Travis Wammack
TRAVIS WAMMACK
Travis Wammack, also known as “Snake Man” due to his passion for wrangling rattlesnakes, is a Shoals-based singer, songwriter, musician, and producer. Born in Walnut, Mississippi, he moved to Memphis with his parents when he was three years old, and started playing guitar at when he was eight. Growing up in the suburb of Binghampton, where his neighbors included the likes of Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, he caught the attention of Memphis disc jockey and promoter Eddie Bond. By the time he was ten, he was performing under the name Little Travis in Bond’s “jamboree” events, where he opened for such music legends as Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins.
Wammack was just twelve years old when he started cutting his own records, the earliest of which were engineered by Elvis Presley’s guitar player Scotty Moore. Then, as a teenager, he started playing sessions at Sonic Studios in Memphis. The studio’s owner, legendary Sun Records guitarist Roland James, produced Wammack’s recording of his original composition “Stratchy,” which became a major chart hit in 1964.
After stints at Hi Studios and American Studios (and a world tour with “British Invasion” duo Peter and Gordon), Wammack caught the attention of Rick Hall, who began flying him down to Muscle Shoals to play guitar on sessions at FAME Studios. Eventually, Wammack relocated to the Shoals full-time, and in 1969, when Hall’s rhythm section broke away to establish the rival Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Wammack was charged with filling the void. He enlisted the services of Memphis-based session players who would become fixtures on the Shoals music scene, including bassists Bob Wray and Jerry Masters. Meanwhile, Wammack himself contributed instrumentation to such iconic FAME tracks as Clarence Carter’s “Patches,” Bobby Gentry’s “Fancy,” and “One Bad Apple” by the Osmonds.
In addition to his contributions as a guitarist and bandleader, Wammack co-wrote “Greenwood, Mississippi,” recorded separately at FAME in 1970 by Little Richard and Tom Jones. (Wammack would later reunite with Richard, serving as the rock legend’s bandleader and arranger from 1984 to 1995.) He also resumed his career as a solo artist in 1972, when Rick Hall produced Wammack’s self-titled debut album and released it on the Fame Records label. Hall again produced Wammack on his 1975 follow-up, Not for Sale, which boasted two U.S. chart singles: “Love Being Your Fool” (#38) “Easy Evil” (#72).
“There was a horn player that summed it up pretty good… They asked him, ‘What is the difference between the Muscle Shoals sound and the Memphis sound?’ And he said, ‘150 miles.’ Basically, that’s what it is. It’s poor people. We didn’t go to school. We didn’t have the money to go to college. We’re self-taught. We play from the heart, not the chart. Maybe it’s in the water, I don’t know. It’s just southern players. They play different, and it’s just low-down and nasty. You can’t get that from going to school and college. It’s just one of them things."
—Travis Wammack