Muscle Shoals

★★★★

Dir: Greg Camalier

(2013)

You could watch the entirety of Greg Camalier's Muscle Shoals purely based on the soundtrack alone, with no picture, and be throughly entertained. This tiny Alabama town of only 8,000 people slumped on the edge of cotton plantations and squashed up to the banks of the Mississippi river produced some of the greatest soul records of all time. Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Bob Dylan and Etta James all recorded some of their finest cuts in Rick Hall's makeshift studio.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Franklin, Pickett and many, many others (including, weirdly a boring out-of-place Bono) recount their stories in a simple static talking heads documentary which gracefully keeps the stars at arm's length to focus on the back bone of the studio; The all white backing group (yes, seriously) affectionately named the Swampers. Camalier lets the music tell the story of why Muscle Shoals rivalled Memphis, Clarksdale and later Detroit and Chicago as one of the birthplaces of how to record that rhythm and blues sound.

The film and the town's biggest revelation is really in the fact that segregation in Alabama of all places was still at a great height and while the black power movement was becoming a major issue of the time, Hall and his much, much, much better than the average white band were joining so many black artists to record this wonderful music. A must see for soul lovers the world over; Muscle Shoals is instilled with the spirit of the music, the quiet heartbeat of the Mississippi river (which plays a major part in the film and some say "that sound") and with all of those beautiful tracks which wormed their way out of the mud and on the records.