Muscle Shoals Research Articles

The Keller Plantation and the Racial Plot of Disability History in the U.S.

Between the popularization of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), and the cinematic dramatization of The Miracle Worker (1962), scenes of Keller’s early life and education have served as touchstones through which nondisabled Americans have imagined disability’s history and narrowed its political possibilities: toward the conditional dispersal of access based on individual acts of overcoming. Yet, if Keller’s story has played an outsize role in consolidating disability’s history and politics, it is also a site of profound racial occlusion. The context of Keller’s early life on the Keller plantation in Tuscumbia, Alabama is largely absent from her popular legacy. With the disappearance of this context, the black people who facilitated Keller’s disabled coming of age have also fallen away, as well as the history of slavery and Indigenous removal that made her life story possible. This void—at the locus of perhaps the most hegemonic origin story of American disability history—is cause for critical race inquiry. This essay traces the relationship between the material background of Keller’s autobiography and its imaginative foreground; from her family’s role in settler conquest and slavery in the Alabama Muscle Shoals, to Keller’s status as a transcendent icon of disability. Reading between the plantation and the plot of Keller’s Story while locating both beside the Tennessee River’s shoals, this essay turns to theories of cartography and narrative authored by Sylvia Wynter and Tiffany Lethabo King for insight into a critical paradox: the antiblack and anti-Indigenous structure of ableism, and the whiteness of disabled representation. By resituating Keller’s iconicity in relation to conquest, slavery, and their afterlives, this essay locates the problems and possibilities of narrating black and Indigenous disability history from the Keller plantation’s surround. Yet, while invested in unsettling the landscape, I neither recover these stories nor entomb them as untellable. Instead, I write toward further investment in black and Indigenous counter-archives that have complicated who has been—and who remains—the imaginable and politically traction-able subject of disability.

Reciprocating subsurface-flow constructed wetlands: a microcosm treatability study.

Two batch-loaded microcosm treatability studies of eight days' duration (192 hours) were conducted concurrently from July 26 through August 3 in an environmentally controlled greenhouse at the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Constructed Wetlands Research Facility in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, USA. These, the first of five treatability studies, were conducted in batch-loaded wetland microcosms, with and without reciprocation. Reciprocation refers to the process of filling and draining paired wetland cells on a recurrent and timed basis to facilitate passive aeration of fixed microbial biofilms during the drain phase and oxygen depletion during the fill phase. The study was designed to simultaneously evaluate the influence of three treatment parameters with respect to removal dynamics of chemical oxygen demand (COD), total ammonia-nitrogen (TAN), nitrate-nitrogen, and orthophosphorus. The treatment parameters evaluated included four COD concentrations, two reciprocation cycle times, and the presence or absence of reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea), a plant with an anoxic rootzone. Temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, electrical conductivity, redox potential, and evapotranspiration were also monitored. Results showed that treatments with reciprocation vs. no reciprocation provided significantly enhanced aerobic and anoxic treatment of wastewater and improved removal of COD and ammonium, irrespective of initial COD concentrations or planted vs. not planted with P. arundinacea. Treatments with P. arundinacea had less accumulation of nitrate nitrogen; less than 0.4 mg/L., while reciprocating treatments without P. arundinacea accumulated from 15-26 mg/L nitrate nitrogen over the 192-hour treatment period.

Nothing But the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar

Nothing But the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar

An Imperfect Legacy

An Imperfect Legacy

Florence, Alabama and the Muscle Shoals Region

Florence, Alabama and the Muscle Shoals Region Michael Pretes Florence, Alabama welcomes you to the 75th annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (SEDAAG)! The conference will take place from November 22–23, 20201 at the Marriott Shoals Hotel and Spa (which you can see, with its distinctive Renaissance Tower, on the left of the cover photo), and will be hosted by the Department of Geography at the University of North Alabama. Florence is located on the Tennessee River in the far northwest corner of Alabama, and together with the three neighboring cities of Tuscumbia, Sheffield, and Muscle Shoals, it comprises the Shoals Region, also known as the Muscle Shoals Region or the Quad Cities. The combined population of these four cities is about 80,000. Muscle Shoals has a small airport with commercial propeller plane service from Atlanta, but most locals fly in and out of Huntsville, which is about one hour away. Nashville and Birmingham airports are both about two hours away. Evidence of Native American inhabitation of the region goes back to at least 500 BCE, when the Florence Indian Mound, also known as Wawamanona, was constructed (Steen n.d.). The mound is still standing and can be visited along with the Florence Indian Mound Museum. Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Yuchi were among the Indigenous Peoples of the region. Many were removed to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears from 1830–50, but many remained, and some have returned. The Wall, built by Tom Hendrix as a memorial to his Yuchi great-great grandmother, Te-lah-ney, commemorates her harrowing and arduous return home from exile. A hand-built rock wall, it is the largest monument to a Native American woman, and can be visited on a short trip outside Florence. The city of Florence was founded in 1818 and served as the transshipment point for traffic between the upper and lower parts of the Tennessee River. The Muscle Shoals were an obstacle to river traffic, a problem ultimately solved in the early twentieth century by the construction of Wilson Dam (1918–24), which raised the water level and replaced an earlier, less successful canal detour (Davidson 1946). Wilson Dam (which you can see on the right of the cover photo), the first of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dams, also provides hydropower and attracted the aluminum processing industry to the area. Today Lauderdale County, where Florence is located, and neighboring Colbert County, have both an agricultural (corn, cotton, soybeans, chickens) base as well as an industrial one. During and preceding the Civil War, Florence was a temporary home to Dred Scott, Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Bell Hood, and William T. Sherman, who used the current Geography building, Wesleyan Hall (built in 1855, Figure 1), as his headquarters, and his journals written there contain the famous phrase “War is hell” (McDonald 1991). [End Page 193] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Wesleyan Hall, Geography building. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Recording Studios. Florence’s fame today largely rests on its outstanding music heritage. W.C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” was born and raised in Florence, and his house is now a museum. Several recording studios opened in the Shoals Region beginning with FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Recording Studios (Figure 2) in 1959 (Ells 2015). Within the next two decades other studios opened, including Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and [End Page 194] Cypress Moon Studios (Whitley 2014). Artists who recorded at these studios include Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Richard, Cher, Jimmy Buffett, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, The Commodores, George Jones, the Oak Ridge Boys, Duane Allman, and many others. These studios are still very much in business and can be visited on guided tours. The music empresario Sam Phillips—who discovered and produced Elvis Presley, Howlin’ Wolf, and Johnny Cash—was born in Florence and had a close connection to the city. The region’s musical tradition is continued by Jason Isbell/Drive By Truckers, John Paul White/The Civil Wars, the Alabama Shakes, and...

Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960 by Matthew L. Downs

Reviewed by: Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960 by Matthew L. Downs Whitney A. Snow Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960. By Matthew L. Downs. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 331pp. $47.50. ISBN 978-0-8071-5714-5. Exploring the various positive and negative changes wrought by the federal government in cooperation with local communities, this chronological work provides a fascinating look at the history of the Tennessee Valley. Author Matthew L. Downs, Assistant Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Mobile, argues, “The history of the modernization of the Tennessee Valley perfectly captures the rise of the Sunbelt—the emergence of an industrial and commercial economy, marked by active cooperation (and contestation) between local, regional, and federal developers and accompanied by major changes in the everyday lives of southerners” (p. 3). In fact, Downs insists that the Tennessee Valley’s transformation actually outshone the South as a whole. Using a sampling of cities like Muscle Shoals, Florence, Decatur, Guntersville, and Huntsville, he reveals how each municipality was altered under federal interest, but maintains such change could never have come without support from the local level. In his words, “In the Tennessee Valley and across the region, southerners modernized their own economy, and in doing so, played a crucial role in the creation of the Sunbelt” (p. 2). In Chapter One Downs highlights how the mere interest Henry Ford exhibited toward Muscle Shoals, especially its dam and nitrate factories, attracted nationwide attention and resulted in a real estate smorgasbord. His bid brought competition from utility companies like Alabama Power, but most area residents, suspicious of trusts, [End Page 270] preferred Ford. They supported Ford largely because of his iconic stature and a belief that if anyone could industrialize the region, he could. Their advocacy of Ford showed that many were willing to abandon the status quo and take a chance on further industrial development. Ford ultimately withdrew his bid, but his vision of the potential of the Tennessee Valley spread. Throughout Chapter Two Downs speaks of how in Ford’s absence, many locals reluctantly embraced the idea of Alabama Power because its presence would at least mean development. Ultimately, it was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), established in 1933, which combined regional economic and resource planning. The TVA provided employment, educational opportunities, rural electrification, conservation, and flood control, among other things. Its arrival came at a time of abject depression and was heartily welcomed by area residents. The TVA, for all its benefits, also had its fair share of drawbacks which Downs is quick to point out in Chapter Three. Many people were displaced by the flooding of land and this led to mass unemployment (especially for tenants), out-migration, and homelessness. Dislocated families were forced to migrate, thus severing and even destroying long-established communities. Worse still, prized farming land was flooded. Downs addresses the extent to which the TVA aided the displaced. People were often compensated for land taken by eminent domain, but it was less than the land was worth. There was evident miscommunication between the TVA and Tennessee Valley residents over its purpose. Some talk arose over whether more aid should be given, but TVA officials believed that “by improving the regional economy, the authority might provide a kind of financial assistance to the displaced” (p. 83). Downs uses Chapter Four to analyze the maturation of the TVA, especially its collaboration with local leaders. What President Franklin D. Roosevelt had envisioned for the TVA and what the program had become, however, were two entirely different things. Downs explores TVA’s faults, like a failure to consult all types of communities and an eagerness for any and all business regardless of whether it “cared [End Page 271] for the people and environment that drew them to the valley” (p. 140). Immense study is given to the TVA’s mishandling of racial issues. While the TVA hired blacks, these workers were subjected to workplace racism and discrimination. Black employees were paid less and rarely advanced. The TVA, for all its boasting of working hand-in...

Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes (review)

