Praised for his masterful poetics and tasty guitar playing, four-time GRAMMY® winner Jason Isbell is considered one of the great Americana artists of our time.

Growing up in Northern Alabama, he was surrounded by music and learned to play multiple instruments through his family, playing in the school band, and singing at the church where his grandfather also preached and played guitar. Isbell believes his Alabaman heritage greatly impacted his development as a musician saying, “I definitely don’t feel like I would be the musician that I am, or the type of songwriter, had I not come from that particular place.”

He put his heart and soul into playing music and performed at the Grand Ole Opry at the tender age of 16, Just five years later, he received a publishing deal with Rodney & Mark Hall as the first new writer of their recently acquired FAME Publishing company, beginning a fifteen year relationship that includes recording and writing as a member of The Drive-By Truckers on their albums Decorations Day, Dirty South, Blessing and a Curse as well as his solo albums Sirens of the Ditch, Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Here We Rest, and Southeastern. Jason has also produced at FAME on the Blind Boys of Alabama track “Christmas in Dixie,” as well as a duet with John Paul White on “Old Flame”. Both of which were included on a tribute to the country supergroup Alabama. Jason and John Paul White were featured on a track with Candi Staton for the album Muscle Shoals-Small Town Big Sound”. The track would go on to be one of legendary producer Rick Hall’s final final productions. Isbell has said that working at FAME Studios meant everything to him, that it was a gateway towards the music that he wanted to play.

The name of his GRAMMY® winning band The 400 Unit is also deeply rooted in his time in Alabama. The 400 Unit is the name of a mental treatment facility in Florence, Alabama. As Isbell tells it, “About once a week they would drive downtown and take, I guess, the six or eight healthiest people in the facility and let ’em go downtown. Give ’em all like $15 apiece to go get some lunch. You’d immediately recognize who it was and why they were there; they all had nametags on, saying kinda strange stuff to everybody. And trying to get a sandwich at the same time,” adding, “When I started thinking about a band, and how we get to a new town and everybody gets $15 and gets out of the van, goes out and tries to get a sandwich, it kinda reminded me of that.” Both bassist Jimbo Hart and drummer Chad Gamble are Shoals area natives and have done a lot of studio session work at FAME outside of the 400 Unit over the last 20 years.

In addition to his four GRAMMY®s, Isbell has won nine Americana Music Honors and Awards and was the Country Music Hall-of-Fame Artist in Residence for 2017. He has also seen success across multiple genres as his album Something More Than Free debuted at number 1 on Billboard Magazine’s rock, folk and country record charts. Something More Than Free, Southeastern, and The Nashville Sound (with The 400 Unit) have sold nearly 150,000 copies each, with Southeastern being his most recently recorded album at Fame Studios. For The Nashville Sound (with The 400 Unit), Isbell garnered four peak chart positions in the United States and eight top-40 peak chart positions in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Isbell is married to fellow Americana superstar Amanda Shires, co-founder of the Highwomen, and the two share a daughter together. He is an avid player and collector of guitars. He believes a special guitar “…is one that fulfills its purpose in design,” and discussed some of his vintage guitars with Guitar World in 2020. He currently owns roughly 50 to 60 guitars including a ’53 Les Paul gold top, a ’59 ‘burst dubbed “Red Eye” that once belonged to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ed King, a ’65 Tele, a ’60 Strat, a ’61 ES-335, a Gretsch White Falcon given to him by John Prine, a mid-50s Martin D-18, and more in his collection.

Outside of his musical career, Isbell has also seen success in acting with his first role being in 2016 providing the voice for pastor Kyle Nubbins in the animated television series Squidbillies. In 2021, Isbell earned his biggest role in the upcoming Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon.

In 2019, Jason along with his manager, Traci Thomas gave the Shoals some love and launched their music festival, Shoalsfest. The festival has hosted thousands of fans to shows with artists like Sheryl Crow, Mavis Staples, Candi Staton, Drive By Truckers, Amanda Shires and Lucinda Williams and is one of the premier events in the Shoals musical calendar..

