Gorgeous mural sums up Alabama music history, ‘what these people are and what they’ve done’

A heavenly choir sings in the clouds over a house where a white boy listens to a Black man playing guitar. Water pours from the spillways of a dam as the sun rises. And in the middle of it all a pair of hands rest folded across a red electric bass guitar.

There’s a lot going on in a new mural adorning the side of the Florence-Lauderdale Visitor Center in Florence’s McFarland Park. Completed earlier this year, the mural’s three panels showcase major pivot points that shaped the cultural history of the region. The first celebrates the early influences that led Sam Phillips to a revolutionary role in popular music. The dam represents the transformative impact of TVA. And the hands are those of a legend of the Shoals-area recording industry that boomed in the ‘60s and ‘70s and remains a magnet for artists to this day.

Much of this is laid out in three accompanying audio clips presented by the Florence-Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau. In one, Jerry Phillips, son of Sam Phillips, talks about his father learning music, and learning to listen, from an African-American sharecropper, Silas Paine. He tells the story of his father stopping in his tracks to listen to the music coming out of an African-American church.

In another, Halley Phillips, granddaughter of Sam Phillips, tells the story of the creation of Wilson Dam. In the third, Rodney Hall, son of FAME studio owner Rick Hall, draws a line from the dam to the rise of the Shoals recording industry.

A conversation with artist Scott Campbell reveals that there’s even more going on under the surface. Trying to sum up the cultural history of a diverse region, with four cities spread across two counties, comes with a certain pitfall risk. For outsiders, it’s very easy to lump the four municipalities together as the Quad Cities or as “the Shoals.” But Florence, Tuscumbia, Sheffield and Muscle Shoals each have their own local identities and their own sense of pride. Florence is in Lauderdale County, the others are in Colbert County. He didn’t want his art to be divisive or leave anyone feeling left out.

Fortunately, he had a lot of history of his own to draw on, including images he’d been developing, in some cases, for decades.

Campbell said that as a kid, he was entranced by the hand-drawn movie posters created by the legendary Bob Peak. He speaks fondly of such influences as being part of “the world before Photoshop.”

“I’m more of an illustrator at heart,” he said. “That’s what I grew up looking at. And since I was 10, that’s all I ever wanted to do.”

He had plans to pursue a formal education in art, but he didn’t like the technology that began reshaping commercial art in the ‘80s. So he headed for the Florida Panhandle and spent years illustrating T-shirts, in some cases for major entertainment companies.

“Photoshop hit the world and I grabbed my airbrush and went to the beach and was gonna wait for the computer to die out,” he said. “Of course, it never did.”

Later, he returned to northwest Alabama. He’d begun to be fascinated by the potential of murals: He was interested by the work Dothan had begun doing, using them to highlight aspects of the region’s culture and to provide a focal point for tourism. He began developing mural concepts for the Shoals area, but the idea didn’t get any traction.

Years passed. Then he stumbled into the opportunity to do a train mural in Sheffield. That seemed to open some eyes, he said.

There are hopes that the new mural will be the first in a series throughout northwest Alabama. Rob Carnegie, president and CEO of the Florence-Lauderdale CVB, said discussions have already started on a second one, to be located in Rogersville. Campbell said he envisions as many as seven.

As the series grows, he said the imagery may become more specific. For example, one might focus purely on Native American history in the area, particularly the Trail of Tears. Another might pay tribute to W.C. Handy. For the first, though, he felt he had to be both general and specific.

That’s one reason the water of the “singing river” serves as a through-line, rising from the left edge of that bass guitar to the spillways at right. He also said he was heavily influenced by the concept of session players “serving the song” rather than showing off.

Another key insight came from an acquaintance named Brad Guin, a farmer and a musician.

“He made the comment that in a farming area, during hard times, everybody comes together for each other,” Campbell said. “This guy’s farm over here is struggling and this guy’s farm over here is doing well and you kind of reach across and help. It becomes a big community trying to develop a life out of the dirt around this river. And he said, we approached our music the same way we approached life and that was, you know, you serve the song … it was very selfless, very community-driven.”