Reviewed by: Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes Paul Devlin Charles L. Hughes. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015. 280 pp. $29.95. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes is a nuanced, elegant, and authoritative history of an important corner of the Southern popular music industry from the 1960s through the early 1980s. Hughes focuses on what he calls the “country-soul triangle” from Memphis to Nashville to Muscle Shoals, epicenters of creativity that helped create the soundtrack of the era. Stars who emerged from the triangle include Al Green, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack, the Staples Singers, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, Charley Pride, Dolly Parton, and Elvis Presley, while those who traveled to the triangle in search of a particular sound include James Brown, Liza Minnelli, and the Rolling Stones. Hughes successfully navigates many potential pitfalls as he tells (and revises) the intricate story of how country and soul music have been understood as political and social proxies. The hit-making studios (such as Stax, for instance) of the country-soul triangle during this period have long been considered extraordinary sites of progressive interracial harmony. For example, a black studio band created the music for the white Mar-Keys and a white band, the famous Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, played the music on some of the best-known tunes by the Staples Singers (at the very moment that the Staples Singers became more overtly political and aligned with a Black Power perspective). Country Soul is filled with a wide variety of similar examples. This narrative of interracial cooperation was cemented by music critic Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (Back Bay, 1986). Hughes’s goal is to both oppose and complicate the assumptions that have followed in the wake of Guralnick’s book, and from related anecdotes that have proliferated about the period. The fact that the Staples Singers used a white studio band is widely known. But what of the similarly talented black studio bands during the period who worked under difficult conditions? It may be fun to watch Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash perform together on YouTube, but Hughes argues that broad historical conclusions should not be drawn from such glorious moments: When knitted together, these stories of cooperation offer an alternative narrative of southern history, a tradition of racial interaction that complicates or even contradicts the conventional understanding of the South’s conflicted past. Interracial music collaborations from Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s to Nelly and Tim McGraw in the 2000s are offered as counterpoints to racial polarization. The interracial intermingling of 1850s string bands or 1950s rock ’n’ roll becomes evidence for the limits of segregation and white supremacy. . . . . . . But those who promote this narrative (and there are lots of us, from Barack Obama to me at some points in my career) have taken it further and exhibit a disquieting tendency to imply that the music existed outside of history. Statements like “racism did not exist in the studio” or “on the bandstand, everyone was the same” or “we saw no difference between black and white” are commonplace in this discourse. Southern musical spaces— both literal and figurative—have become a kind of ahistorical interracial dreamland. (190, 191) [End Page 63] Hughes successfully uses what he calls a “labor-based analysis” (6) to attempt to replace this ahistorical interracial dreamland with something closer to reality. Hughes does not claim that the dreamland was actually a nightmare-land, but his excavation of the in-between land discards sedimented layers of myth. There is an element of truth to the idea that many people looked to the Southern music industry as a site of change, or a space reflective of the vanguard of social change. Hughes writes that Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams, a black country-and-soul musician, “understood that his hybrid music offered a way out of [race-based genre divisions imposed by the music industry] by...

Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960 by Matthew L. Downs (review)

Reviewed by: Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960 by Matthew L. Downs Lou Martin (bio) Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960. By Matthew L. Downs. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Pp. 331. $47.50 cloth; $47.50 pdf; $47.50 ebook) In Transforming the South, Matthew Downs does yeoman’s work in detailing boosters’ and federal administrators’ efforts to bring new industries to four communities in the Tennessee Valley of northern Alabama: Muscle Shoals, Florence, Decatur, and Huntsville. Beginning during World War I, a new generation of southern elites courted federal aid and industrial development, developing and maintaining a relationship with federal agencies and taking “the lead in directing the flow” of federal money (p. 2). The early chapters focus on a series of false starts as local boosters tried to attract investors to take over a hydroelectric dam and two [End Page 119] idle nitrate factories at Muscle Shoals. Henry Ford presented locals with a vision of nitrate factories producing cheap fertilizer for ailing cotton farms in the area and building a broader industrial economy on the cheap electricity from the dam. The complicating factor was the federal government’s control over the facilities, and federal officials, local leaders, and company executives debated the best use of the facilities for a decade. Beginning in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) would become the dominant force in the region’s development. Debates between Arthur E. Morgan and David Lilienthal, the first two chairmen of the TVA, held great significance for people living in Muscle Shoals and other towns in the valley. Morgan’s vision of self-sufficient, mutualistic communities gave way to Lilienthal’s focus on industrialization, and local boosters applauded. Communities along the river created professional booster organizations that were effective in promoting their locales for development and courting federal funding. The last chapters focus on Huntsville’s rise from a former textile mill town to the “Rocket City,” a center of defense and aerospace industries. City boosters formed the Huntsville Industrial Expansion Committee to campaign for a more diverse economy and lobby other manufacturers to locate in their city. In doing so, Downs argues that they created “a solid foundation for economic prosperity” (p. 243). Downs has done a good job of following the negotiations between the region’s boosters, federal officials, and industry executives as well as detailing debates, which were often over the role of the federal government. Readers will also come away with an appreciation of how the booster ethos and industrialism took root in southern soil and gave rise to the Sunbelt. Downs is eager to credit local boosters for shaping the region’s development, but, in most cases, they appear to be junior partners to federal agencies and budgets. Furthermore, there were thousands of booster organizations across the country that used the same techniques and failed to achieve the same results. With few comparisons [End Page 120] to organizations outside the region, it is difficult to prove that these boosters were particularly instrumental. Early in the introduction, Downs notes that “prosperity failed to erase inherent inequalities” and that “African Americans demanded full inclusion, workers called for better wages and conditions, women worked to participate more fully in the growing prosperity, and conservationists decried the environmental consequences of unregulated industrialization” (pp. 2–3). It is not clear why the author thinks the inequalities were inherent, and the stories of those groups remain at the margins of this narrative. When we do learn about African American guards, masons, or college applicants, readers often must rely on the elites’ perspectives of their demands for equality. Because of the persistence of racial discrimination and segregation—which are not inherent to industrialization or economic development—we gather that the region’s boosters and their patrons in Congress must have supported Jim Crow until the mid-1960s. Finally, Downs seems to have as much faith in growth economics as the twentieth-century boosters. Near the end he uses Lawrence County with its “slow-moving economy” and lower levels of education and income as a contrast to the counties touched by federal development (p. 254). He also...

