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Roger Hawkins obituary

<span>Photograph: House Of Fame/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: House Of Fame/Getty Images

The American drummer Roger Hawkins was never a flashy performer. Playing his part on such hit records as Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You), Respect and I Say a Little Prayer, Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman, Wilson Pickett’s Mustang Sally and the Staple Singers’ Respect Yourself, he simply found the essential groove of a song and made it stick. That instinct made Hawkins, who has died aged 75, particularly prized by singers and record producers who knew that he would find a way of making their great song even greater.

The voices on those timeless classics were those of African Americans. Hawkins was a young white man from the Deep South, as were his fellows in what became known as one of the finest rhythm sections of the 1960s and 70s, based in the small Alabama town of Muscle Shoals. But their feeling for black music was immaculate, their authenticity beyond question.

In the words of Jerry Wexler, Franklin’s producer: “White southern musicians – unlike their British counterparts, who learned the blues off records – lived the blues themselves, saw them, tasted them, were rooted in the same soil as their black teachers.”

None of them could read music. Instead they worked out a system of numbering conventional chords, from 1 to 6, which could be applied to any key. They would experiment with a song until an arrangement emerged, featuring riffs and turnarounds that, as with the work of their counterparts at Stax in Memphis and Motown in Detroit, would often turn out to be a vital element of the record’s appeal.

Roger Hawkins, second left, on tour with Traffic in the early 1970s.
Roger Hawkins, second left, on tour with Traffic in the early 1970s. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Hawkins’s contribution could be both subtle and indelible. At the climax of When a Man Loves a Woman (1966), he tipped Sledge’s emotion-racked voice into the final chorus with a syncopated pick-up that provided an exact parallel for the experience the singer was trying to convey.

He could drive a song like Respect (1967) with the necessary vigour, but the lightness of touch evident on I Say a Little Prayer (1968), where he cruised through the single 3/4 bar thrown into the chorus of a 4/4 song, was his creative trademark. For Respect Yourself (1971), another drummer might have come up with a funky, bottom-heavy beat. The more imaginative Hawkins devised a reggae-influenced combination of ticking hi-hat and snare-drum rimshots that gave the song an irresistible momentum.

Born in Mishawaka, Indiana, Hawkins was raised in Greenhill, Alabama, by his parents, Merta (nee Haddock), who worked in a knitting mill, and John Hawkins, a shoe-shop manager. At 13 he was given his first drum kit and was soon playing country music in a band with his friends. But if country music was what white boys were supposed to play, they were paying greater attention to the more invigorating sounds of the rhythm and blues records being played on the radio by Wolfman Jack and other disc jockeys. Soon Hawkins would be a member of the R&B-slanted Del Rays, with the guitarist Jimmy Johnson, and the singer Dan Penn’s band the Pallbearers, along with Penn’s songwriting partner, the pianist Spooner Oldham.

When a Man Loves a Woman, recorded in 1965 on rudimentary two-track equipment, was the first big hit on which Hawkins played. Regular recording work started to come his way at the producer Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. There he, Johnson, the pianist Barry Beckett and the bass guitarist David Hood formed a core rhythm section soon in great demand for the hit-making qualities in evidence on James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet (1966) and Etta James’s Tell Mama (1967).

Among those who influenced Hawkins’ playing was Al Jackson Jr, the drummer with Booker T and the MGs in nearby Memphis. From Jackson’s work he learned how to tailor his playing to a song with a care also applied to the tuning of his drums, which he adjusted to suit the singer’s voice. For him, the key was not in his playing but in his listening. “I was always a better listener than I was a drummer,” he said in an interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “I would advise any drummer to become a listener.”

In 1969, looking for a greater share of the rewards than the $10,000 a year Hall was prepared to pay each of them, he and his three main colleagues built their own studios, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former casket factory and undertaker’s showroom in the nearby town of Sheffield.

Its address, 3614 Jackson Highway, would become the title of a 1969 album by Cher, one of many stars who eagerly made their way to the single-storey concrete building, hoping that some of the magic would rub off. After Boz Scaggs’ Loan Me a Dime (1969) won critical acclaim, Paul Simon’s Loves Me Like a Rock (1973), Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It (recorded in 1975) and Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll (1979) were among the studio’s big hits. In 1973 the English rock band Traffic recorded with Hawkins, Hood and Beckett before taking them on the road for a rare taste of life outside the studio.

Muscle Shoals Sound moved to new premises in 1979, but the original building is now a tourist attraction listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A documentary titled Muscle Shoals, in which the musicians told their story, was released in 2013.

Hawkins is survived by his wife, Brenda, whom he married in 2002, and a son, Dale, and two grandchildren.

• Roger Hawkins, drummer, born 16 October 1945; died 20 May 2021