I had been recording in Memphis for perhaps two years, maybe even three, and uh, we had good success with the records we made with William Bell, with Carla, with Otis, no matter who the artist was. Uh, but there was a recording session that as we were putting a wrap on it, Steve Cropper and I were sitting around talking, and Steve said, how come Motown is called pop records and our records are called R and B or are records are still called Soul records. We sell as many as they do. And I said, well, you can't compare the two types of records. Because their's are like nursery rhymes. Every syllable is on the beat, there is no artist expression, it is a recitation in time. And Steve kind of looked at me, and I said, yeah, like when we're doing Otis, you think of a song like "Fa-fa-fa", any song of that nature, lots of times we're playing and they have half the words finished and they're thinking like when they can't remember what they intended to sing, they put in a soul expression like a scream or a cry or a pain or something, so, it's, that's the difference, and if you wanted to have a Motown type record, you've got to write a record where the artist doesn't have an opportunity to put in any expression, he's compelled to have to sing in time. And so, Jerry went down to Memphis to record with Wilson Pickett and when the tape was on its way back up to me, Steve Cropper was joking with me, and he said, I want you to listen to this third cut, I wrote a song just the way you aid, and uh, I listened to it, and I couldn't believe my years, Wilson singing in time, hello?

I'd been recording in Memphis for several years and we'd had success with the Stax artists that I had recorded with the Stax people. And there was one session, where as I was leaving, Steve Cropper and I were reflecting on one or two of the songs, and Steve said, how come Motown makes records and they're called pop records, and the stuff we do is called R and B or soul? We sell as many as they do? Why the difference. And I said, well, Steve, you can't compare the nature of the writing or the nature of the performance because the Motown records are like nursery rhymes, it's like kids singing "Ring-Around-The-Rosie" in kindergarten at recess time or something like that, or holding hands. I said the records we make, and the records you, and the songs you write and the things you do down here allow for the artist to have much more expression. I said also in the heat of recording, lots of times the artists blank out on what lyrics that they're going to sing and they put an expression in, that's what makes it soul. It's like in essence of jazz and gospel and blues all run together and it's spontaneous that way. And he kind of looked at me and he shook his head. The next thing I know a couple of weeks went by and Jerry Wexler went down to record with the Stax rhythm section, bringing Wilson Pickett with him. And uh, when that session was over, Steve called me up in New York one day, and he said, hey man, when you get that tape, I want you to listen to the third cut, because I dig what you said. Now I vaguely remembered what he was talking about. But this was a complete surprise. [plays tape of "634-5789"] You see, those holes going by that's normally where Wilson or any other so inspired soul type artist would be stretching out and putting yeah baby and who like that, but he's singing straight ahead on the beat. And when you hear the chorus, it's the giveaway -- here comes Steve. [plays tape] Now it's hard to making everything that's on the beat swing, but they managed to do it. But I don't think Steve devoted his time to writing too many more songs like that even though that one was a hit.

So tell me what you think the difference is between the music that was done in Detroit in Motown, and the music that was coming out of the South.

The music coming out of Detroit was the product of the generation of people who had moved from Memphis, Birmingham, areas like that, Mobile, to the North, working for the automobile factories and whatever the industry was that they were employed in. Now they were living the big city life. They had TV, they had AM, they had AM/FM radio, their kids were going to school, unlike what was going on still in the South. In the South it still was segregated, and the people down in the South were still living the traditional turn of the century lifestyle. So that the people in the South when they were making records, were still under the influence of gospel, country and blues, wailing and crying, and informal, impromptu, ad-lib, just like a Sun -- you can't dictate a Sun, the sermon is an inspirational thing that takes place on a Sunday. Detroit, they had become completely columnized, and they were la-da-sing-around-the-Rosie, everything is in time, everything is to the beat, and there's a fad for this and a fad for that, and that's reflected in their writing and their style of music. It comes from predominantly black people, but it is not coming from the field, from the work song, from the factory. It's coming from the different transitional life that they are adjusting too and thriving on.

Do you think Berry Gordy was purposively going after a younger and whiter audience?

