Muscle Shoals “wasn’t in New York or Chicago or Philadelphia, or indeed in any major conurbation. It was 780 miles away in the middle of nowhere in Alabama, a state where, up to 1955, black people couldn’t even use the same bus as white folks.” Yet the studio founded there 50 years ago became “a recording centre that was to cater for everybody from Aretha Franklin to The Osmonds, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon and from Etta James to the Rolling Stones.”