Jimmy Johnson, session guitarist, producer and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio co-founder, has died aged 76.
His death was announced on his son Jay’s Facebook page. “He is gone,” Jay wrote. “Playing with the angels now.”
One of the four members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, known as “the Swampers”, Johnson worked with Roger Hawkins, David Hood and Barry Beckett as the go-to band for Alabama’s FAME Studios. They played on records by Wilson Pickett, Leon Russell, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Bobby Womack, and Aretha Franklin‘s “Respect”.
The four musicians opened Muscle Shoals in 1969, where they would record albums by some of the most revered artists in history.
“I guess you’d say my inspiration was Chuck Berry,” Johnson said in an interview earlier this year. “My parents always tried to get me to play country music, and I just didn’t like it that much.”
“The mighty Jimmy Johnson has passed,” Jason Isbell, who grew up in the Shoals area, wrote on Twitter. “A lot of my favourite music wouldn’t exist without him.”
