I’ll Take You There by Greg Kot

Author:Greg Kot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

24

“Cleo, you like brownies?”

The Staple Singers returned to Muscle Shoals in 1971 with new confidence, now that they had a legitimate hit on the pop charts with “Heavy Makes You Happy (Sha-Na-Boom Boom).” “The first time we met them, there may have been some doubts about how things were going to work,” bassist David Hood says. “On The Staple Swingers album we had some loose ends, some rough patches. But the next time, there was a definite sense of excitement that we were building on something. We knew we were cutting tracks that were going to be heard and promoted.

“The Staples were doing a new thing. They had the gospel influence, but they were moving in a more secular direction that almost perfectly coincided with what we had going on. We wanted to be like Motown or Stax—a soul rhythm section—but there was a pop and rock thing in there, too. You can’t help your roots from showing, no matter how hard you fight it. I don’t think that hurt. In fact, I think it helped them reach a wider audience.”

Any trepidation the Staples may have had about recording in Alabama was assuaged by the sound they got at Muscle Shoals. “That was a rhythm section to die for,” Mavis Staples says of Hood, Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins, and Jimmy Johnson, plus lead guitarist Eddie Hinton. “They were funky, and they helped make us sound funky.”

In between sessions with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Traffic, and Boz Scaggs, the Muscle Shoals Swampers were frequently employed by Al Bell and his team of producers to crank out rhythm tracks for Stax artists. Their bond with the Staple Singers was especially tight, due in no small part to the family’s easygoing warmth.

“They were huggers,” guitarist Jimmy Johnson fondly remembers. “We’d all get a hug at the start and the end of the week. They all had pet names for us. Hood was ‘Little David,’ I was ‘Jimmy Mack.’ With them, it became like family pretty quick.” Johnson’s mom and dad would host meals at their home nearby to give the Staples a break from their nightly catfish dinners at the Holiday Inn. Hazel Johnson was renowned for her country-fried beefsteak, cream potatoes, brown gravy, black-eyed peas, and corn on the cob. Her homemade pies rivaled those of Mom Staples.

Integrated restaurants still weren’t widely accepted in Muscle Shoals, but the Swampers and the Staples didn’t let that stop them, and they’d hit the town for a meal and some laughs after a particularly long day. “There was a time early on, when we were still working at Fame, it was sometimes a little uncomfortable for Wilson Pickett to eat with us—fly in the buttermilk, know what I’m saying?” Johnson says. “But even with all the racial problems back in those days, we had zero problems in the studio. Sometimes when we’d go eat at places, we’d get looks from the rednecks. But no one tried to invade [the studio] or

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