Here is a little bit of Pseudo-Surf history about a band called "The Mosriters” and a track called “On The Run” that appeared on the compilation album “Surf-Age Nuggets (Trash & Twang Instrumentals)”. I’ll go ahead and spoil the surprise ending: The Mosriters’ members included Roger Hawkins, David Hood and Jimmy Johnson, better known as Muscle Shoals’ Swampers. On a personal note, I am a native of the area. Quin Ivy was my Accounting professor at the University of North Alabama and, while in college, I worked at the Radio Shack across the street from Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. This is a summary of the history of the Mosriters from an article on Quin Ivy and his Norala (North Alabama)/Quinivy Studios by Pete Nickols:
Rick Hall, like the owners of most fledgling studios of the day, had at first kept his Fame Studio pot boiling by providing cheap-rate studio time for unknown wannabes seeking demo sessions as well as the local advertisers wanting to record their radio commercials; but as his studio came to be used more often by significant artists, he found he was now having to turn away many of these local small-income providers. So it was that his pal Quin Ivy asked him if it would be OK if he opened his own little studio directly opposite his 2nd Street Sheffield record store to offer recording time to such custom. Hall readily agreed and so Ivy’s Norala (for Northern Alabama) one-room studio came into being in 1965.
In 1965, between organizing demo and advertising work, Quin Ivy soon decided to follow Rick Hall’s lead by starting up his own record label, which he simply named Norala after his studio. Its first release on Norala 6501 was by The Mosriters (Mosrite being the name of a Californian-manufactured guitar, which had primarily been popularized via its use by the big-selling instrumental group, The Ventures).
This was indeed a Ventures-like surf-sound instrumental 2-sider, featuring “On The Run” and “Turmoil”, both penned by Don Srygley and Jimmy Johnson. Johnson had been influenced in his very early days to take up the guitar (rather than the trumpet he had played in the Sheffield Junior High School Band) when he saw Srygley play guitar for Hollis Dixon & The Keynotes at a dance held in the basement of the Sheffield municipal building. His Aunt had then bought him his first basic guitar and amp and, when the 15 year-old Johnson came back a whole $10 better off one night from a local Saturday night dance gig at the National Guard Armory in Tuscumbia, his father Ray (himself a musician and ex-member of the Johnson Brothers country duo together with his brother Dexter) bought Jimmy his first Fender, trading in his own Gibson acoustic guitar to help conclude the deal.
After playing in a few local bands with his new Fender, Jimmy settled in as guitarist in the Del-Rays. They cut an early 45 for Rick Hall at his Fame studio and, at the end of the session, Rick offered Jimmy a job as a general ‘gopher’, Johnson becoming Rick’s first ‘employee’.
Srygley and Johnson along with David Hood and Roger Hawkins made up the four ‘Mosriters’ who played on the disc and they followed it up on Norala 6502 with another 2-sider which paired “Take That” with an instrumental version of “Treat Her Right”. As you can hear, “Treat Her Right” is more rock ‘r roll/R&B than soul perhaps but a powerful instrumental rendition of the Roy Head classic, nonetheless.
The third Norala 45 featured a young Muscle Shoals native called Mickey Buckins who was trying to make it as a songwriter as well as a singer. The top side “Silly Girl" is now a highly sought after (and expensive) Northern "soul" 45 but in truth it is a pleasantish if unremarkable up-tempo pop number. Undoubtedly this disc has the Mosriters playing behind Buckins but sadly like the two previous Norala 45s it sold poorly. Buckins went on to become a key percussionist in Muscle Shoals as a member of the Fame Gang and contributed several very good songs for artists like Clarence Carter and Millie Jackson along the way. In 1969, Buckins would also engineer Solomon Burke’s great Bell album “Proud Mary” at Fame.
It seems Ivy had ‘big plans’ for the Mosriters - but all these plans came to naught with the arrival at Norala in the summer of 1965 of a certain group called the Esquires and their then unknown lead-singer, Percy Sledge ("When A Man Loves A Woman").
