Terry Woodford
TERRY WOODFORD
Terry Woodford is a Shoals-based songwriter, producer, publisher, engineer, recording artist, author, and music consultant. He started singing at age six and developed an interest in recording around the same time, thanks to his musician grandfather, who owned a primitive wire recorder. During his high school years, he formed a band called The Mystics with friends Larry Hamby and David Hood. Their 1963 single “Where Is My Little Girl,” one of the earliest recordings made at Rick Hall’s FAME Studios, became a regional hit, helping Woodford (the song’s co-writer) pay his way through college.
After graduating from Auburn with a degree in textile engineering, Woodford accepted an invitation from the newly opened Muscle Shoals Sound Studio to head up their music publishing department. “Because I had that engineering background, I decided I would study all the hits,” Woodford recalls. “I looked at the chart records, listened to them, and I realized there were about fifty things that all hit songs seemed to have in common… So that is what I taught the songwriters, and it worked.”
In 1972, Woodford left Muscle Shoals Sound and teamed up with former FAME session pianist Clayton Ivey to form the independent production company Wishbone. The pair released their first full-length album production, Reuben Howell’s self-titled debut, in April 1973. The following year, the pair got their big break when they signed an exclusive production arrangement with Howell’s label, Motown Records. "We were their first white producers," Woodford remembers. "We had an apartment in California, they gave us an office, and we could actually sign talent to Motown."
Wishbone ended its ties with Motown in 1976 and built its own studio on Webster Avenue, across from the Muscle Shoals airport. It was a state-of-the-art facility at the time, boasting the first 24-track recorder in the Shoals area.
“We built the recording studio not so much as a rental studio. We built it for our own productions, and to develop our own songwriters and to do demos. If you’re going to be an independent production company, you’re going to have to have access to great songs. And if you’re relatively new producers, and you don’t have a tremendous track record, big publishers aren’t going to bring you the great songs... I still had my principles that I’d learned from studying hit songs. So I figured if I could get some songwriters that really have a lot of potential, and teach them these guidelines to go by, we’ll really get great songs. So unlike Muscle Shoals Sound, which had the big artists coming in, we used it to speculate on artists. We’d use our own money, and we’d find a singer. We speculated on 23 artists and we got record deals for 19 of them. And a lot of the reason for that was because we had great songs. And we had great musicians, of course, playing on the records.”
Among the successful local songwriters who honed their craft at Wishbone were Mac McAnally and Robert Byrne. Woodford and Ivey themselves co-wrote (with staff songwriter Tommy Brasfield) the Wishbone-recorded hit “Angel in Your Arms,” which was named Billboard magazine's “Song of the Year” in 1977.