Jerry Carrigan
Jerry Kirby Carrigan was born in 1943 in Florence, Alabama, in the Shoals. His father bought him a drum kit when he quite young and encouraged him to play. The first band that Jerry played in was Little Joe Allen and the Offbeats; they liked to learn the R&B songs that heard on the radio.
Jerry’s father was confident that his son could earn money from playing the drums and so he set about finding some other local lads to form a group, that could play at student parties. The two lads who were invited to join were David Briggs and Norbert Putnam. Mr. Carrigan had a good eye for talent! The band was named the Mark V and Mr. Carrigan was their booking agent and their taxi driver.
It wasn’t long before the boys found their way to SPAR Studio, where they met Tom Stafford, Billy Sherrill and, of course, Rick Hall. They started working there, recording demos of songs that the owners and other visitors were writing, and so met Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, Donnie Fritts and Terry Thompson. Dan Penn started singing with the Mark V, which became Dan Penn & the Pallbearers.
When Rick Hall’s venture with Sherrill and Stafford was terminated, Jerry Carrigan and his friends were given the opportunity to go FAME. It is not hard to see the attraction of working in a recording studio, not just making demo tapes but also backing professional singers. All the SPAR musicians and songwriters came to work at the new studio. Within a few weeks, Arthur Alexander had brought a big smile to their faces with his first hit. That was followed, as we have seen, by a series of successful recordings in the early sixties.
The next significant event for Carrigan and the others occurred early in 1964, when Tommy Roe came back to record at FAME. Roe had just been booked, along with the Righteous Brothers and several other acts, to open for the Beatles at their first concert in the States, and Roe needed a backing band. He asked the boys to be that band. In February, they boarded a plane for Washington D.C. and they took part in that historic concert. Not bad for a trio of young lads from the Shoals! Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before they decided to leave Rick Hall’s FAME Studios and move to Nashville.
Jerry Carrigan
Carrigan played as a session man in Nashville for over thirty years. He developed a style of drumming that suited Nashville’s Country music, but his playing retained an element of that Soul and R&B that he had grown up listening to and which he brought to songs recorded at FAME.
Jerry Carrigan was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 2010, and then into the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2019, the year of his death.
Rick Hall has described what made Jerry Carrigan special, in The Man From Muscle Shoals:
“Jerry was the first drummer I ever knew who could synchronize his kick and snare drum while simultaneously playing the open and closed sock cymbal”.
Carrigan himself is quoted on the Alabama Music Hall of Fame website, describing his sound:
“I started playing real loose, deep-sounding snare drums on country records. Billy Sherrill loved it. So, I started experimenting with different things, different kinds of drums. I bought the first set of concert tom-toms that were in Nashville. I think that’s one reason the producers liked my sound. I had a different approach.”
Carrigan certainly played a key role in making Nashville the “Music City” that it is today.
Roger Hawkins
Roger Hawkins was born in 1945 in Mishawaka, Indiana. He grew up in a town called Greenhill in Alabama, around twenty miles from Muscle Shoals. At the age of thirteen, he started to play drums and soon joined the Del-Rays. They began recording at FAME Studios, where he met Rick Hall, who invited him to join the second session band. He also found work at Quin Ivy’s Norala Studio, where one of his first sessions was Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman”. What a great start to his career as a session musician!
In any band, the drummer is the anchor. The beat they set is the heartbeat of the music. All the best studios had a great drummer, and FAME was no exception. Hawkins was a master of his art, despite not being able to read music. None of the band could! As Hawkins has explained, his skill was listening to a song and finding a drumbeat that enhanced it. He listened and stored musical ideas, ready to use them when the right song came along:
“I was a better listener than player and I think the other guys were too”. (My Drum Lessons, Sunday, April 30th, 2017)
“…they loved music and they had catalogs of music in their brains, just like I had a catalog of stuff where I could pull out certain things and make it work with newer stuff.” (Roger Hawkins speaking with Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone magazine, May 2021)
Roger Hawkins
Image: MHSNA
There are many recordings that demonstrate his skills and his originality. For the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” he developed an intricate cymbal pattern with a soft edge, accompanied by David Hood on bass, who provided a funky bottom line. His solid back beats transformed such songs as “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” or “Respect Yourself”. The intro of “Respect Yourself” has drumbeats that move from soft to hard and back to soft, a reggae pattern influenced by sounds originally developed on the island of Jamaica.
The biggest influence on Hawkin’s playing style was much nearer home: Al Jackson Jr. in Memphis. Hawkins has described the impact of hearing “Green Onions” for the first time and rushing out to buy the record. The music recorded at Stax Records provided him with some wonderful examples to follow.
However, Hawkins didn’t just copy. He was also an experimenter. In an interview with Jeff Porter of Modern Drummer, Hawkins explained how he got the sound Paul Simon wanted for “Kodachrome”:
“I call it a loping feel. That was the drums, but that didn’t get the feel enough… And I sure as hell couldn’t play it on the bass drum. So I got an old two-inch tape box, like the big reels used to come in. I put some newspaper in the box and played the pattern on it with hard vibes mallets. I listened back to it, though, and it wasn’t quite cutting through. So I kept changing the packing in the box until it came through well. That’s where the loping feel comes from. I don’t know if that drum part would have sounded that good without it”.
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Two very different drummers, but Jerry Carrigan and Roger Hawkins played a key role in putting Muscle Shoals on the music map.
Header Image: FAME Recording Studios (Carol M. Highsmith, Wikimedia Commons)
