The origin-story of the Muscle Shoals hybrid of musical styles.

These are people my father knew in the 1960s and 70s, and whom I must have met occasionally. (Norbert Putnam, who features in the picture, was bassist on two of my father’s albums.) Watching the movie, you learn what astonishingly hard lives most of them had, unlike my father, a Tampa lawyer’s son from a big Savannah family. Segregation was indeed a parchment barrier, keeping apart groups of people who had in common desperate poverty and sparks of musical genius.

As always, the Muscle-Shoals-adjacent heretical bard R. Stevie Moore must be mentioned: