When one listens to Aretha’s Gold, he or she is afforded not only the pleasure of hearing one of the greatest singers of our lifetimes, but also the musicianship of The Swampers, the studio band heard on those recordings.
The Swampers were the band assembled by Rick Hall at his Fame Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals, where producer Jerry Wexler brought Aretha after Atlantic Records owner Ahmet Ertegun bought her contract from Columbia Records. Columbia had assigned her to Mitch Miller (yeah, THAT Mitch Miller), who didn’t know WHAT do with her. Well, Wexler did, saying he was going to "put her back in church."
Anyway, The Swampers exemplify the style of musicianship known as "ensemble playing": playing so as to make the singer, the song, and the other musicians sound better, rather than to glorify oneself. Wexler also brought Wilson Pickett down, and though Pickett was apprehensive---he had left the South to escape the racism The Swampers seemed to represent: white "crackers"---he said when they started playing, he couldn’t believe his ears; the funkiest band he had ever heard, white or black.
Other artists have gone to Muscle Shoals, expressly to record with The Swampers: Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Boz Scaggs, Joe Cocker, Paul Simon, Dusty Springfield, J.J. Cale, too many to list. Drummer Roger Hawkins and bassist David Hood were enticed out of the studio by an offer from Winwood to join Traffic. Hood’s son Patterson is the frontman of The Drive-By Truckers.
Drummer Roger Hawkins is considered amongst the greatest studio drummers of all-time, even by Jim Keltner, who said he wished he played more like Roger! Extremely "musical": tasteful, elegant, smart (there are a fair number of rather stupid drummers around. Ever hung around a drum shop? ;-), restrained in the less-is-more style. But man does he make for the deepest groove that has ever been played! And his press roll is as good as it gets. To say that his playing is the antithesis of that of, say, Neil Peart, is not to disparage the latter, only to once again make the point that the metric by which a musician’s playing is appraised varies according to what one is looking for, and what one values.