Berry Gordy worked for Decca Records, and a man Nat Turnapole, who was his mentor. And in the days when companies like Atlantic and Chess, Modern, Don Robey, Duke, Peacock and those companies were doing black artists, Decca was the Andrews Sisters, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, you name it, okay? They did have a guy named Jackie Wilson, who was Nat Turnapole and Berry Gordy's artist. And Nat Turnapole left. Berry Gordy left Decca, moved up north, and decided there's a market in that business, and it doesn't have to be a secondary or third step part of a record company. It's a record company all by itself, and he started Motown.

Historically, because of my exposure to various forms of music. I always went for the spontaneity of the performance. The fact that is Muscle Shoals, and in Memphis, with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section and the Memphis, the Stax rhythm section or the American rhythm section in Memphis, these were people who played together five and six days a week, seven, eight, nine, ten hours a day, whether in a studio or in a club, they were perpetually playing together. If you spoke to one of them, five of them heard the same thing. They were just completely together in everything they did. So that if you went down there to record you hoped that you could get the artist to sing live as a worthy performance that would inspire the musicians to play. Because they were not going to memorize a song. They were going to now respond to what the artist was singing to, and they would get louder, they would get softer, a fill here the first time would not be there the next time, because the artist might have taken a breath and shifted a phrase. This was a magnificent capture of a combined effort to play at one time a selection. And if they played it two or three times, it was minutely different, but one was the one that was it, one was that super-sensational, spiritually effective take.

Any particular tune come to mind in that context?

Think of Aretha Franklin, uh, "I Never Loved A Man." Aretha sat down at the piano, played the song once or twice and then we just, the musicians sat and thought, okay, I know where you're coming from, maybe six minutes or nine minutes later, two, three takes later, there was no use doing it again. She wasn't going to sing it any better, and their reactions would now start to become formula, where they had been spontaneous.

You were talking about that first session Aretha did. Could you tell us a little bit about the atmosphere there, and talk a little bit about the band was all white country boys and here was Aretha coming down from the city and how that session went, without getting into the trouble that happened later -- I think that's another story.

Because of the geography of the four city area, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, __________, Florence, to this day there's, as we sit here talking and this is 30 some odd years later, uh, they still live in the turn of the century tradition for the most part. With the accouterments that they have about them, I mean, it's the same little church that stood there in 1900 and radio stations and televisions have been an onslaught, but for the most part, the geography and the topography is identical. And the people traditional will picnic on a Saturday or go canoeing. They all go church on a Sunday, no matter what the church, they all go to church on Sunday, and Sunday is a very quiet family day. They all go to bed early. And Sunday from sunup to sundown, all you hear, whether it's Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, the Reverend this or the Holy Joe that or whatever you want, all you hear is religious music, I don't care where in the area you turn the dial. That's all you get. That's the nature of the people and their mellowness and their preserving a tradition although adapting to new times. Musicians in that atmosphere were affected by the religious music they were hearing, the field songs they were hearing, and during the weekdays, late at night listening to the radio, the jazz they'd be hearing coming out of New Orleans, or out of St. Louis, or out of Chicago. So that the music that they played is a reflection of a number of cultures, and when you were listening to radio, you couldn't tell whether the people you were listening to were black or white. All you could do is like what they were doing and want to emulate it and aspire to emulate it. So that the input to these people is an entirely different input than what we have today, where people don't even listen to a damned record, they look at TV, decide they like what they see on TV, now they go out and buy the record. I mean that's bass-ackwards. But musicians in that territory even to this day are under this multiple-input influence, so that people listening to them play cannot tell whether they're black or white, whether they're playing blue, or whether they're playing church, because not too many people know the difference, but they do. Because they've been raised with it. But they don't think to sort one from the other. When Atlantic Records decided, Jerry Wexler was inspired to record Aretha in that environment, Aretha had had several albums on Columbia that were as Aretha described them, turntable hits, but she was in debt to royalties, she owed them money for the amount of expenses that they had paid incurred in recording her and not having a hit. When we had the opportunity to record her, Jerry was inspired to put her into something that had an empathy for her background, which was C.L. Franklin, the Reverend C.L. Franklin and her singing.

