This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Taking a walk Nashville. Hi, I'm Sarah Harrelson, your host of Taking a Walk Nashville. And today I'm here with the senior director of editorial and interpretation at the country music hall of fame and museum, Paul Kingsbury. Thank you so much for being on Taking a Walk Nashville. Oh, thanks so much for having us, Sarah. Yeah, so we're here and the new Muscle Shoals is a low rhythm rising exhibit. It just opened and it's gonna be here at the country music hall of fame and museum for three years, correct? That's right, yeah. Yeah, so people have lots of opportunity to come see this. We're really excited because we worked on this exhibit for about three years to do all the research and contact everybody we needed to fill this up. Wow, so all of the artifacts that we're seeing as we walk through here today are from the shoals. Yeah, well, they are. Now, in some cases we had to reach farther afield than North Alabama. We got some items for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They loaned us some. We got some from other places, but we definitely had a lot of interaction with the North Alabama community all around Muscle Shoals to make this happen. Very cool. Well, I am excited to walk through it. Let's definitely explore it and tell listeners about the artifacts we're seeing today. Yeah, I'll just tell folks that when you walk in the exhibit, you can maybe listeners can barely hear in the background. We have Wilson Pickett's famous Land of a Thousand Dances playing because we have a little looped video that gives people the taste of all the many folks who worked or recorded in Muscle Shoals and made major hits. And then we've got this wonderful wall display of lots of photos of some of the famous people who came to Muscle Shoals to record, like the Rolling Stones and Bob Seeger and Arthur Alexander and Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge and Aretha Franklin. And we'll hear about those as we walk through. Yeah, there's so many different artists that have come down to the shoals to record. And Muscle Shoals is only about a two and a half hour drive from Nashville. So when the Hall of Fame decided to do this exhibit, was it because there's such a strong connection between Nashville and Muscle Shoals? Well, yeah, there is. And also, we've long been aware of the powerful music that was made there. An interesting connection that we talk about in this exhibit is that one of the key, the first key studio in Muscle Shoals, the Fame Studio, the rhythm section, the guys who were playing backing on the sessions there, they were so good that in 1964, after they'd been recording there for about five years, they moved up to Nashville and became 18 session players up here. Wow. And we got to see some of those session players here the other night during the exhibit celebration concert. It was such a great night. They were celebrating the songs of the shoals with Betty LaVette, Maggie Rose, Wendy Mountain, Shenandoah, many other artists. And it was so cool just seeing, spoon or all of them there. Did you have a favorite moment of the night during the opening concert? Well, I really loved when Betty LaVette, you know, who's, I guess she's in her late 70s now, got up and she was, when she was singing, she was dancing all over the stage and she really brought the energy. I'll tell you that, you know, a guy who's been in Nashville a long time, Jimmy Hall, I mean, he knocked it out of the park too when he sang things like Land of a Thousand Dances. I mean, yeah, there was a lot of energy in that show. So much energy, everyone was great. It was such a great kickoff to this exhibit and there's so many great artifacts in here as we're walking around. I saw you had a costume from Wilson Pickett. What other artifacts can we expect to see? Oh my gosh, well, when people walk in, they're gonna see a costume from the 70s from Candy Staten, who was one of our artists who performed at the concert. She told us she was 85 years old. She was fantastic. And she recorded a lot of great songs that were covers of country music songs that she did in her own R&B way. And yeah, in terms of artifacts, I mean, we're walking past a case that shows the roots of Muscle Shoals music and famous people like Sam Phillips, who started Sun Records in Memphis, and Arthur Alexander, one of the first big artists to come out of Muscle Shoals. They're represented here with artifacts. We've even got Arthur's passport and the ledger he used to keep up with the royalty payments that he made. Very cool. And I think over there, we have Aretha's piano that she played in. Yes, that's a centerpiece of the exhibit. So Aretha Franklin turned around her whole career when she came to Muscle Shoals in 1967. And she had been recording for years, but never had a hit until she came to Muscle Shoals and she recorded the famous song, I Never Loved a Man, The Way I Love You, with Muscle Shoals musicians, and that launched her whole career to become the Queen of Soul. Wow, he's so special. Yeah, so we've got that on loan from the Fame Studio. We've got a beautiful dress from the early 70s from Aretha. We just passed Wilson Pickett's fabulous costume here, he wore on the cover of his best of Wilson Pickett Volume Two album, the album that includes his famous cover of The Beatles Hey Jew, where he sings his heart out and he's matched lick for lick by Dwayne Allman of the Allman Brothers, who was then a session musician. And not only do we have Wilson Pickett represented here, but if we walk down here, you'll see we have two guitars that Dwayne Allman played. Yeah, very. Which, you know, those are both on loan and we're really excited to have them both. And people know the Allman Brothers music, but they may not know that