Music

Concert Review: Muscle Shoals | Low River Rising, Nashville, Nov. 14

Nov 20, 2025

NASHVILLE, TENN. — If music is a river, then Muscle Shoals sits squarely at the headwaters of southern soul, R&B, funk and rock. And even though most of the artists who pioneered that swampy, fertile ground are gone, their sound, their work and their legacies roll on.

On Friday night, they rolled into Nashville’s Country Music Hall Of Fame And Museum, where a crew of Muscle Shoals legends, lifers and leading lights staged the sold-out, soul-powered revue Low Rhythm Rising to celebrate the museum’s new exhibit of the same name — and to breathe new life into the music that made it possible.

Held in the museum’s woody, warm and welcoming CMA Theatre — a venue clearly designed for live performances, with pristine sound and great sightlines — the show featured a stellar cast, including Jimmy Hall, Tiera Kennedy, Bettye LaVette, Wendy Moten, Spooner Oldham, Dan Penn, Maggie Rose, Shenandoah, Candi Staton and John Paul White. Guitarist and latter-day Swamper Will McFarlane led a house band of Muscle Shoals ringers, including Mark Beckett (drums, and the son of Swampers keyboardist Barry Beckett), Mickey Buckins (percussion), Kelvin Holly ( guitar), Clayton Ivey (keys), Bob Wray (bass), Brad Guin, Steve Herrman, Jim Hoke and Charles Rose (horns) and Shoals Sisters Marie Lewey and Cindy Richardson-Walker (background vocals).

After some opening remarks by exhibit curator Michael Gray, McFarlane played host for the rest of the event, welcoming everyone to a night of music and community. He delivered on both counts. This wasn’t some tightly choreographed, fast-paced Nash Vegas extravaganza; it was more like a late-night lockdown jam at your local watering hole. The singers were relaxed and playful. The players were laid-back and in the pocket. And McFarlane was the perfect host, introducing the featured artists and his bandmates with southern hospitality, sharing stories and anecdotes about their careers and talents as if he were talking to you across the table.

The show kicked off with beloved singer-songwriter / overalls enthusiast Dan Penn, delivering impeccable renditions of his tender classics I’m Your Puppet (co-written with keyboard legend Spooner Oldham, deservedly lauded more often than anyone else onstage) and You Left The Water Running. It was just the start of a two-hour set that featured 19 timeless hits birthed at or linked to the legendary FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound studios in the ’60s and ’70s.

The highlight of the night for me was Bettye LaVette, who tore up Eddie Hinton’s I Still Want to Be Your Baby (Take Me Like I Am) and John Prine’s Souvenirs (after revealing she sang the song to him shortly before he died). There are few singers in this world who make me simultaneously grin like a fool and weep like a baby every time they open their mouth, and LaVette — who can convey a lifetime of love, loss, tragedy and triumph in a single note — is one of them. So getting to hear and see her kick up her heels (musically and literally) was all I needed to make my night complete.

But there was plenty more where that came from. Wendy Moten (pictured up top) had the unenviable task of covering two Aretha Franklin classics — Penn’s Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (which he hung around to watch) and her breakout hit I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) — and quite simply knocked it out of the damn park.

Live wire Jimmy Hall was in fine form, belting out Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman and tearing the roof off the sucker with Wilson Pickett’s Land Of 1000 Dances. Shenandoah worked the room like old pros on their hits Two Dozen Roses and The Church On Cumberland Road. Former Civil Wars member John Paul White kept it sweet and low with his renditions of Arthur Alexander‘s You Better Move On and Bob Seger’s We’ve Got Tonight, earning well-deserved praise from McFarlane for the purity of his pipes. Proudly informing everyone that she’s 85, Candi Staton proceeded to act like a woman half that age, dancing up a storm on her heaven-sent I’m Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin’). Tiera Kennedy injected soul into The Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses and the Etta James classic I’d Rather Go Blind. And recent Grammy nominee Maggie Rose — who graciously downplayed the accolade by noting she was in the same category as Mavis Staples, which was an even bigger honour — showed off her powerhouse pipes on The Staple Singers’ I’ll Take You There and Aretha’s Chain Of Fools.

Finally, everyone returned to the stage for show-closing singalongs on Pickett’s Mustang Sally and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Muscle Shoals-endorsing Sweet Home Alabama. In keeping with the freewheeling vibe of the night, they were endearingly loosey-goosey — energizer bunny Hall seemed to come perilously close to smacking into the tiny LaVette a couple of times, and the band accidentally wrapped up Sweet Home Alabama just as she was starting to sing. But no matter; it was still a night that no one will forget anytime soon. Simply put: They took us there. And made it clear that the Muscle Shoals Sound isn’t just a thing of the past, preserved in amber to be admired and revered; it’s a living, breathing entity filled with and driven by heart and soul, ready to roll on into the future.