Hall’s solution to the problems posed by the departure of the Swampers in 1969 was to put together a new band made up of people he had already worked with and other musicians who came highly recommended. The hand-over was quickly achieved, with new members of band picking up all the unfinished work. Hall called his new session band the FAME Gang, which usually consisted of a four-piece rhythm section and a four-piece horn section, with a mixture of Black and White musicians.
Albert “Junior” Lowe was born in Florence in 1940 and got his first guitar at the age of six. Six years later, he put a band together and started playing seriously. His main interests were Country and Gospel music. He later played guitar with the Fairlanes, replacing Rick Hall as the group’s bass player when Rick left the group to develop FAME. He went on to play many sessions for Rick Hall at FAME and Quin Ivy at Norala. He was an obvious choice to take over from Jimmy Johnson and David Hood, as he played lead guitar and bass and knew the studio well.
Jesse Boyce was born in North Carolina in 1948. He was a classically trained musician, who learned to play piano, organ, drums, bass and guitar. He completed his degree at American Baptist College in Nashville and went on to join the third FAME Studios session band, playing mainly bass. At FAME, he worked on sessions with Clarence Carter, Candi Staton, Wilson Pickett and many other singers. He later formed several groups, often in collaboration with Moses Dillard, and worked and recorded in Nashville. He was an accomplished songwriter, providing songs for many well-known artists, including Linda Clifford, the Temptations, Ben E. King, the Dells and the Commodores. From the mid-eighties, he worked for around thirty years as a member of Little Richard’s band. He died in 2016.
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. 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.
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.
When the Swampers left FAME in 1969, Rick Hall began using various drummers. Some were independent, like Fred Pouty, who played on some of the Osmonds’ hits, James Stroud and Owen Hale. A few others like Freeman Brown were signed to FAME. Brown played on Clarence Carter’s 1969 album “Testifyin’”, completing the work that had been started by Roger Hawkins. Rick Hall described Brown as “steady as a rock”. Wilson Pickett highlighted the precision of his playing: “He wasn’t all over the drums on recordings, but he was always just there.” Freeman Brown died in 2017 at the age of seventy-four.
FAME Studios 2013
Photo: Ralph Daily (Wikimedia Commons)
Rick Hall later signed a young drummer from Chatanooga, Tennessee, Roger Clark, who had played his first gig aged just fourteen. He had gained a lot of experience playing as a member of Steve Miller’s touring band and had also done some studio work on the West Coast, before an old friend suggested he should go to FAME. Clark played on Clarence Carter’s 1973 album “Sixty Minutes With Clarence Carter”, going on to contribute to a large number of the hits made at FAME during the seventies. Rick Hall rated Clark very highly: “Roger was a wonderful player with a touch and feel like no other drummer I ever used. You will hear an example of this when you hear his playing on “Baby, Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me,” which became a number-one record for Mac Davis.” (See the Modern Drummer website).
Clark also worked on sessions at Wishbone Productions’ studio in Muscle Shoals, including a track called “Guilty” for the band HOT, which achieved gold accreditation. Clark also had a writing credit for the song. He was invited to play on some sessions at Motown along with Clayton Ivey. Amongst the collection of gold and platinum discs that he accumulated is “Firefly”, a song he recorded with the Temptations. Clark’s work at Wishbone with Hank Williams Jr. led to an invitation from Nashville producer Jimmy Bowen to go to work there with the Elektra/Asylum roster of artists. More hits followed with some of Elektra’s Country music stars. Roger Clark died in 2018 at his home on Wilson Lake, part of the Tennessee River in the Shoals area.
Charles Michael Buckins was a local Muscle Shoals singer, who led his own band, Mickey Buckins and the New Breed, in the mid-sixties. In 1965, Buckins recorded a single entitled “Silly Girl” at Norala Studios with Quin Ivy, probably with the support of the Mosriters. It didn’t sell well, but he went on to record two more singles on Ivy’s South Camp label, “Seventeen Year Old Girl” (B-side “Long Long Time”), produced by Marlin Greene and Eddie Hinton, and “Reflections of Charles Brown” (B-side “Big Boy Pete”), produced by Quin Ivy.
Possibly attracted by his songwriting skills, Rick Hall offered Buckins a job at FAME in 1967. Hall needed to replace Dan Penn, who had left to join Chips Moman in Memphis, and Buckins could fill that slot. Penn had also been heavily involved in producing and sound-engineering, working alongside Hall, and now Hall set about training Buckins to fill that role too. Buckins learned quickly and rose through the ranks, moving from assistant to chief engineer, becoming a producer and studio manager. He also took part in recording sessions, playing percussion. Just as Penn had done, he became Hall’s right-hand man.