for a period before the Allman Brothers got started, Dwayne was really psyched to be able to be a session musician playing behind great R&B artists, Muscle Shoals. There's so many great artifacts here in the museum. What do you hope people will take from this when they explore this exhibit? I think, you know, a subtext to this exhibit is that music brings people together. And the people who made the big hits in Muscle Shoals both the artists and the producers, the entrepreneurs wanted to cross racial boundaries, right? And so early on with so many hits from Muscle Shoals, it was black R&B singers getting together with crack session musicians that were white in Muscle Shoals. And they kind of did this all under the radar because this was in the era when civil rights was still trying to take hold and before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 64. And so you had black artists, white musicians making incredible music. And eventually, as this exhibit tells the story, it went beyond just black artists and white musicians. Muscle Shoals became a magnet for artists from not only all over America, and we're talking about artists like Paul Simon Bob Seager and Cher and the Osmond Brothers. We're also talking about artists that came over from England like the Rolling Stones and traffic with Stevie Winwood and Joe Cocker all recording in Muscle Shoals because the music was so powerful and they wanted to get into the studios with these players. Yeah, and speaking of under the radar, Muscle Shoals is a pretty small town. So it was definitely a great way for multiple artists of different genres to come together and record. But I also heard Rolling Stones, they were coming over from the UK and they had a little bit of trouble recording in LA because of their green card. So Muscle Shoals was the perfect place for them to do. Yeah, they talked to some folks who said, hey, we can kind of get under the radar if we go to Muscle Shoals. Nobody's paying attention there. And so they came in, recorded three songs, two of their biggest they recorded. You know, they recorded a Brown Sugar, you recorded Wild Horses there, other Muscle Shoals and both big hits. Yeah, and Tiara Kennedy did a great job of Wild Horses. She sure did at that concert. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, what else is there for us? Well, so we're actually looking at a case right here. I'm sure a lot of people still know the classic R&B song, I'll Take You There by the Staples singers. Well, we have the dresses for the three sisters and the staple singers along with the suit in Telecaster guitar of Pops Staples, their father who was in the band. So we've got the costumes, stage costumes, Cleo the Yvonne and Mavis Staples right here and for everybody. We've got a gold, I'm sorry, a platinum record that Bob Dylan got for recording in Muscle Shoals for his album, Slow Train Kind. Very cool. And you said this exhibit is 5,000 square feet? Yeah, yeah, and in addition to all of the artifacts that are on display, people will get to see clips of interviews, we did 50 hours of interviews with people in Muscle Shoals and they can see clips that we've cut on TVs here. We've got also clips from a very well done documentary on Muscle Shoals back in 2013. We've got touchscreen interactives and if you want, we can walk up to those and you can play with them for a moment. We've got a 60 song jukebox people can listen to. We've got information on the session musicians, on the songwriters, on the recording studios because it's more than one studio that was active in Muscle Shoals. Yeah, we have the Fame Studios, Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, quite a few studios have been. Yeah, I think we have 13 studios featured in our interactive. Let's see if we go to studios. You'll see we've got a whole thing here where of course we've got Fame and we've got Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and people can read a little bit of history. They can swipe through photos of these places and if they want to hear music, they can go to our jukebox. You can play anything you like here. I mean, here's a famous song. This is I'm Your Puppet by James and Bobby Purify, written by Dan Pannon, Spooner Oldham. I like that you selected that one. That's a song my mom would always play for me and sing to me when I was little. Really? That's wonderful. One of my favorites, yeah. Well, this is a great way for people if they're coming in Nashville to see this exhibit and then they can even just drive down to Muscle Shoals and to our studios. Sure, they can check out new. You can go and get tours of Fame Studio and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. They regularly have music events there that people can go hear. I would hope that people would come here, experience some of this, and take some of these stories and music with them. We've got a great full-color companion book that we created to go with the exhibit that people can pick up in our museum store or buy online. In fact, if they don't come here, they can get it on Amazon, if they will. Of course. And this is going to be a very popular exhibit. But if people are coming here to visit, what other exhibits do you recommend that they explore while they're here? Well, we're in a museum, so we have a fabulous exhibit on Dolly Parton. We collaborated with her earlier this year on that. We've got Dolly Parton. We've got a huge exhibit on Lainey Wilson. We have a great exhibit on Roseanne Cash, a pretty new exhibit that we opened this fall on 100 years of Grand Ole Opry history. And we also have our permanent exhibit in the museum that's kind of a walkthrough of country music history from earliest commercial origins and pre-commercial origins at the beginning of the 20th century on up to