawkins and David Hood, 1994; quotesfrom Rick Hall, from Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, by Jerry Wexler withDavid Ritts, used with permission, Wexler information from various past published accounts,including the interviews, Wexler's book, Goldmine magazine interview with Wexler from March1989, and Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm & Blues and the Dream of SouthernFreedom, 1987. Buddy Killen book quote from By the Seat of My Pants: A Life in Country Music,1994. Quotes from Percy Sledge from a late '70s documentary on the Muscle Shoals Music industryby students at Alabama A&M of Normal, Ala.

Documents

Chapter 3 (Percy Sledge): Unpublished history of the Muscle Shoals AL recording business