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Muscle Shoals
noun
- former rapids of the Tennessee River in SW Alabama, changed into a lake by Wilson Dam: part of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Example Sentences
According to former curator of Alabama's Music Hall of Fame, George Lair, the Muscle Shoals sound was a product of geography.
"You can draw a triangle from Nashville to Memphis to Muscle Shoals, and while Nashville is the country centre, Memphis is generally known as the blues centre," he told NPR in 2023.
"Muscle Shoals, being between those two places, has been able to combine those two styles into a real Southern rhythm and blues that was very appealing."
At their peak, the Muscle Shoals' players were largely anonymous but music obsessives - the sort of people who pored over the liner notes of their vinyl albums - knew all about them: Keyboardist Barry Beckett, drummer Roger Hawkins, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood and pianist Spooner Oldham.
"We all knew the story of when Aretha went to Muscle Shoals and she thought she was going to record with these old blues guys; then she turned up and it was this group of geeky white blokes," she tells the BBC.
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