Two traditions. More shared history than we remember.

FAME Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

January 24, 1967.

Aretha Franklin is sitting at the piano.

Spooner Oldham is on electric piano. Chips Moman and Jimmy Johnson have guitars. Tommy Cogbill is playing bass. Roger Hawkins is behind the drums.

Then Franklin starts singing I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).

And there goes the room.

The musicians barely seem to chase her. They don't need to.

The drums hold their ground. The guitars find small spaces. Oldham's electric piano answers rather than interrupts. Franklin has almost the entire record available to her.

Listen to her voice and the church is there.

Listen underneath it and you hear blues, Southern R&B and a rhythm section that understands a very useful rule.

Leave something alone.

The session produced I Never Loved a Man. Do Right Woman, Do Right Man was also begun that day, although the recording was left unfinished when the Muscle Shoals session fell apart and was completed later in New York.

There are many ways to tell what happened at FAME.

Here is one.

Everybody in that room knew what the song needed.

Nobody had to stop halfway through and decide which shelf in the record shop it belonged on.

Outside the studio, American music had become very good at shelves.

Inside, things had always been messier.

BEFORE SOUL HAD A NAME

Go backwards.

Quite a long way.

In 1930, Jimmie Rodgers recorded Blue Yodel No. 9.

Rodgers would become one of the foundational figures of commercial country music.

Playing trumpet on the record was Louis Armstrong.

Lil Hardin Armstrong played piano.

That is a useful record to put on whenever the history becomes too tidy.

Rodgers yodels. Armstrong answers him. Blues runs straight through the middle of it.

Nobody hearing the record today needs a diagram.

The musicians are already explaining it.

Around the same period, A.P. Carter was travelling through the South looking for songs with Lesley Riddle, a Black guitarist from North Carolina.

Riddle knew songs.

He remembered melodies.

He played guitar.

And his influence travelled directly into the Carter Family story. The Country Music Hall of Fame notes that Maybelle Carter refined her famous guitar style partly through Riddle's playing, while Riddle also helped A.P. gather material.

Then there was DeFord Bailey.

Black.

Tennessee born.

Harmonica player.

One of the Grand Ole Opry's first stars and, according to the Country Music Hall of Fame, country music's first African American star.

Bailey himself called part of the tradition he grew up with “Black hillbilly music.” His family played secular string-band music drawn from repertoire shared by rural Black and white musicians.

All of this happened before anyone had made a soul record.

The music business, meanwhile, was busy learning how to sell records to different groups of people.

During the 1920s, companies marketed recordings by Black performers as “race records” and increasingly sold white rural performers under the “hillbilly” category. Those terms reflected the segregation of American society and helped create separate commercial markets. The Library of Congress still holds the catalogues that document it.

The labels were useful for selling records.

They were considerably less useful for explaining where the music actually came from.

THEN CAME THE CHURCH

Soul has a place it keeps returning to.

Church.

Black gospel gave the music call and response, vocal improvisation, harmony, rhythmic phrasing and that particular relationship between a lead singer and the people answering behind them.

You can hear the architecture long after the lyrics have become secular.

Country built other rooms.

Fiddle.

Steel guitar.

String bands.

Ballads.

Honky tonks.

Bluegrass.

The Grand Ole Opry.

Nashville publishing houses.

Songs where three chords and one bad decision could comfortably occupy three minutes.

The traditions became recognisably different.

That matters.

Flatten them into one vague idea of “Southern music” and most of the interesting history disappears.

But blues kept moving between them.

So did gospel.

So did songs.

And songs are notoriously bad at respecting fences.

SOLOMON BURKE GETS THERE EARLY

In 1961, Solomon Burke recorded Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms).

It was already a country song, previously recorded by artists including Faron Young and Patsy Cline.

Burke took it somewhere else.

His version became a Top Ten R&B hit and crossed into the pop Top Forty.

This is a year before Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.

Worth remembering.

Because Ray Charles is quite rightly central to this story.

He simply wasn't standing there alone.

In 1962, Charles made the relationship impossible to overlook.

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music took country repertoire and put it through his musical language.

Gospel.

Blues.

Jazz.

Strings.

Backing singers.

Ray Charles.

Don Gibson's I Can't Stop Loving You survives the entire operation beautifully.

Actually, “survives” is unfair.

It flourishes.

That tells you something about Gibson's song and something about Charles.

A good song can be remarkably unconcerned with the industry category printed on the sleeve.

Charles would continue recording country material. His official archive records 33 country songs between January 1962 and January 1966.

The door was very clearly open.

Although, by then, people had been walking through it for decades.

MEMPHIS

Jim Stewart played country fiddle.

Then he co-founded Stax.

There is a small fact capable of ruining several very convenient versions of American music history.

Stewart eventually left country behind and concentrated on the rhythm and blues records coming out of his Memphis studio. Stax became home to Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Sam & Dave, Albert King, the Staple Singers and many others.

And sitting inside a remarkable number of those records were Booker T. & the M.G.'s.

Booker T. Jones.

Steve Cropper.

Donald “Duck” Dunn.

Al Jackson Jr.

An integrated band making records in a segregated city.

That sentence needs both halves.

There is a temptation to make places such as Stax into comforting stories about music defeating racism.

History was less accommodating.

The musicians could work together while the society outside the studio remained segregated.

The contradiction is part of the story.

Put the records on.

Cropper has a wonderful habit of leaving.

A phrase.

A chord.

Enough.

Dunn keeps things moving underneath him. Jones can fill a space without crowding it. Jackson makes the groove feel inevitable.

Nobody seems particularly concerned with demonstrating how good they are.

The singer gets the room.

Country musicians know something about that too.

AND NASHVILLE HAD ANOTHER SIDE OF TOWN

Nashville became Country Music USA.