Big Dam, Big Ideas

Big Dam, Big Ideas Jefferson S. Rogers Norris Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) first major project, was completed on July 28, 1936, three years after Congressional approval. The dam is named after Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska who is considered by many to be the “father” of TVA. It was and remains an impressive, if not especially picturesque, feat of early twentieth century engineering. More importantly, it is also a landscape of big ideas. This landscape can be initially appreciated by sizing it up with some numbers. Located about 25 miles northwest of Knoxville, Tennessee, Norris Dam rises 265 feet from its base and extends 1,860 feet across the Clinch River. At its foundation, the dam is 208 feet thick. Inside the powerhouse (partially shown in the lower right of the image), two Westinghouse generator units produce a net capacity of 110 megawatts of electricity which is enough power to supply roughly 90,000 households. The “Streamline Moderne” style of the dam and its adjacent structures was applied by architect Roland Wank. In terms of its fundamental aspects of engineering and style, Norris Dam served as the prototype for fifteen other dams built by TVA in the 1930s and 1940s (Kowalczyk and Thomason 2016, TVA 2016b). The reservoir behind the dam, Norris Lake, is another significant feature of the landscape. It covers 33,840 acres (52.8 square miles) in surface area; its complex shoreline runs a distance of nearly 810 miles. Flood-storage capacity of the lake is 1.1 million acre-feet (TVA 2016b), an amount that could cover nearly all of the greater Knoxville metropolitan area with a foot of water. The forested hills that are visible in the background of the image belong to two state-run entities: Norris Dam State Park and Cove Creek Wildlife Management Area. Another good way to appreciate Norris Dam is to discover its rich philosophical and political heritage. Along with being TVA’s first major project, Norris Dam represents a very noteworthy milestone of the country’s Conservation Movement. In the decades prior to TVA’s creation and Norris Dam’s construction, conservationists and politicians had made considerable progress in developing governmental mechanisms designed to protect large tracts of natural resources while still allowing for their exploitation under federal stewardship. The Yellowstone Act (1872), Forest Reserve Act (1891), Antiquities Act (1906), and Organic Act (1916) were among the many conservationist breakthroughs of this era. Large-scale federal policies and programs that targeted the nation’s waterways were also undertaken, such [End Page 377] as the creation of the Mississippi River Commission in 1879 and passage of the Reclamation Act (1902), Flood Control Act (1917), and Water Power Act (1920). The development of federal river and watershed management policies was, however, uncoordinated, piecemeal, and often undermined by competing interests (Arnold 1988). The handling of the Tennessee River is a case-in-point. The Tennessee was a particularly troublesome river with several major navigational barriers and occasional catastrophic flooding events. Between 1918 and 1925, the US Army Corps of Engineers built Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama to improve barge navigation along the Tennessee and generate the hydroelectricity needed for several nearby nitrate ammunition production plants. Throughout the Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover administrations, however, politicians fiercely debated whether or not Wilson Dam’s hydroelectric facilities and the nearby nitrate plants should be sold to private interests. Senator Norris defied many of his fellow Congressional Republicans by successfully leading efforts to keep them within the public domain (Arnold 1988). The Wilson Dam project also spurred federal interest in how the Tennessee River system could be more extensively controlled and exploited. Between 1922 and 1930, the Corps of Engineers presented to Congress a series of major studies on how the Tennessee River watershed could be managed through the development of a coordinated network of multipurpose dams. Among the thirty-five sites identified in the 1922 report was a description of a prospective dam located at a site where Cove Creek emptied into the Clinch River. “Dam No. 3” as it was called, became the precursor to Norris Dam (US Congress 1922: p. 120–121). By 1930, the Hoover administration supported...

Helping Pave the Road to FAME: Behind the Music of Muscle Shoals

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During the mid-1950s, several amateur musicians living in and around the Shoals region of Alabama made a leap into the music industry. A few, no doubt, had ambitions fueled by dreams of stardom, while many were simply taken by the sounds of R&B and rock 'n' roll broadcast over the radio, and others were interested in songwriting and publishing. After initially funneling songs through Nashville, the closest music scene and recording center some 125 miles away, the fledgling Shoals music industry gained national attention in 1962 after the song Better Move On by Arthur Alexander charted in Billboard, and it continued to grow in prominence throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. Like many other regional recording centers such as Nashville, Memphis, Cincinnati, and Detroit, the multiple recording studios in Shoals primarily relied on homegrown session musicians. Two different rhythm sections formed and initially worked as the house band for studio owner and producer Rick Hall at the Florence Alabama Music Enterprise, known as fame. first group, active between 1961 and 1964, included bassist Norbert Putnam, keyboardist David Briggs, drummer Jerry Carrigan, and guitarists Terry Thompson and Earl Peanutt Montgomery. second section, which worked for Hall between 1964 and 1969, included guitarist Jimmy Johnson, drummer Roger Hawkins, bassist Albert Junior Lowe (later replaced by David Hood), and keyboardist Dewey Spooner Oldham (later replaced by Barry Beckett). At times, other musicians, including guitarists Eddie Hinton, Pete Carr, and Duane Allman, supplemented fame's second house FAME's prestige within the music industry and among fans grew through the repeated chart success of hits such as Everybody by Tommy Roe (1963), What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am) by the Tams (1964), and Steal Away by Jimmy Hughes (1964). After Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman, a track produced by Quin Ivy at his Norala Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, reached number one on both the r&b and pop charts in 1966, the Shoals recording scene took off. Singers traveled to Alabama and recorded with the fame studio musicians because the artists heard something--a riff or a groove--in the of the rhythm sections that appealed to them. session musicians working at fame during the early 1960s, followed by the session musicians first known as the Shoals Rhythm Section--Jimmy Johnson, Roger Hawkins, David Hood, and Barry Beckett, aka, The Swampers--served as conduits for artists' ideas, while at the same time providing singers with enough space to retain their own musical identity with more than a hint of the so-called Muscle Shoals sound. As Shoals Rhythm Section (MSRS) bassist David Hood stated in 2011, With the different artists that we would work with, we always tried to like we were that particular artist's band. (1) In some instances, Rick Hall was the songwriter, but in most cases he was the recording engineer and producer. And in an effort to realize his for a song, Hall always relied on local and imported session musicians. In this way, the recording process at fame in Shoals was modeled upon the process at Stax in nearby Memphis, where Booker T. and the MGs were the house band, and at Motown in Detroit, where the Funk Brothers played on nearly every track. But popular belief--furthered by Magnolia Pictures' 2013 documentary Shoals--deems Hall the single mastermind. As the formal press kit stated: At [the] heart [of Shoals] is Rick Hall who founded FAME Studios. Overcoming crushing poverty and staggering tragedies, Hall brought black and white together in Alabama's cauldron of racial hostility to create music for the generations. He is responsible for creating the Muscle Shoals sound and Swampers, the house band at FAME that eventually left to start their own successful studio, known as Shoals Sound. …

