As a result, the band sold its first copies of Southern Rock Opera during a concert in Murfreesboro, Tennessee on Sept. 11, 2001, the sprawling double album was delayed a day when the printer closed early following that day’s terrorist attacks. Originally intended for self-release on Soul Dump Records on Sept. But there was the whole Muscle Shoals music scene going on at the same time, with white musicians backing up people like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett.” “You know, thinking everyone here is like George Wallace, and the TV footage of police dogs and the schoolhouse steps. “It’s about growing up in the South and people’s misconceptions of that,” Hood told The Birmingham News in 2001. Though located in the same state where Wallace delivered his caustic inaugural address, the racial equity on display within FAME made it seem as if the space existed on an entirely different planet - a gulf a grown-up Patterson Hood would attempt to reconcile on Southern Rock Opera, the breakout third album from his progressive Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers. One of those players, bassist David Hood, fathered a son, Patterson, who was born in Muscle Shoals on March 24, 1964.

By the middle of the decade, the studio would become one of the hotbeds of America’s thriving soul music scene, attracting the likes of Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Wilson Pickett and other prominent Black artists who sought to record with the musically malleable members of the studio’s all-white house band.

The same year, FAME Studios settled into its new digs just 200 miles northwest in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where months later the studio produced its first hit with a longing-filled take on “Steal Away” from soul man Jimmy Hughes. George Wallace stepped to the podium in Montgomery, Alabama and gave an inaugural address that included a phrase - “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” - that stands as one of the most putrid rallying cries ever spoken by a public official against racial equality in America.

The breakout a rock opera