Junior Lowe

JUNIOR LOWE

Albert S. Lowe, Jr., better known as Junior Lowe, is a songwriter, session musician and performer renowned for his contributions to recordings by Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Wilson Pickett, Little Richard and others. Born in Florence, Alabama, Lowe started playing music around age six, and had formed his first band with friend and guitarist Terry Thompson by the time he was twelve. Following the success of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On,” Rick Hall enlisted Lowe and Thompson as session musicians at his newly established FAME Studio in Muscle Shoals. It wasn’t long before Lowe had a million-selling hit under his belt with Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” recorded at Sheffield’s Norala Sound Studio.

In 1969, when Hood and the rest of Hall’s rhythm section (later known as “The Swampers”) left FAME to establish Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Lowe stayed behind as part of the Fame Gang, which backed music legends like Candi Staton and Clarence Carter, and released several singles under their own name.

Lowe left FAME in the early 1970s to focus on songwriting, with compositions recorded by Hank Williams, Jr., and others. During the 1990s, he toured the United States and Europe with Little Richard, who had recorded “Greenwood, Mississippi,” co-written by Lowe and Travis Wammack, during a session at FAME in 1970.