A loving husband, father, and other-worldly musician, Jason Isbell has achieved global success on a level that we at FAME knew was possible. Jason will always have a special place in our hearts as a member of the FAME Gang and we’re excited to see him continue to make genre-defining and genre-expanding music in the future.

The Innovator. The Originator. The Architect of Rock and Roll.

These are just a few of the names bestowed upon the legendary Richard Wayne Penniman, better known to the world as Little Richard, one of the most influential recording artists in the history of popular music. Few have left a more indelible mark on our culture’s fabric than Little Richard. One only needs to listen to The Rolling Stones (who toured with Richard in the early-60s), Jimi Hendrix (who played in Richard’s band for a short period) and The Beatles (who also toured on a bill with Richard in the early-60s).

According to Richard, as quoted in his biography, The Life and Times of Little Richard by Charles White, The Beatles’s manager, Brian Epstein, told him, “These boys worship you. You’re the only famous artist they’ve ever met. They’ve never met a famous person in their life. They want their picture taken with you.”

Sometimes, however, when we extol an artist for their influence, we can diminish their greatness somewhat by viewing them only in a light shined by others. It is not only because he influenced so many other rock and roll bands that we should remember how great Little Richard’s music is — because, in fact, there are so many aspects of his performance style and playing abilities that are still untouched by others — to this day.

Little Richard was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1932, the third of 12 children. Obsessed with music in his early years, he was given his first big break at the age of 14 opening for Sister Rosetta Tharpe at the Macon City Auditorium after hearing him singing her songs prior to a performance.

By 1949, he was performing in minstrel performer Doctor Nubillo’s traveling show and was later inspired to don some of the more flamboyant outfits worn by Nubillo — like capes and turbans — that would come to define the signature, electrifying, live performances he would become known at the apex of his career.

After years of touring and performing with little traction, Little Richard scored his first smash hit, “Tutti Frutti” in 1955, continuing to deliver an unprecedented string of hits in the late-50s, including “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin,’” “Ready Teddy,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” (the title song for the 1956 movie of the same name starring Jane Mansfield) “Rip It Up,” and “Lucille,” to name only a few.

This record run of hits would come to an abrupt end, however, as in the middle of his 1957 tour with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, Richard announced that he would be leaving popular music behind and following a life in the ministry.

Cutting the tour short and returning to the U.S. ten days earlier than expected, Richard learned that his original flight had crashed into the Pacific Ocean, further cementing his decision to stop performing secular music and he enrolled at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, to study theology, following a “farewell performance” at the Apollo Theater and a “final” recording session with Specialty Records.

His break from secular music would prove to be short-lived, and Richard embarked on several successful rock and roll tours throughout the sixties — although due to the arrival of the Beatles and other British bands as well as the rise of soul labels such as Motown and Stax Records, Richard’s new releases were not well promoted and found little airtime on the radio.

By 1970, three years had passed since the last new material from Little Richard. Wanting to cross over to both black rhythm and blues and white rock audiences, Richards signed with Reprise Records (having turned down offers from other labels, including The Beatles’s Apple Records).

Hoping to meld his signature sound with the hit-making power coming out of Muscle Shoals in the early 1970s, Little Richard decided to record his next album, The Rill Thing, at FAME Recording Studios under the direction of Producer Rick Hall.

“I worked with several of my early rock and roll idols who’d had a profound effect on the shape of my musical ideas. Little Richard was one.” said Hall (in his autobiography, “The Man From Muscle Shoals.”) “After Little Richard visited FAME, he made Muscle Shoals a part of his musical identity. A number of my best studio musicians, including guitarist Travis Wammack and bassist Jesse Boyce, later joined Richard’s road band and toured the world.”

Although The Rill Thing was not the commercial success Richard was hoping for, the album received near unanimous critical acclaim and delivered Richard his last Billboard Hot 100 hit, Greenwood, Mississippi, written by Travis Wammack and Albert Lowe Jr. Billboard Magazine described the album as a “stomping, swinging, soulful leap backwards in the rock ‘n’ rolling ’50’s with the Muscle Shoals gang” and Joel Selvin of Rolling Stone considered the album “a major artistic triumph for Little Richard” that “faithfully exhibits Richard’s maturity as an artist both through the selection of material and the contemporary instrumental setting”.

