One of Arthur Alexander’s innovations as a songwriter was the simple use of the word ‘girl’ for the addressee in his songs. After years of personal struggle with drugs and health problems (he was hospitalized several times in the mid-1960s, sometimes at his own request, in a mental health facility in southern Alabama), he returned in the 1970s, first with an album on Warner Brothers and then with a minor hit single in 1975, ‘Every Day I Have To Cry Some’. In 1969 Fame’s studio musicians opened their own independent studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, where Dylan would later make his gospel albums Slow Train Coming and Saved.ĭespite this hit and its influence on other artists, however, while an EP of his work was highly sought-after in the UK, Arthur Alexander was generally received with indifference by the US public and his career stagnated. Leased to Dot Records in 1961, ‘You Better Move On’ was a hit and helped Hall to build his bigger Fame Studio, which later attracted the likes of Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett.
And then he made a perfect record out of it, produced by Rick Hall at his original Fame studio (an acronym for Florence, Alabama Music Enterprises), which was an old tobacco barn out on Wilson Dam Highway. He wrote this exquisite classic while working as a bell-hop in the Muscle Shoals Hotel. It was really with ‘You Better Move On’ that Arthur Alexander made himself an indispensable artist. You can’t say he pays tribute to Alexander with this, because he makes such a poor job of reviving it. His father played gospel slide guitar (using the neck of a whiskey bottle) his mother and sister sang in a local church choir.ĭylan covers Arthur Alexander’s début single, ‘Sally Sue Brown’, made in 1959 and released under his nickname June Alexander (short for Junior), on his Down In The Groove album. Hall, and let me offer a brief account of his part in the Arthur Alexander story by reprinting the AA entry from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:Īrthur Alexander was born on in Florence, Alabama, just five miles from Sheffield and Muscle Shoals.
Tomorrow (the last day of January) is the 75th birthday of Rick Hall, born in Tishimingo, Mississippi - the man behind Fame Studios and thereby the person who gave the late great Arthur Alexander his chance to record (for which he was amply repaid: see below).
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