JIMMY HUGHES: ALMOST FAME-OUS
Jimmy Hughes: Steal Away
Jimmy Hughes: Neighbor, Neighbor
From The Best of Jimmy Hughes (FAME, 2008)
Leon Austin: Steal Away
From 7" (King, 1970)
When people talk about "Southern soul," inevitably, Memphis' Stax Records tends to come to mind first. After all, Stax/Volt was as vital a force in '60s soul as Motown and given their connection to Atlantic Records only expanded their reach. But the story of Southern soul isn't complete without the recognition of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Beginning in the early 1960s, the vaunted "Muscle Shoals Sound" helped influence a generation of soul, blues and rock n' roll musicians and helped make Muscle Shoals one of the capitols of South below the Mason-Dixon, alongside Memphis and Macon (GA).
It began with Rick Hall, an eccentric White musician and entrepreneur, who helped found FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) in the late 1950s. Jimmy Hughes was one of his first major finds - a local singer who, like many soulsters of that era, came into R&B through gospel. You can hear that influence clearly on many of his songs - there's something in his elongated syllables and dramatic upswings of voice that has a touch of Sunday morning vigor to it - but unlike some of more famed falsetto types to come out of the same tradition: Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, etc., Hughes' had a mellow tenor that worked well on more polished tunes as well as the grittier blues he turned out.
Hughes was never as big of an artist as others from the South such as Otis Redding, William Bell or Solomon Burke but his output was prolific enough to churn out dozens of songs and carve out a career that spanned the '60s through early '70s. He was also responsible for one of the first major R&B hits to come out of Muscle Shoals - "Steal Away" from 1964. It's a slow, heavy ballad sprinkled with some tinkling blues piano from Ray Stevens and David Briggs' subtle organ, huffing in the background. "Neighbor, Neighbor" comes from two years later and you can clearly hear how proto-funk influences have crept in with Jerry Carrigan's snappy backbeat plus John Sandlin's guitar licks. What you hear there is the evolution towards the full-fledged Muscle Shoals Sound that artists such as Aretha Franklin and Percy Sledge would make historic use of but the rhythm section clearly has their chops down.
The surprising thing though is that the FAME house band - at the time - was exclusively White. That wasn't wholly unprecedented - Stax's vaunted MGs were thoroughly interracial - but it still must have shocked the unaware, coming to record at FAME, that their classic soul sound was the product of an all-White band (members of that band later broke from FAME to form the rival Muscle Shoals Sound Studio). At the very least, the story of Muscle Shoals raises some interesting questions around our assumptions of race, music and authenticity.
This Hughes CD is the first offering from a newly reinvigorated FAME Studios; one can only hope they make as much of their storied catalog available again.
For a bonus track, I included a cover of "Steal Away," done by Leon Austin from the late '60s, produced by another son of the South: James Brown. Austin's energetic take is dramatically different from the more somber original; if not the for the lyrics, you'd never guess they were based on the same song.
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