That part is true.

It is simply incomplete.

Jefferson Street tells the other part.

For decades it was one of the centres of Black Nashville: clubs, theaters, hotels, restaurants and music.

Etta James played there.

Little Richard played there.

Ray Charles played there.

The city that was building the institutional centre of commercial country music also had a thriving Black R&B culture only streets away. Nashville's own historical research describes Jefferson Street in the 1940s through the 1960s as a corridor filled with nightclubs, theaters and dance halls before redevelopment and Interstate 40 devastated much of the district.

Same city.

Different institutions.

Different audiences.

Plenty of musicians listening across the distance.

BACK TO MUSCLE SHOALS

And then there is Alabama.

Arthur Alexander recorded You Better Move On in the Shoals.

Wilson Pickett came to FAME and cut records including Land of 1000 Dances and Mustang Sally.

Aretha arrived in 1967.

Later that year Etta James recorded Tell Mama there.

This is where the geography becomes almost absurdly productive.

Muscle Shoals is a small place.

The records are enormous.

Yet listen closely and many of them achieve that size by refusing to fill every available inch.

The drums do enough.

The guitar appears and disappears.

Keyboards find holes.

Bass moves underneath.

Then the singer does the dangerous part.

There is something here that great country records understand perfectly.

Serve the song.

That is an observation rather than a historical theory.

But put a great FAME recording next to a great country recording and listen to what the musicians leave out.

Space has a sound too.

TONY JOE WHITE MAKES THE LABELS TIRED

Then Tony Joe White turns up.

Louisiana.

Polk Salad Annie.

A guitar.

A voice apparently dragged along a gravel road.

Blues fits.

Country fits.

Swamp rock fits.

Soul fits.

Funk occasionally walks in.

Eventually you may decide to stop filing.

Probably sensible.

White wrote Rainy Night in Georgia. Brook Benton took the song and made it a major R&B hit. Elvis Presley made Polk Salad Annie part of his live repertoire.

The songs travelled because there was something sturdy underneath them.

Strip away the arrangement and they still work.

Which brings us to Harlan Howard.

Howard wrote The Chokin' Kind.

Waylon Jennings recorded it and had a country hit with it in 1967.

Two years later Joe Simon had a million-selling soul hit with the same song.

One songwriter.

One song.

Two industries.

Different records.

There is probably an entire essay hiding inside those four lines.

SOLOMON BURKE COMES BACK

Forty-five years after Just Out of Reach, Solomon Burke went to Nashville.

In 2006, he made an album actually called Nashville with Buddy Miller.

Eight days.

Miller's home studio.

Dolly Parton.

Emmylou Harris.

Gillian Welch.

Patty Griffin.

Patty Loveless.

Burke sings Tom T. Hall's That's How I Got to Memphis. He sings Tomorrow Is Forever with Dolly. We're Gonna Hold On with Emmylou Harris. Patty Griffin joins him on Up to the Mountain.

And Solomon Burke remains Solomon Burke.

That is important.

The country songs do not require him to abandon the church in his voice.

They can take it.

Candi Staton understood this too.

Her years at FAME moved freely through gospel memory, Southern soul and country repertoire. Her version of Tammy Wynette's Stand by Your Man became one of her important FAME recordings and earned a Grammy nomination.

Again, the song crossed the border.

Apparently nobody had told the song it needed a passport.

THE BORDER IS STILL THERE

It would be easy to jump from here to a neat modern conclusion.

Yola.

Miko Marks.

The War and Treaty.

Look. Everybody mixes genres now.

Too easy.

Because the industry part of this story never disappeared.

Miko Marks tried to build a Nashville recording career in the early 2000s. She released Freeway Bound in 2005 and It Feels Good in 2007, appeared regularly at CMA Fest, then stepped away from recording.

Fourteen years passed.

She returned in 2021 with Our Country, bringing country together with the gospel, blues and Southern rock already embedded in her musical identity.

Her story makes an uncomfortable distinction clear.

Musical borders can be porous while institutions remain considerably less so.

Yola approaches the same vocabulary from another direction entirely.

She is British.

Her 2019 album Walk Through Fire, produced by Dan Auerbach, uses fiddle, steel, strings and tremolo guitar around a singer capable of moving from restraint to a huge soul vocal.

By this point, the language has travelled across the Atlantic.

It belongs to records now.

Which brings us back to Alabama.

FAME STUDIOS

Almost sixty years after Aretha Franklin sat at that piano, Michael and Tanya Trotter were making Plus One.

The War and Treaty had already worked on songs for the record at FAME in 2021. More sessions followed in 2023 and 2024. The album finally arrived in February 2025, mainly produced by Michael Trotter and recorded at FAME.

Listen to The War and Treaty and the old filing system begins struggling again.

Gospel is there.

Country.

R&B.

Blues.

Soul.

Michael and Tanya sing together and eventually the argument about where one ends and another begins starts to feel less interesting than the singing itself.

And there they are.

FAME Studios.

Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

The same building.

In January 1967, Aretha Franklin sat at the piano while Roger Hawkins played drums, Tommy Cogbill played bass and Spooner Oldham found the spaces around her.

Decades later, another record is being made in that room by artists carrying gospel, country and soul in the same voices.

The room hasn't solved anything.

Country became country.

Soul became soul.

Each built its own history, institutions, audiences and language.

The differences are real.

So is everything that travelled between them.

Songs.

Musicians.

Churches.

Studios.

Radio stations.

Guitar phrases.

Ways of singing.

Ways of leaving silence.

We called some records country.

We called others soul.

Sometimes that was exactly right.

Sometimes the musicians had already complicated the answer before somebody printed the label.

So perhaps When Country Met Soul was always the wrong question.

They had known each other for a very long time.

The more interesting question is when we learned to hear them as strangers.