Tune Records

TUNE RECORDS

123 E. Alabama Ave., Florence, AL

Tune Records and Publishing Company was established in 1956 by James Joiner, Walter Stovall, Kelso Herston and Marvin Wilson. Joiner and Herston ran Tune out of the Joiner family’s Greyhound bus station. Inspired by Dexter Johnson, they set up a modest demo studio in the bus station diner, using an adjoining office as a control room.

“We started at the bus station and then moved over [to] the Ryan Piano Company on Court Street," Herston later recalled. "There were some lawyers there and they complained, so we moved to the Ritz Theater in Sheffield and also did some recordings at local radio station WLAY.”

Tune Records and Publishing Company was established in 1956 by James Joiner, Walter Stovall, Kelso Herston and Marvin Wilson. Joiner and Herston ran Tune out of the Joiner family’s Greyhound bus station. Inspired by Dexter Johnson, they set up a modest demo studio in the bus station diner, using an adjoining office as a control room.

“We started at the bus station and then moved over [to] the Ryan Piano Company on Court Street," Herston later recalled. "There were some lawyers there and they complained, so we moved to the Ritz Theater in Sheffield and also did some recordings at local radio station WLAY.”

One song recorded at WLAY was “A Fallen Star,” written by Joiner, published by Tune, and performed by local high school student Bobby Denton. The recording “was probably the first master tape in Alabama to actually be stamped and sold,” according to Janice Hume of the Times Daily. It became a regional hit in 1957 and was subsequently recorded by a number of other artists, including Ferlin Husky, Jimmy C. Newman, Nick Noble, and the Hilltoppers.

Following the success of “A Fallen Star,” word of the burgeoning Shoals recording industry spread across the state, attracting a number of aspiring songwriters and musicians to the area. Among them were Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill of Hamilton-based band The Fairlaines, who began making weekly trips to the Shoals to pitch their material to Joiner. One of their Tune-published songs, “Sweet and Innocent,” was recorded by Roy Orbison in 1958, and later recorded with greater success (and with Hall as producer) by Donny Osmond.

“The recording session was done in about an hour or two using three musical instruments and a local gospel quartet for backup. Of course, we didn’t have the equipment to overdub mistakes, so the complete song had to be recorded all at the same time... Also, the engineer who was the radio station disc jockey... had to do his work and carry on the regular programming of the station at the same time... He had to play an extra long record in order to oversee the two minutes and fifty-one second record we were recording.”
          —Bobby Denton

Following the success of “A Fallen Star,” word of the burgeoning Shoals recording industry spread across the state, attracting a number of aspiring songwriters and musicians to the area. Among them were Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill of Hamilton-based band The Fairlaines, who began making weekly trips to the Shoals to pitch their material to Joiner. One of their Tune-published songs, “Sweet and Innocent,” was recorded by Roy Orbison in 1958, and later recorded with greater success (and with Hall as producer) by Donny Osmond.

Tune also released four singles by rockabilly pioneer Junior Thompson, including “How Come You Do Me?” James Joiner never managed to replicate the success of “A Fallen Star,” however, and by the mid-1960s he had returned to the family bus business full-time. In 1959, he introduced Hall and Sherrill to a “local bohemian type” named Tom Stafford, setting the stage for the next chapter in Muscle Shoals music history.

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Personnel

Owners:
• James Joiner
• Kelso Herston
• Walter Stovall
• Marvin Wilson

Writers:
• James Joiner
• Marlin Greene

Rick Hall
• Billy Sherrill
Peanutt Montgomery
• Carl Montgomery

Musicians:
David Briggs (keyboards)


Discography

 1956:
• Junior Thompson, “Who's Knocking?”

 1957:
• Bobby Denton, “A Fallen Star”
• Bobby Denton, “Lover's Paradise”
• Marlin Greene, “Wishful Thinking

 1959:
• Bob Alexander and the Coaxials, “Treehouse”
• Doug Bowles, “Oh Me, Oh My”

 1960:
• Doug Bowles, “Shake Loose”
• Leon Bass, “Love-A-Rama”
• Johnny Denton, “At Night”

 1961:
• The Bobolinks, “Message from Me”
• Betty Marie and the Bobolinks, “One Little Wish”
• Piney Brown, “I'm Traveling”

 1962:
• Johnny Cook and the Hy-Lites, “Please Don't Say Goodbye”
• Van Howard, “You Make My World Go 'Round”

 1963:
• Lynn Cramer, “Go Find a New Love”


Sources:

Christopher S. Fuqua, Music Fell on Alabama (Huntsville: Honeysuckle Imprint, 1991).

Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015).

Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Richard Younger, Get a Shot of Rhythm and Blues: The Arthur Alexander Story (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000).

Christopher Reali, “Helping Pave the Road to FAME: Behind the Music of Muscle Shoals,” Southern Cultures 21, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 53-74.

Janice Hume, Times Daily, May 21, 1982.

Terry Pace and Robert Palmer, Times Daily, August 1, 1999.