Not Fade Away
ROGER HAWKINS
The kid from FAME (1945-2021)
DRUMMER Roger Hawkins always insisted there was no great method to the Swampers’ unique sound, only their embrace of complete freedom. “Nobody really suggested anything to play; we would interpret it,” he explained to Modern Drummer. “Now that I look back at what we did, in addition to being musicians, we were really arrangers as well. It was up to us to come up with the part. That was the rule back then.”
Alongside guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood and keyboard player Barry Beckett, Hawkins was a member of the crack session team, also known as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, based at Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Alabama. The quartet backed a host of names on some of the most enduring soul and R&B classics of the ’60s, among them Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman”, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and “Chain Of Fools”, Wilson Pickett’s “Land Of 1,000 Dances” and “Mustang Sally” and Clarence Carter’s “Slip Away”.
Their reputation was such that work continued to pour in after the Swampers set up their own