the present day. And then every year we refresh an exhibit in early spring called American Currents, which covers the big events and prominent artists of the previous year. So if people want to see who we've got represented for the year 2024, you've got that all up in American Currents right now, too. Very cool. There's always so many different exhibits coming in and out of here. And in addition to that, there's always events happening here. You have the Taylor Swift Education Center. You have shows on the weekends, usually songwriter rounds on Sundays. So people have kids. Can they do any sort of workshops? Yeah, we have lots of education workshops on the weekends. And we encourage folks to go to our website countrymusiccallofame.org. Go look. We have a calendar of events, really easy to access, and people can see any particular date they want to visit. But for families and kids, the weekends, you have a Saturday and Sunday or a good time to come through. Yeah, and the concert we saw on Friday was at the CMA Theater, which is always a wonderful venue to see shows as well. Yeah, yeah, that's an 800-seat theater. And with many different kinds of shows up here there. And I believe coming up December 20th, we have singer-songwriter Steve Orrell coming in to do a show for us. Okay. If you get a membership, then you can attend all of these programs, attend the museum for free. You get a discount at our store. It's a pretty great deal. I have several friends who are members, and I just feel like, wow, this is an amazing deal. You come in, see concerts, one-of-a-kind concerts. You couldn't see anywhere else for free. And then you could drop in with your friends and family anytime. Wonderful. It was something to look forward to. I love to see the rest of the exhibit. Paul, you've been in Nashville for quite a while, and throughout the country, music hall of fame's time, it moved from Music Row to Downtown. It's been through so much change. What do you think of the change you have seen in Nashville over the years? I'll tell you one change that I love that people don't talk about very much is I've been in Nashville many, many years. And it didn't used to be the music town that it is now. It used to be, I can tell you in the 80s and into the mid-90s, there just weren't that many concerts and nightclub shows available. But over time, the music industry's refocused, and you could hear any kind of music you like here in Nashville now. We have dozens of great venues, and that's one thing I love. The other thing that's surprised me over the years is how vibrant Downtown Nashville has become, because in the 80s and 90s, it was a little sketchy downtown, and we like to feel like when our museum moved from Music Row here downtown in 2001, we were part of the whole revival of Downtown Nashville, and we take some pride of ownership in how Nashville has come back so big in downtown. Yeah, and it's not just country music here in Nashville anymore, which is why I think it's special the Shoals exhibit is here, because so many different genres came out of the Shoals, and I think that's what's happening with Nashville. So many genres of music are coming out of here now. Yeah, you know what I would say, even people who are not sure that their hardcore country fans would enjoy the country music hall of Amon, certainly this Muscle Shoals exhibit, because it's not just about country artists like Willie Nelson or Shenandoah or Bobby Gentry who recorded here, it's about Paul Simon, it's about the Rolling Stones, it's about Aretha Franklin, it's about Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, the staple singers, all different kinds of music came out of Muscle Shoals, and I think folks will also find as they go through the museum that many artists that they might have some awareness of, Blaney Wilson, Roseanne Cash, Dolly Parton, they're going to find out about them in Ducks, and see how they connect with the wider world of music. Yeah, very cool, absolutely, and Paul, we're taking a walk in Nashville, so I always love to ask this to our guest, but do you have a favorite place you like to take a walk in Nashville? Is it here in the museum? Oh, well, I can't say that, I mean, I love the museum, I walk through the museum regularly, because I like seeing some of these things over and over again, I'll show you a thing that we are proud to be able to display, we have the original song manuscript that Chris Christofferson wrote of Help Me Make It Through the Night, and if you can see, he wrote it on the stationery of his publisher, Monument, and who's also his record label, and this was a very transformative song, because he started to talk about real adult relationships, sexuality to some extent, in a way that country music hadn't gone to before, but he did it in a very poetic way, and of course it's become a standard. So I love walking past this and looking at this, I mean, if I'm trying to get people to come to Nashville, I will also say we are blessed are blessed with amazing forest parks all over Nashville, and because I'm an outdoor guy, I mean, love to go to Radnor Lake, love to go to Warner Parks, but hey, if you want to do something indoors, please come to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Absolutely, there's always something new to check out here, I think. Well, Paul, thank you so much for being on Taking a Walk in Nashville today, and everyone can check out the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the Muscle Shoals exhibit for the next few years. All right, thank you, Sarah. Thanks for listening to Taking a Walk Nashville with singer-songwriter Sarah Harrelson, and check out our other podcasts, Music Save Me, Comedy Save Me, and Taking a Walk, available on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
