Jerry Wexler stopped the car in the parking lot of a converted coffin factory on a dead-end street in Sheffield, Alabama and told Etta James they had arrived. She looked at the building, then at him. She said, “I am not going in there.” He did not argue. He turned off the engine and asked her one question. Jerry Wexler had been producing records at Atlantic Records since the late 1940s and had developed in those years a theory of recording that was almost entirely opposed to the prevailing practice of the industry. The prevailing
practice in the mid-1960s, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, was to bring the artist to the studio and build the sound around them in layers. To construct a recording in which every element was controlled and polished and the room itself was invisible. The acoustic character of the space engineered out of the final product so that what remained was clean and portable and exactly what the arranger had written.
Wexler thought this was wrong. He thought it was wrong in the specific way that things are wrong when they are technically correct and aesthetically false. What Wexler believed, had believed since he first understood what made the records he loved different from the records he merely respected, was that the room was the instrument.
That the specific acoustic character of a space, the way sound bounced off particular walls in a particular configuration, the way a rhythm section locked in differently depending on the floor and ceiling and the arrangement of the musicians in relation to each other, that all of this was not a problem to be eliminated but a resource to be used.
That the best recordings sounded like somewhere. That somewhere was not an engineering achievement. It was a choice about where to record. In 1966, he had taken Aretha Franklin to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and watched her record “I Never Loved a Man” in a single afternoon. And what came out of that session had confirmed everything he believed.
Muscle Shoals had something that New York and Los Angeles did not have and could not manufacture. A rhythm section of white Southern musicians who had grown up on black music and who played it not as an imitation, but as a native language. Who brought to the recording of soul music the specific understanding of people for whom the music had been the soundtrack of an entire life.
And who could lock into a groove with a singer and find a collective center of gravity that the polished New York arrangements could not replicate. In 1967, Wexler believed Etta James needed Muscle Shoals. Her career had hit a complicated moment. She had been at Chess Records for over a decade. She had At Last and the catalog that followed it.
But the mid-1960s had been uneven. The singles had not always found the chart positions her voice warranted. And the recordings had not always given her the setting she needed. She was 29 years old and had a voice that had deepened since the early Chess recordings. Had developed a range and a weight that the earlier material had not fully accessed.
Wexler had heard what she could do with the right setting. He believed the right setting was Alabama. The drive from Memphis to Sheffield took a few hours on roads that ran through the flat cotton country of the Tennessee River Valley. Etta James was quiet for most of it. She had been to the South before, had toured it extensively on the Chitlin’ Circuit, knew its specific combination of musical richness and physical danger for black performers traveling through it.
Had her own accumulated experience of what the South required you to absorb in order to work there. She had done it. But that did not mean she was comfortable with it. And arriving in Alabama, in the state where Birmingham had happened, where the Selma marches had happened, where the specific weight of what the South had done and was still doing was most present in the landscape, was not the same as arriving somewhere neutral.
Wexler pulled into the parking lot of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, which operated out of a building on Jackson Highway that had previously served other purposes, and that did not look from the outside like a place where anything significant was happening. Etta James looked at the building. She looked at the street.
She said, “I am not going in there.” Wexler turned off the engine. He did not speak for a moment. Then he asked her, “What do you hear when you listen to the record you want to make?” She looked at him. She said, “What?” He said, “Not the record you’re going to make. The record you want. The one that’s already in your head.
What does it sound like?” She was quiet. The Alabama heat sat on the car. The parking lot was empty except for them and the station wagon parked near the door. From inside the building came the faint sound of a rhythm section warming up. Guitar, bass, drums, finding the pocket of something before anyone had told them what the song was.
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The sound came through the cinder block walls and reached them in the car, and it sounded like something she recognized, though she could not immediately say from where. She said, “It sounds like it means it.” He said, “Then let’s go find out.” He opened his door. He got out of the car. He did not look back. He walked to the entrance and opened the door and went inside.
She sat in the car for another moment. The sound of the rhythm section came through the walls, the drummer settling into something, the bass player finding the bottom of it, the guitar locating its place in the middle of the thing the rhythm section was quietly assembling. It sounded like something that meant it.
She got out of the car. She walked to the door. She went inside. The parking lot was the last place she was in charge of what happened next. Once she walked through the door, the music would take over, and the music had its own requirements. She had learned this about herself, that the approach to a recording session was the part she could control, and the session itself was the part she could not, and the transition between the two was always the hardest moment.
She had stood in parking lots before. She had stood outside venues. She had stood in the wings of stages. The threshold was always the place where the resistance concentrated, where everything she was protecting herself from pressed against the decision to stop protecting. The question Wexler had asked had not dissolved the resistance.
It had named what was on the other side of it. The musicians who made up the Muscle Shoals rhythm section were arrayed around the recording floor in the configuration they had developed over years of sessions. A configuration based not on any standard arrangement, but on what they had learned about where each of them needed to be in relation to the others in order for the thing to lock.
They were white musicians who had grown up 30 miles from where Robert Johnson had played, who had absorbed the blues and gospel and soul of the black South as the music of their own childhood, who brought to the recording of that music the particular fluency of people for whom it was not a genre to be mastered, but a language to be spoken.
Etta James stood at the microphone and looked at the room, and the musicians in it looked back at her. Someone counted off. The bass landed on the one. The drums found the backbeat. The guitar found the space between. And Etta James opened her mouth and gave the room what she had told Wexler the record sounded like in her head.
Something that meant it. They recorded Tell Mama on the first day. They recorded I’d Rather Go Blind on the second day. A song that Etta James delivered in two takes with the complete authority of someone who is not performing a lyric, but reporting a truth. The voice stripped of everything that is not necessary and left with only what cannot be removed.
The Muscle Shoals rhythm section played behind her with the specific restraint of musicians who understand that the best thing they can do for a voice like this is to give it exactly what it needs and stay out of the way of the rest. Jerry Wexler sat in the control room and listened and said nothing. He had brought her here because he knew what the room could do and what she could do in it.
He was right about both. Tell Mama was released in late 1967 and reached the top five on the R&B chart. I’d Rather Go Blind became one of the most covered songs in the soul and blues canon. A recording that musicians in every decade since have returned to as a definition of what it means to give everything a lyric contains without protecting yourself or the listener from any of it.
Etta James spoke about the Muscle Shoals sessions for the rest of her career as the recording experience that had given her the setting her voice had been looking for. She said once that Wexler had understood something about her that she had not yet articulated to herself. That the right room was not a technical question but an emotional one.
That the question was not what equipment the studio had or how many tracks were available but whether the room was a place where the truth could be said. She said Muscle Shoals was a place where the truth could be said. That is harder to find than it sounds. The musicians at Muscle Shoals never asked her to be anything other than exactly what she was.
They did not arrange around a version of her voice that was easier to contain. They found the center of gravity of what she brought into the room and built underneath it. And the result was a set of recordings in which the voice and the music are not in a relationship of singer and accompaniment but of two things that cannot be separated.
Where removing either would leave something that is not the record only a fragment of it. That is what the right room produces. That is what Wexler drove her to Alabama to find. She sat in a car in a parking lot in Alabama for a long time before she walked through the door. The question he asked her was not a technical question and it was not an encouragement and it was not a negotiation.
It was an invitation to name what she was actually there to do. Once you have named it the door is easier to walk through. The question Wexler asked her was not about the studio. It was about what she was making and why. What do you hear when you listen to the record you want to make? She had an answer. The answer walked her through the door.
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