I cut it open and lifted the lid, and I sat right down on that open cab door, because inside that welded box was a reel of recording tape, a stack of photographs, and a spiral notebook full of dates and song titles in a working man hand.
The photographs about stopped my heart. They were studio pictures, old ones, a young Black man with a bass guitar in a room full of microphones and cable, and standing right there beside him in shot after shot were faces I knew. Faces everybody knows. Singers and players whose records I grew up on, whose songs came out of every radio in Alabama for fifty years. And the young man with the bass was in the middle of all of it, laughing, playing, part of it.
The notebook laid it out plain. His name was Clarence, and he had been a session man at the studios right here around Muscle Shoals, back in the days when this little town cut some of the biggest records in the world. He played bass on songs I could sing you every word of this minute. But he was a hired player, a sideman, and in those days the sidemen did not get their names on the record. The famous voices got the credit, and the sidemen got scale and went home. Clarence spent his whole life knowing he was on records the whole world loved and being able to prove it to just about nobody, so he kept his proof, the reel and the photos and the log of every session he ever played, welded up under the floor of his truck where no thief and no hard time could ever take it from him.
I was there. That is me you hear on the bottom of all those songs, holding it all down. I never needed my name on it to know I was there. But it would have been a fine thing, just once, to be able to show somebody.
I sat on that cab door and thought about a man driving a rusted-out Silverado around Muscle Shoals for years with the proof of a whole beautiful life welded up under his feet, and never once able to say to a fellow at the gas pump, that is me, that bass line right there, that is my two hands.
I took the reel and the photographs to the music heritage folks here in town, the ones who keep the story of what happened in these studios. And they knew him. The minute they saw the photos, an old engineer teared up and said the name Clarence like it was a prayer, said that man could play anybody in the room under the table and never got his due. They are putting him in the exhibit now. His photograph, his name, his bass, up on the wall with the greats he made sound so good, where every tourist who comes to see where the music was born will read his name and know he was there.
His own family did not fully know. His grandkids grew up on those same records, never knowing their granddad was the man playing the bass under them. They know now. That is his name up on that wall, kids. That is your grandfather, holding it all down, right in the middle of the best music this country ever made. He was there. Now everybody gets to know it.