Sweet roam Alabama
With a rich past of civil rights, music and space greats, this state is an historic destination
Tour guide Colin put on Freebird by 1970s Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. “The intro you can hear on this record was by keyboard player Billy Powell sitting right here at this very piano,” he said.
‘’And if you look over here,” he gestured to the tiny bathroom just off the recording studio, “this is where Keith Richards locked himself in to think while the Rolling Stones were recording Wild Horses. They couldn’t come up with the last two verses. After a while Richards emerged to tell the group he’d nailed it and the lyrics were ready to go.”
We were visiting the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio at 3614 Jackson Highway in Sheffield, Alabama. It was established in 1969 by four session musicians known as The Swampers who had left the nearby FAME studios run by the legendary record producer Rick Hall.
OOZE
The list of artists that the Swampers backed reads like a Who’s Who of the industry: Rod Stewart, Aretha Franklin, Bob Seger, Cher, Paul Simon, Percy Sledge and many others. The walls ooze music history. Colin told us it is not unusual for grown men to weep while on the tour.
We had the extraordinary good fortune to meet David Hood, the Swampers’ bass player. He has played on more hit records than he can remember and told us a fabulous story of how the Swampers were booked to record with a young artist who had been dropped by her record company.
A shy, nervous girl arrived and the four musicians were sitting around impatiently waiting to get started. When she sat at the piano and sang, everyone stopped what they were doing to listen openmouthed. The girl was Aretha Franklin and in that first session they recorded the million-selling masterpiece I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Loved You) (msmusicfoundation.org).
Rick Hall’s FAME studio at East Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals is also open to the public, although it is still very much a working place. The walls are covered with gold discs from a huge roster of artists who sold more than 300 million copies worldwide; another bucket list moment for me (fame2.com).
Also worth a visit is the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in nearby Tuscumbia. There are hundreds of exhibits – stage costumes, instruments, handwritten lyrics and much more (alamhof.org).
We began our Alabama adventure a few days earlier in its largest city,
Birmingham. After exploring the state’s musical heritage we wanted to see the birthplace of the American Civil Rights movement.
A good place to start was the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where we met passionate and informed guide Barry McNeal.
The Institute’s exhibits reveal the full horror of segregation. They have the actual cell bars that Dr Martin Luther King was incarcerated behind when he wrote his “Letter From Birmingham Jail”. Also on display is a deeply sinister Ku Klux Klan outfit (bcri.org).
Barry also took us over the road to the 16th Street Baptist Church, the 1963 scene of one of the worst moments of the Civil Rights era when Klansmen planted a bomb which killed four young girls.
The reaction to this horror led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination in the US. But there’s more to Birmingham than history. I’d recommend going up Red Mountain where a statue
of the Roman god of fire Vulcan stands on a 124ft pedestal. It’s the world’s largest cast iron statue and there are panoramic views across the city (redmountainpark.org).
We also saddled up for an enjoyable14-seat e-bike tour of downtown calling at several fine microbreweries to sample craft ales. (birminghampedaltours.com).
Next, from beer to – eternity. We travelled across the state to visit the US Space and Rocket Centre in Huntsville, an old military facility which became part of NASA, working on the space programme which would take men to the moon.
It is still a working NASA facility testing engines, but has a huge visitor centre. Exhibits range from a gigantic Apollo Saturn V rocket to a tiny but priceless moon rock. (rocketcenter.com).
Alabama is so different to other parts of the US I’ve seen. I loved the state’s wide open spaces, hospitality, music and history. In fact, it has something for y’all.