Greg “Freddy” Camalier, Director; Stephen Badger and Greg “Freddy” Camalier, Executive Producers; Raji Mandelkorn, Co-Producer. Muscle Shoals (Video)

Greg “Freddy” Camalier, Director; Stephen Badger and Greg “Freddy” Camalier, Executive Producers; Raji Mandelkorn, Co-Producer. Muscle Shoals (Video)

Gimme Shelter—the Rolling Stones (review)

Gimme Shelter-The Rolling Stones (1970) Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin. Distributed by The Criterion Collection www.criterion.com The Rolling Stones are as iconic for the images they have projected as for their music. For four decades, from the T.A.M.I. Show (1964) and six appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s through Martin Scorcese's documentary valentine Shine a Light (2008), the Rolling Stones have held a magnetic appeal for filmmakers attempting to catch lightning in a jar. Several films between 1968 and 1972 employed cinema verite techniques in an attempt to capture the Stones at what was arguably their creative peak, among them Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil (1968) Robert Frank's little-seen Cocksucker Blues (1972), and of course, the Maysles' well-known Gimme Shelter. In concept, Gimme Shelter was no doubt intended to play as tour documentary-brothers Albert and David Maysles had produced some of the earliest on-the-ground footage of the Beatles in America in 1964 and had worked with both Marlon Brando and Godard. Albert Maysles had also been a cinematographer on D.A. Pennebaker's successful festival film Monterey Pop (1968). But along the way Gimme Shelter acquired an unanticipated narrative, culminating in the chaotic and ultimately epochal events of the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in early December 1969, where escalating crowd violence peaked with the stabbing death of a young black man, Merideth Hunter. If Gimme Shelter is indeed, as some have claimed, the greatest rock documentary ever filmed, it is not because of its concert footage. Rather, it is the film's end-of-the-sixties gestalt, embodied in its tragic progression toward Altamont, which lends it weight not simply as a great rock film but as an important cultural document. As Robert Ghristgau was to state in Newsday over thirty years ago, writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended. The film begins with a frivolous staged shot of drummer Gharlie Watts dressed in armor, riding a donkey, and it ends with a scene of exhausted concert-goers departing Altamont the morning after, as if fleeing disaster. What is bracketed by these shots is the documentary of a tipping point-a sudden pivoting of youth culture from the airy freedoms of the late 60s to portents of the 70s-the fall of Saigon, Watergate and Nixon's disgrace, an economic slump and national malaise, the debasement of music and drug experimentation from free-flowing forms of expression to simple commerce and abuse. The Stones of Gimme Shelter were simultaneously provocateurs and accidental messengers. For half its length, Gimme Shelter is a straightforward documentary of life on the road with the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band, teasing crowds with a set of songs that were both libidinous and political. Two years earlier, Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Rockand Roll Circus (1968) had portrayed the band in a carnivalesque portrayal, and the members were none too pleased with the outcome. The Maysles' project was an attempt by the band to communicate their strengths-playing to a live audience- interspersed with depictions of life on the road, backstage, and in the studio (in Muscle Shoals, Alabama). While footage from the originally conceived heart of the film remains central, the events that transpired at Altamont impose a narrative that none of the principles could have foreseen. The Altamont concert itself, as depicted in the film, seems largely improvised. Woodstock impresario Michael Lang had originally aspired to hold a free concert with the Stones-a Woodstock West-in Golden Gate Park. When complications arose, the site of the concert shifted to Sears Point Raceway, north of San Francisco, and then to Altamont Speedway only a few days before the event. …

Phosphorus Paradox Scarcityand Overabundance of a Key Nutrient

In between shepherding the United States through the Great Depression and bracing the country for war in Europe, then-President Franklin Roosevelt took a moment in 1938 to tell Congress about phosphorus.1 More specifically, he spoke about phosphates, the most commonly commercially exploited form of phosphorus. Roosevelt’s was not a scientific presentation but a cautious alert about the critical role this element plays in agricultural production. Private interests were exporting increasing amounts of the country’s phosphates to markets abroad, he warned. Given the prospect that this vital constituent of fertilizer could come into short supply domestically, Roosevelt recommended framing a formal policy to deal with a strategic issue. “The disposition of our phosphate deposits should be regarded as a national concern,” he said. “The situation appears to offer an opportunity for this nation to exercise foresight in the use of a great national resource heretofore almost unknown in our plans for the development of the nation.”1 In spite of Roosevelt’s call, no phosphate policy was forthcoming. More than seven decades on, the phrase “heretofore almost unknown” still echoes in many discussions about phosphorus. Meanwhile, the significance of phosphates is even more profound today than it was in the 1930s. Phosphate rock has emerged as a globally traded commodity linked to a diverse set of politically charged debates, ranging from environmental degradation and threats to human health to food security and agricultural sovereignty.

