It is mid-June, 2024, 7:17pm. I am sitting outside the house, listening to my sweetie DJ'ing records out his bedroom window.  We are experiencing a heat wave this week, but the temperature finally dropped enough to sit outside for longer than 5 minutes.

"Slip Away" by Clarence Carter  started spinning on the record and I just sat there enjoying it, not realizing until the song's end that I had started crying.  It wasn't anguish though, it was more like that sweet cry you have sometimes when you remember a bittersweet memory? (I don't really have words for this feeling but I know you know what I'm talking about.)

One of my favorite music documentaries came to mind, 2013's Muscle Shoals.  I knew that Clarence Carter song was recorded in Muscle Shoals because it was featured in that film.  The film gives the history of the "Muscle Shoals sound", a magical and hard-to-describe quality that many hit records from the area possessed.  The beginning of the documentary briefly describes how that geographic region is along the Tennessee River, where Indigenous people described the river as "singing". Here's some interesting info I found on the internet. Each passage is linked to its source website!

"Some of the Indians believed that the spirit of a goddess lived in the loud, rushing waters of Muscle Shoals. This legend could have originated in the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, or Koasatis Indian tribes. In another version of this myth, the Yuchi tribe said that the sound of the Shoals was the voice of a woman. The mysterious woman sang sweetly when the water was low and trickled calmly over the rocks and waterfalls, but roared in fury when the river rushed violently over the Shoals."

 "The area of Muscle Shoals was a part of the historic Cherokee hunting grounds dating to at least the early eighteenth century, if not earlier. Many Cherokee fought against the rebels during the late American Revolutionary War, hoping to expel them from their territories.

After the Revolution, Cherokee attitudes toward the new U.S. republic were divided, as settlers increasingly encroached on their territory. An anti-American faction, dubbed the Chickamauga, separated from more conciliatory Cherokees, and moved into present-day south-central and southeastern Tennessee. Most of this band settled along the Chickamauga Creek, from which their name was derived. They claimed Muscle Shoals as part of their domain. When Anglo-Americans attempted to settle the region in the 1780s and 1790s, the Chickamaugas bitterly resisted them.

The Upper Creek, residing in what is now north and central Alabama, also resented any European or Euro-American presence in the region. A major incident occurred in 1790, when U.S. President George Washington sent an expedition under Major John Doughty in an attempt to establish a fort and trading post at Muscle Shoals. This expedition was nearly annihilated by a Chickamauga and Creek party sent to destroy it, and the administration abandoned the project."

"Indians first inhabited the lands bordered by the Tennessee River that we call the Shoals area today.  No one knows when the name Muscle Shoals was first used for this area, however, there are many theories of where the name originated.  One theory is that at one time there were piles of mussel shells found along the shoals in the Tennessee River.  Another theory is that the shape of the river looks like the muscle in a man’s arm, therefore, Muscle Shoals.  The last theory comes from several booklets that were published before Muscle Shoals incorporated.  This theory states: “Muscle Shoals, the Niagara of the South, derives its name from the Indians, who, attempting to navigate upstream, found the task almost impossible because of the strong current.”  Thus came the word muscle, symbolic of the strength required to “paddle a canoe up the rapids.” 

That particular part of the Tennessee river is described as "treacherous", "an area of dangerous shallows and turbulent currents, impeding commerce and navigation".

This is why when the region became colonized, it was hard putting up a dam (but eventually they built the Wilson Dam in 1924).

"The difference between the white settlers’ reactions to the Muscle Shoals and the Indians’ reaction to it could not be more different. From the beginning, the white settlers saw the Shoals as a wild and dangerous beast that needed to be tamed. The Indians, while likely struggling with the dangers the Shoals posed as much as the white settlers did, saw them as a mysterious force of nature to be revered and respected."

I'm in awe of this powerful river and the powerful people who tried to protect it.  It's like this river girl just wants to sing and these colonizers tried to silence her, when her natural power just needs to be acknowledged and respected! Thinking about the river's currents being so strong there and the history of the strong resistance of the Chickamauga people, I am not surprised at all that so many hit singles came out of FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio within the last century!

For me personally, music has always been most closely related to the act of resistance (when compared to other art forms), but I am unsure why. I use the word "resistance" with as much intention as I am capable of in this moment.  I am specifically referring to the act of fighting back against opposing forces that are intent on your destruction.  It is not a state of being that people *like* finding themselves in obviously, since it implies so much tragedy, injustice and death.  Yet it is necessary to survival, so it is just as natural to engage in it as it is for a river to have an unusually strong current.

I don't know why these things feel so inextricably linked but it seems like many others feel the same. (WHO ELSE IS DOING BATTLE WITH THEIR EMOTIONS EVERY TIME THEY HEAR A GOOD SONG UNTIL YOU FINALLY GRANT YOURSELF THE SWEET RELEASE??) Why is music related to water related to resistance?  It makes sense to me, but not in a verbal language that I could express in text.

Sincerely hoping I can visit that place one day, in real life or in a dream, I will literally take either!

"At Painted Bluff, in northeast Alabama, painted glyphs dating to ca. 1400 A.D. have been discovered among cliffs overlooking the river." (Totally wondering what they were singing then and why)