FAME Recording Studios, Muscle Shoals, AL, May 8, 2008, from the “Listen” project, 2006-18

© Rhona Bitner, ADAGP, Artists Rights Society, New York. Image courtesy of the Ruth and Elmer W…

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Artist/Maker Rhona Bitner (American, born 1960)

DateMay 8, 2008

MediumFujiflex print

DimensionsImage: 40 × 40 in. (101.6 × 101.6 cm) Frame: 41 1/2 × 41 1/2 × 1 1/2 in. (105.4 × 105.4 × 3.8 cm)

Credit LineRuth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY.

Object number2024.7.6

Not on view

DescriptionEstablished in 1959 in Florence, Alabama, and moved to Muscle Shoals in 1961, Florence Alabama Music Enterprises Studios produced multiple hit records. Producer Jerry Wexler brought Aretha Franklin to FAME Studio A after signing her to Atlantic Records in 1967. The first tracks she worked on with the house band were “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”—records that would help make her reputation as the undisputed “Queen of Soul.” Those responsible for what became known as the Muscle Shoals sound, the house band sometimes called the FAME gang, or the Swampers, were a group of white musicians who backed up some of the era’s most successful soul and R&B artists. Some of the greatest tracks of the late 1960s and early ’70s recorded at FAME include Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1,000 Dances,” the Staple Singers’s “I’ll Take You There,” and Etta James’s 1968 Tell Mama, praised as one of the best albums of the rock and roll era.

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