After I completed my tour of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, my next stop would be at the FAME Studios. FAME is the place that started it all for the music scene in Muscle Shoals. It was started by a man named Rick Hall. He is still active in the day to day operations of FAME. Any of the other studios that had success in Muscle Shoals were, in one way or another, spin-offs from his studio. Aretha Franklin recorded her first successful album there. Wilson Pickett also had several hits that were recorded in this studio. The Osmonds, Mac Davis and Jerry Reed are among the names of famous people that recorded at this studio.
About 3 years ago when I was traveling to Huntsville, Alabama, I went through Muscle Shoals. If I had ever been through there before, I hadn’t noticed it. I remember hearing about Muscle Shoals and the “Muscle Shoals sound” as it related to some of the music I heard when I was growing up. But I couldn’t tell you what that sound was, who made it, or what made it so special. When I got to Huntsville, I did a little research and found out that many of the songs I listened to when I was growing up were recorded in the this little town on the Tennessee River. I had a chance to drive back through and drove by the original building that housed the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio on the Jackson Highway. I knew from my research that they weren’t doing tours. It also looked like the place was practically abandoned. From the research that I did at the time, it seemed like this building was in a constant state of limbo as far as who owned it and what was being done with it. At the time, there was a website that had a lot of information about the recordings that were done at this studio. As of this writing, that website is no longer active. It’s also hard to find a good source of information about the history of this facility on-line. I follow a page for the facility on Facebook. Late last week, they posted information that said the building would be open on Friday and Saturday. I thought this would be a unique opportunity to visit a bit of music history. I was also going to be available to go on Saturday. In my research, I also learned about another historic studio in Muscle Shoals called FAME. Many major artists recorded there as well. I later found out the FAME was the studio that started it all in Muscle Shoals. I also found out that they were going to be doing tours on Friday and Saturday. This would give me even more reason for my trip. This will be the first in a series of posts about my trip to Muscle Shoals and it will focus on the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio.
There are a variety of ways that churches do communion. I have spent my entire life in the United Methodist church and we typically do communion once a month. In all of the communion services I have participated in, we have always gone to the front of the church to be served. Beyond that, there are many ways that churches serve the bread and wine. The United Methodist churches that I have gone to always use grape juice, many times served in the miniature shot glasses (I’m sure there is an official term for these but this is what I have always called them). These glasses were actual glass in the church I grew up in and had to be cleaned between uses. They also used broken up saltine crackers for the bread. I remember our church upgrading to the communion crackers (comedian Dane Cook refers to them as Jeez its) and eventually using disposable shot glasses.
The first train trip I ever took was in Denmark. I flew into Copenhagen and took the train to Odense which is about 2 hours away. I had never been to Denmark before and was on a business trip with a friend. She was travelling there from business in Germany and I was coming directly from the United States. She had visited this business in Denmark before. At the train station, we purchased our tickets and went to wait for the train. I looked at the ticket and we had an assigned seat and car. My friend told me not to worry about that because these trains were never full and it didn’t matter where we sat. When the train arrived, we go on the car closest to us, found seats across from each other and started catching up with each other. We didn’t work in the same facility and hadn’t seen each other in a while so we had a lot to talk about. Someone came by and checked our tickets and nothing was said about where we were sitting so everything was ok.
I have written about my trip to China before. I have talked about Chinese tea and being chased by monkeys. I haven’t mentioned that this two week trip also included a visit to Singapore. When they told me about a visit to Singapore, I didn’t have a good feel for where that was in relationship to Hong Kong or any of the places we were visiting in China. In my mind I had it lumped in with China. As the trip grew closer, began to study the geography of Southeast Asia more closely.
When you find Singapore on the map, looks like it should be a part of Malaysia. Singapore is both a city and a state on the tip of a peninsula that includes part of Malaysia and Thailand. Cambodia and Vietnam are also very close. It is about a 4 hour flight from Hong Kong.
Some time ago, I ran into a friend who was drinking a Minute Maid Orange drink. She mentioned that she was loading up on fruit juice. She actually had two cartons of Minute Maid fruit drinks with her. I asked her to look at the list of ingredients on the label. I explained that the drink has more of the first item on the list. As you continue through the list, the drink has less of each item that follows. Unless the drinks are actual fruit juice they usually contain more water than anything else. Even the fruit juices sometimes have water as their main ingredient.
I know better than to do this, but I just can’t help myself. I received a text message from someone I obviously don’t know and I decided to respond like the message was for me. The only deception in my first responses was that I was not the person they thought they were texting. I had no idea who this person was or what direction the conversation would go. Here is what happened today.
The first text was time stamped at 6:32 AM on Saturday, February 1, 2014.
Text: Want anything from jack in the box.
There are no Jack in the Box restaurants anywhere around where I live. I didn’t pick up my phone until 11:40 AM when I replied.
When I was a kid, my parents bought me a banjo. I had been playing ukulele for several years and had started playing guitar. But I was strictly a rhythm guitar player. I had no fingerpicking skills. When I started trying to play the banjo, I quickly became frustrated. I never felt comfortable enough with my technique to even begin to develop any speed. The books I was using to learn were either to simple or confusing. The book that I had that I didn’t pay any attention to was Pete Seeger’s “How to play the 5-String Banjo”. At the time, I barely knew who Pete Seeger was. The book focused on simple techniques and styles that I didn’t really want to play. I was a big Steve Martin fan and I wanted to play bluegrass like him. I also wanted to play like Earl Scruggs. How would I ever learn to play like them?
When I was growing up, my parents had a relatively large record collection. I would occasionally look through it to see what kind of things they listened to. Sometimes I would find something worth checking out. There are a handful of albums that I found in my parents’ record collection that had a lasting influence on me. The five albums that I discuss below have had a lasting impact on me and my music.
I have written music off and on throughout my life. Most of the things I did early in my life weren’t work keeping around. There are bits and pieces of this music stored away in drawers at my father’s house but it’s really not worth digging up. Sometime around 1998 or 1999, I started work on the song that would become The Belly of the Whale. At the time, I lived in Livingston, Tennessee. We only lived there three years and my youngest child was born while we were there. She might have been born before I started working on this song. At the time, I felt that I was being moved to minister to people that I really didn’t like. By writing this song, I attempted creatively address this feeling.
