In this issue, we invite you to join contributing writer Bill Newcott on a 350 mile journey from Northern Alabama to Nashville to Memphis, tracing the history of American popular music (page 30). The first stop is Muscle Shoals, a sleepy Alabama river town that seems an unlikely locale for the world’s greatest recording artists, from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones, to have laid down some of their most memorable tracks.
The little secret