Southern Rockers

Southern Rockers Joshua Guthman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution It is impossible to overlook the shame of the Stars and Bars, but what about the sound of the music itself? There lies glory. Lynyrd Skynyrd in concert, New Brockton, Alabama, 2008, courtesy of Jayuzi, under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License. [End Page 141] Let’s be honest: Southern rock is a critically despised genre, a redneck sound draped in the Confederate flag and fueled by an oh-so-’70s mix of Jack Daniels and Quaaludes. But the genre’s critics have it only partly right. It is impossible to overlook the shame of the Stars and Bars, but what about the sound of the music itself? There lies glory—especially if you turn it up real loud. 10. The Allman Brothers Band The genre’s progenitors? I wouldn’t be so quick to place the Allmans at the moment of creation. But it is true they exhibit all that is good and bad about southern rock—the heady mix of blues, rock, country, and soul, on the one hand, and the never-ending on-stage “jam” burdening that other hand like so much deadweight. 9. Lynyrd Skynyrd Only Elvis’s music lies buried beneath more heaps of cultural symbolism. But that’s what you get for playing in front of the Rebel flag and sparring with Neil Young over the meaning of southern manhood. 8. Lucinda Williams Oh, she can sing it sweet, but, Lord, have you heard Williams when she plugs in? A voice like a branding iron. 7. Uncle Tupelo The Rust Belt meets the Bible Belt. The post-industrial descendants of the white southern migrants who found themselves exiled to the steel mills and automobile factories of the Midwest. 6. Gram Parsons The pre-eminent country-rocker, a radiant songwriter, and a man who died far too young. Did you know that his corpse was stolen and set alight in the deserts of California before it could be flown back to New Orleans for burial? Talk about southern gothic. 5. The Sir Douglas Quintet They hailed from Texas and summoned the sounds of Mexico. But, please, don’t call ’em Tex-Mex. Makes their music sound like a bowl of bad chili when in fact they were serving up the sweetest stew of borderland soul imaginable. 4. Drive-By Truckers Latter-day chroniclers of what they call “the duality of the southern thing.” [End Page 142] Click for larger view View full resolution She can sing it sweet, but, Lord, have you heard her when she plugs in? A voice like a branding iron. Lucinda Williams, at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, England, 2008, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License. 3. The Band “They’re from Canada!” you scream. “The South ’tis but a state of mind,” I reply. 2. Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (a.k.a. The Swampers) Unseen but always heard. The house band at fame Studios before opening up their own shop in 1969, these guys laid down the beats behind (take a deep breath) Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Bob Seger, Willie Nelson, the Staple Singers, Traffic, the Oak Ridge Boys, Paul Simon, and Rod Stewart, among others. 1. Elvis Presley The original southern rocker. The great white whale of American culture, in Greil Marcus’s words: a musician, an idea, a force, a living metaphor of the sins and virtues of the South. [End Page 143] Joshua Guthman Joshua Guthman is the music editor of Southern Cultures and an assistant professor of history at Berea College, where he teaches American cultural and religious history. He is writing a book about Primitive Baptists and the evangelical self in antebellum America. Copyright © 2009 Center for the Study of the American South

Catfights and Coffins: Stories of Alabama Courthouses

Catfights and Coffins: Stories of Alabama Courthouses “THE COURTHOUSE IS AN OUTGROWTH OF CIVILIZATION. It may be said that erection of a courthouse in new and virgin territory signified the establishment of a stable government dedicated to law and order.”1 This comment by a historian writing about the early Montgomery County Courthouse is reflected in the actions of settlers in all parts of Alabama. In colonial times on the Eastern seaboard there were usually two public buildings in most settlements: a church and a tavern. Both of these were often used by circuit-riding judges to hold court.2 In pioneer Alabama it is probable that this practice was common, but there is also evidence that a building devoted to the conduct of judicial affairs was an early priority for settlers. One of the first actions taken when a county was established was the selection of a site for the county seat and the building of a courthouse. On early maps you will find town names such as Chambers Courthouse, Fayette Courthouse, and Dale Courthouse, showing the importance given to the location of these structures. Even though emphasis was placed on a building dedicated to the law, many counties had judicial business to conduct before they got A N N E H E R B E R T F E AT H E R S Anne Feathers is a retired speech-language pathologist living in Greenville. The author would like to thank the editors of The Alabama Review, Robert J. Jakeman and Carey E. Cauthen, and Norwood Kerr, Frazine Taylor, and the research staff of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. In addition to those listed in the references, the author is extremely grateful to all those who helped in gathering courthouse lore. Some of these are: Inez Barnett, Ed Bridges, Susan Cranfield, Wayne Deloach, Ralph B. Draughon Jr., Sandra Fowler, Shannon Hall-James, Patricia Blondel Harden, Doshia Harper, Davida Hastie, Bert Hitchcock, Mary Frances Jones, Gene Kerlin, Dot Moore, Steve Murray, Phyllis J. K. Owens, Ranee Pruitt, Frances Robb, Margaret Clayton Russell, Bobby Joe Seales, Mary Jane Skinner, Lori Smith, T. Larry Smith, Judy Taylor, and G. Sidney Waits Jr. This presidential address was read at the annual meeting of the Alabama Historical Association held in the Shoals (Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia), April 19, 2008. 1 National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Alabama (CDA), Early Courthouses of Alabama, Prior to 1860 (Mobile, 1966), 52. 2 Nancy Means Jackson, “I’ll Drink to That,” American Spirit, September/October 2007, 33. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 164 around to building a shelter in which to conduct this business. Legend has it that the first court hearings in Baldwin County were held with the judge sitting in the forks of a huge live oak, with jurors gathered on his right and spectators on his left. The tree was ever thereafter known as “court oak.” Another old tree, known as the “hangman’s oak,” grew nearby and was used to carry out executions.3 The first courts in what would become Butler County were held at Fort Dale under the “sheltering branches of several oak trees.”4 The first judge in Walker County sat on a “big rock near a larger rock on which sat the jury.”5 These rocks can still be seen in Jasper. When the first court in Randolph County was convened in 1833, the judge “presided over the opening session sitting on a log and leaning against a large oak tree.” The first commissioner’s court was held under a mulberry tree near the ferryman’s house. The next year the first indoor court was held in the dwelling of Chief Wedowee. Even after a place to hold court was found through the courtesies of the chief, a place to hold prisoners was still a problem; a prisoner in the first jail, a hollow log on the river bank, had come “near to drowning when a sudden rise in the Tallapoosa floated him off in his prison.” After that episode, the jail...

