![]() ![]() You need only visit Muscle Shoals to realise quite how remarkable this was. The roll call of names is extraordinary: Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon… For a brief and exhilarating period Muscle Shoals rivalled New York, Los Angeles and London as one of the most important recording centres in popular music. Franklin was one of scores of artists who made their way to Muscle Shoals to record in the 1960s and 1970s. Above the doorway to the studio where Franklin recorded I Never Loved a Man a sign reads, 'through these doors walk the finest musicians, songwriters, artists and producers in the world'. The Fame studio, a squat, bunker-like building, stands on a busy road junction, adjacent to a chain pharmacy and an auto-parts store. But it would go to the top of the charts around the world, and make her the unchallenged Queen of Soul. Equally remarkable was the fact that the recording session would end in an explosion of racial tension that would lead to Franklin leaving Muscle Shoals the next day, never to return. What made this record all the more remarkable was that the backing musicians who provided the brooding, soulful and unmistakably black sound were in fact white – country boys who had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s in what at that time was the most racially troubled state in America. ![]() But over the course of just a few hours, in a studio where she had never worked before, with musicians whom she had met for the first time that day, Franklin would record not only the most important song in her career but one of the greatest songs in the history of pop music, I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You). She had recorded nine albums, none of which had properly captured the fiery, transcendent intensity of her voice or the rapt, prayerful beauty of her piano playing. At the age of 25 Franklin was already a music veteran. In January 1967 a young singer named Aretha Franklin arrived in the small Alabama town of Muscle Shoals, her career hanging in the balance. ![]()
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