1966 could definitely be called Percy Sledge Year as far as Quin Ivy’s still-fledgling Norala studio was concerned. The record was a genuine phenomenon by any market standards of the time. This was 1966 and segregation in the land and therefore on radio too was still to be found most everywhere, especially in the South. As a result, very few recordings by black artists ever got enough play on ‘white’ stations to cross over into the Hot 100 pop charts, let alone get to the very top of them! With the final version of the recording being cut at Norala on 17th February, it would enter the national pop chart only some seven weeks later on 9th April where it would reside for nearly 3 months, spending two weeks at the very pinnacle of the pop pile. It would spend 16 weeks on the national R&B chart too, four of these at No.1. What’s more, it was a true international hit as well, charting in many countries around the world, with the record entering the significant UK chart as early as May and spending 17 weeks there, peaking at No.4 – and remember this chart was only a Top 50 back then so very few singles achieved such a degree of longevity. Of course, there would also be massive re-issue sales in the decades ahead but its mid-1966 sales alone gave Atlantic their first-ever gold record for a 45, awarded as early as 15 July that year.
Of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd plays a big part in the legacy of the Swampers and we should briefly fill in some more details about their visit to Quinvy in the fall of 1970.
By October 1970, Skynyrd, originally from Jacksonville Florida, had been together for five years and had already played nearly a thousand gigs. They had a manager, who just happened to be Alan Walden and Alan, as we have seen, was a long-term associate of Quin’s.
Jimmy Johnson maintains it was he whom Alan first contacted and he who got Quin and David Johnson to cut some Skynyrd demos at Quinvy. He even has a You Tube video about this. However, it is important to note that both David Johnson and Quin Ivy himself completely refute this claim.
Quin Ivy says: "I owned the first recording contract on Skynyrd and subsequently sold my rights to Jimmy Johnson for about $3,500 of studio time we had on the books. (Jimmy) Johnson's story of sending them to me to do 'demos' is total bullshit." David Johnson adds: "I first produced the band for Quin (at Quinvy) and then 'shopped' their recordings around for some months. It was only after I (was unable) to get them a deal that Alan Walden finally played the Skynyrd demos to Jimmy Johnson and only then that Muscle Shoals Sound got involved."
Johnson was especially taken with both the group’s guitar work and Ronnie Van Zant’s voice on the Quinvy demos and he believed enough in them to offer to produce an album's worth of material for nothing but a producer's percentage, although these recordings would, in fact, take place not at Quinvy but at Johnson & co’s Muscle Shoals Sound studio ‘up the hill’. Jimmy Johnson and production partner Tim Smith virtually taught the band how to record and Ronnie Van Zant would later emphasize the group's debt to the Muscle Shoals crew for everything they learned, affectionately immortalizing them as ‘The Swampers’ in the lyrics to the group’s classic country-rock hit "Sweet Home Alabama."
Back at Quinvy in the early 70’s, despite all of Quin’s best endeavors, the hits would not materialize for the studio and Ivy himself was fast coming to the conclusion that this lack of ‘current’ commercial success meant that all his eggs were going to remain firmly in the Sledge basket, a basket which, rather than eggs, now probably contained more dollar bills emanating from Quin’s production/managerial role in overseeing Percy’s live appearances than from the singer’s actual record sales. Perhaps then, in hindsight, it was no real surprise when, probably in late-1973, Quin finally decided to throw in the ‘musical’ towel, selling his studio to his faithful producer/engineer David Johnson, who promptly renamed it Broadway Sound. However, the story of Broadway Sound deserves a full assessment in its own right and is not part of the Norala/Quinvy story. Having sold his studio, Ivy said a complete goodbye to the music industry and soon departed for Ole Miss where he eventually obtained an accounting degree. With this to fall back on, in 1980 he began a teaching career at the University of North Alabama, one which would last until his retirement in 1996.
—-Tim
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