Little Richard continued to tour and record throughout his life and, in 1986, was a member of the first group of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the Everly Brothers.

On May 9, 2020, Richard died at the age of 87 at his home in Tullahoma, Tennessee after a long illness.

FAME is honored to have played a part in the extraordinary career of a truly original and singular performer. While Little Richard would have always reached the heights of Rock n’ Roll supremacy, FAME wouldn’t have been the same without his ground-breaking music and style.

A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom

“Aretha Franklin was one of the most phenomenal recording artists I have ever met, and in a short twenty-four hour period in my FAME Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, she was to change my musical life forever.” — Rick Hall

 
It’s hard to fathom today, but there was a time when Aretha Franklin couldn’t buy a hit record. In 1966, after recording nine albums of feckless, light jazz, pop standards without a hit, she was released from her contract with Columbia Records and, at the age of 25, was at a crossroads in her career. That would all change in one electrically-charged, tension-filled, magical recording session on January 24, 1967.

Although she had yet to make her mark on popular music, Atlantic Records co-founder Jerry Wexler knew she had a voice and a once-in-a-lifetime talent that could transcend the musical boundaries that had been placed on her. She just needed the right songs and the right sound. She would find those songs and that sound in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Wexler had signed Franklin in November of 1966 and wanted to pair Aretha with the funky sound that was coming out of FAME Recording Studios, the sound and feel that was producing hit records for Jimmy Hughes and Wilson Pickett. On a mild January day in 1967, Wexler would get the sound he was looking for…and more.

As told by FAME founder Rick Hall in his memoir The Man From Muscle Shoals, “At around ten o’clock that morning, Aretha walked into the studio, then casually walked over to the baby-grand piano that sat in a corner of the studio in front of the large control room glass window, and sat down to do what she came to FAME to do – to cut a hit record and create her career on Atlantic.”

The session included a lineup of some of the best musicians Muscle Shoals had to offer: Roger Hawkins on drums, Tommy Cogbill on bass, Jimmy Johnson on rhythm guitar, Chips Moman on lead guitar, Charlie Chalmers and Ed Logan on saxophones, Ken Laxton on trumpet, David Hood on trombone, Spooner Oldham on electric piano, with Rick Hall engineering.

The first track they set out to record was “I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You),” a waltzy ballad that, according to Hall, needed a little something special to take off. That something special was provided by the great Spooner Oldham. As Hall recalled in TMFMS:

“We were looking for that special groove or hook that would set the record apart from the ordinary and it wasn’t long before Spooner Oldham filled that need. He started playing a funky, soulful blues riff on the Wurlitzer electric piano that set the mood for “I Never Loved A Man” – and became a signature piano blues riff forever

Like a Stradivarius violin, Wurlitzer pianos only mellow with age, and I still have two of them in my FAME Studios today, the one used on Aretha’s session and another one.

As soon as he hit it, everything about that track started coming together. The combination of Aretha playing her gospel-sounding acoustic piano fill lines and Spooner’s bluesy riff on the Wurlitzer glued the whole rhythm track together and set the tone for Aretha to belt out, “You’re a no good heartbreaker, you’re a liar, and you’re a cheat ….”

By the end of the day, Franklin would have the A and B sides of a number one record: “I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You)/ Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”.

Over 54 years on, the story of the tumultuous session that birthed those hits has morphed, distorted, and expanded into legend. To hear Rick Hall tell it, check out his aforementioned memoir, or see it depicted on the big screen in the upcoming biopic RESPECT, coming to theaters on August 13, 2021.

Although Aretha Franklin would never record in FAME Studios again after that historic session, we feel honored that our stories are forever intertwined. Aretha, of course, would go on to become one of the greatest singers who ever recorded and FAME continues to make hit records to this day. However, neither would be the same after that magical day in January.

Thank you, Aretha. For the music, for the soul, and for the memories. Thank you.