David Briggs
David Briggs was born in 1943 in Killen, Alabama. He played keyboards on his first recording session at the age of fourteen for James Joiner at Tune Records. He then worked in the Shoals area with Putnam, Carrigan, and Terry Thompson. He became a member of the first FAME Studios session band, alongside Norbert Putnam, Peanut Montgomery and Jerry Carrigan.
In 1962 he signed for Decca Records and found himself travelling frequently to Nashville. In 1964, he moved there and found that his versatility meant that he was never short of session work. He was also offered the chance to play as part of a touring band for Tommy Roe, who had come to Muscle Shoals in those early years of FAME. He was backing Tommy Roe on stage in Washington D.C. in 1964, when the Beatles made their first concert appearance in the United States.
David Biggs (Image: NAMM)
There are two interesting interviews with David Biggs on the NAMM.org website, part of NAMM’s oral history programme.
He recorded with Elvis Presley, Joan Baez, B.B. King, Tony Joe White and many more singers, across a wide variety of genres.
When the opportunity arose, he opened a studio in Nashville with Norbert Putnam. When that closed in 1976, he opened his own House of David. Like Putnam, he was a member of Area Code 615. When he had some spare time, he recorded a string of commercials for some of America’s biggest corporations.
David Briggs was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1999, and into the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2019.
Barry Beckett
Barry Edward Beckett was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1943. He first met Jimmy Johnson and Roger Hawkins while he was studying at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in the early sixties. Beckett was self-taught on the piano and could not read music. That did not hinder his aim of working as a musician. One of his first jobs in the music industry was working as a keyboardist in Pensacola, Florida, with the producer “Papa” Don Schroeder. He also played with the Esquires.
Schroeder brought Beckett to FAME Studios to play on a session with James and Bobby Purify in 1966. Hall was suitably impressed and soon offered Beckett a permanent job at his studio. For the next three years, Beckett joined David Hood, Jimmy Johnson and Roger Hawkins to form the core of FAME’s studio band, playing on a stream of excellent recordings by artists including Clarence Carter, Etta James and Wilson Pickett.
A key event occurred at FAME in 1969 when the core members of Rick Hall’s studio band (David Hood on bass, Jimmy Johnson on guitar, Roger Hawkins on drums and Barry Beckett on keyboards) departed from the FAME Studios organisation to set up their own studios and production facilities down the road at 3614 Jackson Highway, Sheffield, Alabama. The cause of their departure was, as ever, to do with money.
Rick Hall had signed a new deal with Capitol Records, that was rumoured to be worth $1,000,000. He then offered the musicians $10,000 each, according to Johnson. In the meantime, Jerry Wexler offered them eighteen months support and a $19,000 loan from Atlantic Records, to set up a new studio. It was a gamble, of course, but they decided to take it.
It was an attractive offer. Wexler was offering the four musicians the chance to own and run their own studio and the loan made that more achievable. He had also demonstrated in the past his admiration for their work, when he called them to New York to finish Aretha Franklin’s aborted FAME sessions. It seemed that they would be able to continue working with major Atlantic Records artists, whilst building up their own contacts. The opportunity to make more money, while taking control of their working lives, was too good to miss.
The Swampers
Barry Beckett (on the left above) thus became co-owner (along with his three colleagues) of the new Muscle Shoals Sound Studios. Among the first visitors to the new studio were Cher, the Rolling Stones and Lulu. The first hit came courtesy of R.B. Greaves in October 1969 with “Take A Letter Maria”. The Staple Singers, who had previously recorded in Memphis with Booker T. & The MGs, then came to Muscle Shoals to record three big hits: “Respect Yourself”, “I’ll Take You There” and “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)”.
Bobby Womack, Mel and Tim, Luther Ingram, Johnnie Taylor, Don Covay, Millie Jackson and Dorothy Moore all added to the studio’s credibility, which enabled them to attract a wider range of artists, such as Paul Simon, who made the US No 2 “Kodachrome” in Muscle Shoals in 1972, with Beckett providing a strong piano input. Many artists followed, including Rod Stewart from the UK.
Beckett had always been interested in the production side of things at the studio. During the late seventies, that is where he made his focus, working with Dire Straits (“Communique”, 1979), Bob Dylan (“Slow Train Coming”, 1979, and “Saved”, 1980) and Santana (“Havana Moon”, 1983) amongst many others.
Though he contributed an array of keyboards to the albums he worked on, from the late ’70s Beckett concentrated on production, sometimes in tandem with Wexler, a man he called his mentor, most notably on Communiqué by Dire Straits (1979), the brace of born-again Bob Dylan albums Slow Train Coming (1979) and Saved (1980), and Santana’s Havana Moon (1983).
A few years later, the Swampers, as the four session men were known, sold their studio to Malaco Records. Barry Beckett moved to Nashville, working first at Warner Bros. and then going freelance, producing songs for Country acts, as well as Etta James, Feargal Sharkey and the Waterboys. By the end of his career, he had produced over one hundred albums. He and his partners were inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995 and into the Nashville-based Musicians Hall of Fame in 2008. By that time, Beckett was not in good health. He died on 10th June 2009.
“A lovely man, an old-school gentleman, with a courtesy and quiet consideration about his manners. And hidden inside the genial exterior was a brilliant keyboard player.” That is how Mike Scott of the Waterboys remembers him.
Clayton Ivey
Herbert Clayton Ivey was born in Pensacola, Florida, where he learned to play keyboards. He often played with Jesse Boyce. In 1969 he joined FAME, along with Boyce, as a member of the FAME Gang, the third group of session musicians that Rick Hall had put together. One of their first sessions was with Clarence Carter, for the recording of “Patches”. After that, Clayton was committed to a career in music. He stayed at FAME for a couple years, working on the Osmonds’ sessions, before working freelance.
In 1971 he set up a music production company called Wishbone Productions with Terry Woodford, a musician and songwriter. They established a roster of young artists and helped them get established. They also signed a contract with Motown in 1973, to work with some of their young artists, in particular Reuben Howell.
Ivey was invited to join the band at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio for various sessions, which gave him the opportunity to work with Lulu, Rod Stewart and other artists.
In 1976, the deal with Motown came to an end and Wishbone Productions opened its own studio on Webster Avenue in Muscle Shoals, with the latest technology, including 24-track recording equipment.
Clayton Ivey (Image: NAMM)
In May 2021, Clayton Ivey gave an interview to the Musicians Hall of Fame, in which he speaks of his excitement as a young musician making his way to FAME Studios and working with the FAME Gang. He describes how the songs were often made by a process of collaboration between the songwriters and the session band, working things out by experiment. They had a focus that made good things happen and they were willing to work for as long as it took to get a song to work.
The excitement of that process was a feature of sessions not just at FAME, but at many of the studios in New Orleans, Memphis, Detroit and Chicago. It is a process that is enhanced by the creation of a strong session band, whose members grow together. That experience is what Ivey remembers most about his early days in the music business. Like David Briggs, Ivey was interviewed for the NAMM Oral History Project.