Remember, Aretha sang in her father's choir along with her brother and sisters, and so that envi-, and she was tremendous. So for us to take her to Muscle Shoals, it was a very natural thing to us, it was the most natural thing in life. And when we introduced Aretha to the studio and to the musicians, and she sat down at the piano and played, it was what they were doing in a Sunday drive around in their cars or something. I mean it was no surprises, just adoration for, oh, listen to her sing and to her play. And their response was instantaneous spontaneous, and there was nothing out of place, because they all shared this feeling and they all had this common background. So that Aretha was completely comfortable playing with these strangers, and these strangers were sitting there listening and saying, God, listen to her sing. And they were having a nice time playing, but nobody overplayed. Everybody just played enough to make their presence known but they aren't getting in the way.

The Stax house band, the basic rhythm section was Al Jackson, Booker, Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn. And they all had other occupations. Steve was working in the record shop that was the Stax/Volt record shop in the front of the theater. Duck Dunn was working for Merit Distributors packing records for shipment. Uh, Booker was going to school. Uh, Al Jackson was pumping gas at I think his father's or his and his father's gasoline station. And they would convene on the studio somewhere between 5:30 and 7 o'clock every day in the week. Saturdays they're in the studio 10 o'clock in the morning, but as soon as, whatever their chores were that they were done with, they'd all convene in the studio. And you might hear a comment, and I was witness to it where Duck would say, I had to ship 3000 of the King number so and so and so and so, and what the hell record is that? And Steve would say, oh, I know the record you mean, I sold plenty of them over the counter, but people are asking for this record by Little Willie John, and Al Jackson say, one more car pulls up and I hear this record going by, I'm going to kill. Because they were all getting input from the different cultures in the environment they were working in during the day, that they would come into the studio at night and say, man, I like that guitar, or listen to what he's doing on the drum, and they would then take and integrate that into something they were working on, knowing that it was popular, or knowing that it was something that people were having their heads turned to. So this band was constantly getting different input from different sources affecting what they were planning to do. They figure, hey, if that's what makes it a hit, we gotta use it too. So that's the way they would work. Remember, this was a band that couldn't play in clubs in Memphis, because it was an integrated band. And they couldn't play in parts of Memphis because that was frowned on in those days. At the same time remember Memphis was the place where Elvis came from, and the Phillips people and so forth, before Elvis became the national hero, all of these young people would convene in a black after hours club on weekends at 2 or 3 in the morning, and wait for each other to show up so they could play together. Because they were tired of playing in this part of town or that part of town where it was an all white or an all black band. They wanted to be able to play together, but there was no place where they could play together in the Memphis, Little Rock area. The only places they could play, they'd have to go to Washington or they'd have to go to Los Angeles. And nobody was booking soul or R and B acts in Washington and Los Angeles and moving them 1500 miles. They had their own local artists to play.

The difference in making records in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or going to Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Nashville, that era, in New York, we would have rhythm sections of people that they might be playing in clubs in Greenwich Village, they might be doing this, they might be doing that. We would have to prepare musical charts for them. They'd have to be capable of reading. We'd have to have the artist rehearsed, and then in a three hour period limited by union contract and cost, try and get 15 minutes worth of music or four songs in three hours time. Not to defy the union, not to offend any of that concept. When you went to Muscle Shoals, to Memphis, to Nashville, or any of those type communities to record, those musicians, there were not 15 guitar players to choose from, and six drummers and ten bass players. There were little set groups of three, four and five that played together. And you selected the group that you were going to use. You didn't have to prepare music. You played a song for them once, the artist could sit down and play it, or sing them the song once, they learned the song. No music in front of them telling them go from here to there to there. They learned the song. And they had this intimate relationship with each other, where, if after they listened to the song once they'd say, you take the first verse, I'll take, you do the fills here, I'll stay out, then you -- boom, two or three takes, they learned a song faster than you were prepared to record it. But they were constantly playing together so they had this wonderful, wonderful communication level without writing or saying anything. They'd just kind of look at each other and nod. You know, it was this collective feeling, that you couldn't hire people to play.