For a short while Buckins moved to Memphis. In 1969, George Jackson persuaded Rick Hall to open a small studio in Memphis to record demo tracks for artists who were interested in possibly signing for FAME. Buckins was put in charge of the new venue. Unfortunately, Jackson’s assessment of the number of talented local singers who were waiting to be given their chance at FAME was over-optimistic. The studio in Memphis was closed and Buckins returned to Muscle Shoals. In 1969 he engineered Solomon Burke’s album “Proud Mary” at the FAME studios and produced the FAME Gang’s single “Grits And Gravy”.
Buckins also developed into an accomplished songwriter, responsible for Janie Fricke’s “Tell Me a Lie”, which topped the charts. Other artists to record his songs are Clarence Carter, the Osmonds, Millie Jackson, Spencer Wiggins and Jason Isbell and Joss Stone. Buckins has spent over fifty years working in the Muscle Shoals music industry!
The FAME Gang that took over session duties from the Swampers is generally regarded as a rhythm section group of four men, plus the Muscle Shoals Horns, four horn players. However, the credits on albums produced at FAME Studios from 1969 onwards show that several more musicians were regularly involved in the sessions. One of these was guitarist Travis Wammack, born in Walnut, Mississippi, in 1946. He started out in the music business aged eleven, when he recorded one of his own songs, “Rock And Roll Blues”! His first chart entry was an instrumental called “Scratchy” in 1964.
Wammack worked as a session musician in Memphis from 1961, which brought him to the attention of Rick Hall. From 1968, Hall began calling on Wammack’s services, for Clarence Carter’s albums “Slippin’ Around” (1968), “Willie And Laura Mae Jones” (1970), and “Patches” (also 1970). He later recorded with Bobbie Gentry, the Osmonds, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Mac Davis, Lou Rawls, Candi Staton, Percy Sledge and many more. Rick Hall also signed him to the FAME label as a performer, releasing four singles and an album “Travis Wammack”, between 1972 and 1974. Wammack went on to lead Little Richard’s backing band from 1984 to 1995. He is still performing and works at Muscle Shoals Music Marketing.
Around the time Travis Wammack was beginning to work at FAME, another budding guitarist came to the studio. Duane Allman and his brother Gregg started to play guitar in 1960, while staying with their grandmother in Nashville during the summer. The boys were inspired to play Blues, when they saw B.B. King in concert in the city. Duane’s first venture into the professional music world came in 1966, when he was hired by producer Tony Moon to play some sessions at RCA’s Studio B in Nashville. The two brothers then formed a band called the Allman Joys, playing regularly at the Briar Patch in Nashville, before reforming as Hour Glass. In early 1968, Hour Glass came to FAME Studios to record. Rick Hall saw Duane’s potential immediately and bought out his contract, putting him to work in the studio with Wilson Pickett. Duane camped out in the studio car park! During a break in one of the sessions, Duane played the Beatles’ song “Hey Jude” to Pickett, and the decision was taken to record it. It became the title track of the subsequent album and, famously, brought Allman to the attention of Eric Clapton and Jerry Wexler. Rick Hall played it to Wexler over the ‘phone and Wexler soon bought out the FAME contract!
Allman stayed in Muscle Shoals long enough to play on sessions with Clarence Carter, Aretha Franklin (in New York), King Curtis, Percy Sledge and several other performers outside the R&B field, before forming the Allman Brothers Band in 1969. Auditions for the band were held at FAME Studios. Duane was a rising star in the world of Blues music, playing on Eric Clapton’s “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs”, released as a Derek and the Dominos album in 1970. At the age of twenty-four, Duane was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971.
The FAME Gang released an album and a couple of singles in their own name, starting with a single “Spooky”, released on Atlantic Records in 1968. That was followed by a second single “Grits And Gravy” (B-side “Soul Feud”) on the FAME label in 1969. They then released an album called “Solid Gold From Muscle Shoals”, which failed to make any impact. It was a collection of instrumental covers of songs that had recently been in the charts, but it didn’t do justice to the quality of their session work. In 1970 a third single “Twangin’ My Thang” was released, again on FAME, produced by Mickey Buckins.
“Grits & Gravy”, the 2015 FAME Gang album
(used with permission of Ace Records UK)
The best of their work as a band can be heard on a compilation album that was released in 2015 on Ace Records’ BGP label, called “Grits & Gravy: The Best of the FAME Gang”. It contains a selection of songs from the earlier album and the singles, plus a lot of new material from the vaults at FAME.
From 1972, some new musicians were brought in regularly to work with Clarence Carter, Candi Staton, Z.Z. Hill and others. Ken Bell (guitar) and Tim Henson (keyboards) were amongst them.