Even when it came to representing the legacy of the area’s most famous studio musicians, Campbell said he wanted to be specific without being too specific. His solution was to show hands rather than a face – but the hands absolutely are those of David Hood, the last surviving member of the legendary studio band known as the Swampers.

“If you look at the music that came out of the ‘60s and the ‘70s and a lot of it was recorded, the rhythm section is what really anchored some of the sound,” he said. “You didn’t really have some of that lead playing. Oh, you know, [drummer Roger] Hawkins and, and Hood, I mean, these two right here created that sound. I don’t wanna take anything away from anybody else. Everybody had their piece, and their little bit of brilliance in it. But man, that rhythm section was everything.”

“David is kind of the heart, you know, we’ve lost everybody else,” Campbell said. “I had access to him to say, ‘Hey, David, will you pose with your bass?’ Because I wanted it to be his bass. I wanted it to be his hands.”

This brings in a funny twist. Campbell’s quest for accuracy led him to include a detail that onlookers may think is a mistake.

“The other thing is, and we get calls on this too, is the wedding band,” Campbell said. “He always wore it on the wrong hand. So people call and say, ‘Do you know the artist put the ring on the wrong finger?’ That’s David’s thing. He always wears it on the right hand. But they asked enough that made me go back to my pictures to make sure I didn’t do it ‘cause I thought maybe the picture got inverted somehow.”

Campbell has been involved with a series of “Muscle Shoals Meets” concerts, held at the Shoals Theatre in Florence, that have raised tens of thousands of dollars for local nonprofits. For one of the, “Muscle Shoals Meets the Swampers,” Campbell collaborated with one of the organizers, Russell Mefford, on a book titled “Muscle Shoals: This Little Place We Call Home.” The high-quality little hardback is packed with information on the songs chosen to epitomize Shoals history; the artists who played them; photos from the shows; and many of Campbell’s related illustrations.

Again, it shows that the mural was, for him, a culmination of ideas he’d been developing for ages. There’s a sketch of a Sam Phillips mural that was considered by Graceland years ago. There are other panels done for a now-defunct area restaurant: Phillips at Sun Records, Hood and the other Swampers at work.

Campbell said he’ll approach future murals the same way he did this one. First he’ll do a definitive painting, using the proportions of the wall where the mural will go. That’ll become the basis of an official print. (Prints of the first mural can be purchased at the Visitor Center. They’re $25 for the regular version, $50 for a limited edition signed by Campbell.)

The painting isn’t an absolutely ironclad template for the mural itself: Rather than project the image, Campbell prefers to start with a grid and freehand the mural image. A keen eye may spot some differences between the print and the mural.

“The idea on a piece of paper becomes something totally different than you get [from] 15 feet up in the air,” he said.

He has big ambitions for the series, he said: “What we want to do is show everything.” He talks about the way art changes with the times, about deeper influences. He mentions Rembrandt finding the beauty in peasants rather than in nobility. He talks about Charles Wesley using music to teach theology to a largely illiterate audience. He talks about “an old Dutch theologian,” Abraham Kuiper, and his views on the value of art.

Rest assured, the next mural will be a little more down-to-earth than all that.

“All I care about is putting a piece of an image of something to put a face to what these people are and what they’ve done,” he said. “And look at our community, look at the world that we live in here, look at what makes The Shoals The Shoals.

“And it dances back and forth across that river,” he said. “You know, it’s not just one place. It’s the whole place we need.”

(Note: The book Muscle Shoals: This Little Place We Call Home,” can be found at Mefford Jewelers in Florence. The next concert in the “Muscle Shoals Meets:” series is “Muscle Shoals Meets the ‘80s;” it’ll take place this summer; ticket also are available through Mefford Jewelers. Scott Campbell says he gave up social media several years ago and does not maintain an online presence for his art. For more information, he said, “come here and ask a few people” where to find him.)