Developed for the Service of Alabama: The Centennial History of the Alabama Power Company, 1906-2006 (review)

Book Reviews Developed for the Service of Alabama: The Centennial History of the Alabama Power Company, 1906–2006. By Leah Rawls Atkins. Birmingham: Alabama Power Company, 2006. xxvii, 675 pp. $37.50. ISBN 0-9786753-0-4. Available from the Alabama Power Service Organization, 600 North 18th Street, Birmingham, AL, 35291. In 2002 the Alabama Power Company commissioned a book to commemorate its centennial anniversary. It arranged for Leah Atkins, professor emerita of history at Auburn University and former director of the Auburn University Center for the Arts and Humanities, to write the history. Already a proven author of works on the South and Birmingham, she was well qualified and poised for such an undertaking. After four years of labor, with much assistance from the company, she produced her work. It is an impressive product, rich in narrative and context, and, while it lauds the subject, the Alabama Power Company is contextualized as a factor in the South’s growth and development. For students of southern economic development and general business history, this work will be valuable, and for general readers of Alabama history it will be enjoyable. In 1906 the Alabama Power Company was incorporated by consolidating hydroelectric investments on the Tennessee and Tallapoosa rivers made by Frank Washburn and Charles Baker. Attorney Thomas W. Martin became interested in waterpower when he worked as a young lawyer in the office of the state attorney general. He handled much of the legal work for a group of investors, particularly James Mitchell, seeking to develop the water power resources of Alabama. The company first established headquarters in Montgomery, described as an antebellum city of the Old South, but the eager entrepreneurs moved operations to Birmingham, where the sweat and toil of the New South was underway. Martin took over leadership of the firm in 1920 and served as the company commander for forty years, his name becoming synonymous with Alabama Power. In 1925 the company moved its offices into a new artdeco building, crowned with a statue of Electra, which became a symbol of the company and a landmark of the city. Students of rural electrification will find interesting a discussion of the controversy over the federal dam at Muscle Shoals, including the attempt T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 286 by Henry Ford to purchase the dam for a pittance. Martin defended government ownership and opposed the sale, but later had strong differences with the Tennessee Valley Authority when it took over jurisdiction of the dam. By 1940, as the world mobilized for war, Martin and the TVA had overcome their differences. Atkins furnishes fresh details and the company’s perspective on the Muscle Shoals and TVA battles. After World War II, the Alabama Power Company supplied electricity to homes, businesses, and industrial plants springing up around the state. It experienced setbacks and went through a particularly painful period in the late 1970s, when it had a poor image with the general public and clashed with Gov. George Wallace. Again the firm weathered the storm and returned to sound financial footing in the 1980s. It expanded its responsibilities, as did much of corporate America, and sought to provide more than abundant and reliable electricity. It cooperated with the state government in attracting new manufacturers to Alabama such as an up-scale Mercedes-Benz plant. It went into the 1990s like many large corporations, facing new environmental, workforce diversity, and technologies implementation regulations. When the company reached the new millennium it had become a force for industrial development as well as a provider of electricity. Atkins relied heavily on company records and interviews with many of the officers and employees of Alabama Power. Such use of primary sources enabled her to give the work a sense of depth generally not achieved in commissioned works, accompanied by an insider’s view. She never lost sight of the broader context and for this reason the work will be a valuable addition to the history of a public utilities industry, the state of Alabama, and southern economic growth. D. CLAYTON BROWN Texas Christian University Guests Behind the Barbed Wire...

Source contributions to carbonaceous aerosols in the Tennessee Valley Region

Sources of carbonaceous aerosols collected from three sites of Chattanooga, TN (CH), Muscle Shoals, AL (MS), and Look Rock, TN (LR) in the Tennessee Valley Region (TVR) were apportioned using both organic tracer-based chemical mass balance (CMB) modeling and radiocarbon ( 14C) measurement and the results were compared. Eight sources were resolved by CMB, among which wood combustion (averaging 0.92 μg m −3) was the largest contributor to primary organic carbon (OC) concentrations, followed by gasoline exhaust (0.35 μg m −3), and diesel exhaust (0.18 μg m −3). The identified primary sources accounted for 43%, 71%, and 14% of measured OC at CH, MS, and LR, respectively. Contributions from the eight primary sources resolved by CMB could explain 107±10% of ambient elemental carbon (EC) concentrations, with diesel exhaust (66±32%) and wood combustion (37±33%) as the most important contributors. The fossil fractions in total carbon determined by 14C measurements were in reasonably good agreement with that in primary (OC+EC) carbon apportioned by CMB in the MS winter samples. The comparison between the 14C and CMB results revealed that contemporary sources dominated other OC in the TVR, especially in summertime (84% contemporary).

Reggae Music: A History and Selective Discography

This column offers brief reviews of recent compact disc releases in a variety of musical styles genres, covering both new releases reissues. In alternating issues, a discographic essay focusing on a specific genre, historical period, instrument, or style of music is featured. REGGAE'S ROOTS AND ORIGINS Although reggae is generally considered an indigenous Jamaican music, its roots are actually deeply African American. Strong strains of both calypso the Jamaican folk music called mento are obvious both in reggae's explicit political commentary in its occasionally ribald humor, but the harmonic rhythmic structure of the music has its most significant antecedent in the American soul music of the 1950s 1960s, (1) particularly that which was being produced by the prolific Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Detroit recording studios of those decades, which could be heard on clear Jamaican nights over the airwaves from Miami radio stations. The insistent off-beat rhythmic pattern of soul music rock'n'roll (in which emphasis is typically placed on beats two four of a four-beat measure) would find a strange unique expression in reggae music during the late 1960s early 1970s; in the early days of the music's development, however, that pattern appeared as the trademark galloping backbeat of ska, a more upbeat dance-oriented predecessor of reggae. Ska was based on a double-time version of the basic R & B rhythmic pattern (one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and). This rhythm's relationship to a polka beat is obvious, though there is a significant difference between the two approaches: whereas the horn players keyboardist in a polka band will accent beats two four along with the drummer, in ska the guitars horns would execute chordal chops on the and of each beat, creating a rhythmic pattern in which the traditionally strong beats (one three) are almost wholly ignored while off-beats traditionally weak beats (two four) are all given great emphasis. The resulting rhythm was both unusually complex for the Western popular music of the time almost irresistibly danceable. Ska was fully developed by the mid-1960s, although Jamaica produced many fine ska ensembles, the general critical consensus holds the Skatalites, led by the great saxophonist Tommy McCook (1932-1998), as the finest exponents of ska in this period. A two-compact disc set entitled Ska Bonanza: The Studio One Ska Years (Heartbeat CD-HB-86/87 [1991]) offers a very fine overview of the period, including several tracks by the Skatalites. Ska has enjoyed revivals in Europe the United States at approximately fifteen-year intervals ever since its Jamaican heyday in the 1960s; the second wave ska revival in England came in the wake of the punk rock explosion of the 1970s produced such fine bands as the Specials, Madness the Beat (known in America as the English Beat to distinguish it from a similarly named stateside band). Many of these artists recorded for the British Two Tone label, the best introduction to second-wave ska remains a compilation entitled This Are Two Tone (Two Tone CHR TT 5007 [1983]; reissued on compact disc as Chrysalis F2 21745 [1996]). In the early 1990s a similar revival occurred, this time centered in the United States, led to the national success of such modern ska bands as the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones' Let's Face It (Mercury 534472 [1997]) Dance Hall Crashers' Honey, I'm Homely (MCA MCAD-11676 [1995]) both illustrate nicely the degree to which jazzy ska aggressive punk rock had blended by the mid-1990s, while the Toasters' Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down (Moon Ska 123 [1997]) harks back explicitly to the British second-wave style. SKA BECOMES ROCK STEADY Ska had a relatively limited expressive range, it was inevitable that change would follow quickly upon its popular acceptance. …

Response to Comment on “Geographic Sensitivity of Fine Particle Mass to Emissions of SO2 and NOx”

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVCorrespondence/Rebut...Correspondence/RebuttalNEXTResponse to Comment on “Geographic Sensitivity of Fine Particle Mass to Emissions of SO2 and NOx”S. F. Mueller, E. M. Bailey, and J. J. KelsoeView Author Information Tennessee Valley Authority P.O. Box 1010 Muscle Shoals, Alabama 35662-1010Cite this: Environ. Sci. Technol. 2004, 38, 18, 4911Publication Date (Web):August 3, 2004Publication History Published online3 August 2004Published inissue 1 September 2004https://doi.org/10.1021/es0404724Copyright © Not subject to U.S. Copyright. Published 2004 American Chemical SocietyRIGHTS & PERMISSIONSArticle Views105Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (22 KB) Get e-AlertsSUBJECTS:Anions,Atmospheric chemistry,Environmental modeling,Mathematical methods,Redox reactions Get e-Alerts

Hybrid Bioreactors for Decontamination of Water and Air

AbstractThe Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has developed and patented innovative Hybrid Bioreactors that destroy water and air contaminants, with dramatic savings over existing technologies. Hybrid Bioreactors accomplish single‐step destruction of contaminants without generating contaminated off‐gases or other secondary waste streams. Contaminants destroyed include a wide variety of volatile organic compounds, chlorinated solvents, and other compounds. The bioreactors can be used in a variety of applications ranging from site restoration to industrial compliance. Treatment costs using Hybrid Bioreactors are generally less than one‐tenth of costs reported at Superfund sites. A gas stream application of the new technology was field‐demonstrated at Anniston Army Depot in a project funded by the U.S. Army Environmental Center. A 300‐cubic‐foot Hybrid Bioreactor is being demonstrated this year at TVA's Wetlands Complex in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Additional information is available at http://www.tva.gov/environment/envservices/alw_biofilter.htm. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.*