SHENANDOAH
Official Page
GENESIS
In the beginning…we were just a bar band in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and working at Fame recording studio during the day trying to make a mark in the music business. This is the story of how we all got together and ended up being ‘Shenandoah.
In September of 1984, there was a club here in Muscle Shoals called the MGM club that’s house band was about to be replaced. The club owner, Ken Murray, in whom we are deeply grateful, had found Jim Seales playing in a bar just down the street and told him he wanted to hire him but that he was about to replace his current band and wanted Jim to stay on as the guitar player. Jim had just moved down from Moline, IL to be a studio player at FAME recording studio. So he went down and played for a couple of weeks with those guys while the new band was being put together on the side.
The old MGM club where Shenandoah started out. I’s a Mexican restaurant now called ‘Fiesta Mexicana
The MGM club had actually opened a few years earlier with a guy named Eddie Moore as the leader of the house band. Business had been good, but after a couple of years, Eddie had left and business had gone down. So it was he that Ken Murray called to come back and put a band together to replace these other guys and hopefully rebuild business back to what it was when it first opened.
I (Mike) had played a couple of weekend gigs with Eddie a few years earlier so it was me that Eddie called to play drums. Next he called Stan Thorn from across the state line in Mississippi to play keyboards. To round things out, the bass player ended up being ‘Big Al’ Jones, another local musician.
After giving the other band the news that they were ‘out’, we got together for our first rehearsal. We had to come up with enough material to play for at least 5 or 6 hours so we had a lot of rehearsing to do. Keep in mind that most of us didn’t know each other at all. And we’d NEVER played together before.
Jim likes to tell the story of his first encounter with me. Jim says, “I was in the bathroom doing what you do in the bathroom, and Mike walks up beside me, look’s at me and the first words out of his mouth was, ‘You know what I hate about taking a crap? After you wipe your butt, you ALWAYS gotta look at the toilet paper….and you KNOW what’s on it. But still you gotta look at it.” Jim says the first thought that crossed his mind was, ‘WHAT in the world have I got myself into?’
So, we learned our songs and played together for almost 4 months before the club owner called Jim during the Christmas holidays and said he was making some changes . He was about to let Eddie (the singer) and ‘Big Al’ (the bass player) go, but that he wanted to keep Jim, me and Stan. He asked Jim to find replacements. Jim hadn’t been in the Shoals long enough to know many singers, but he had played with a guy named Sonny Swift months earlier. So it was Sonny he called and Sonny brought ‘Dumpy Joe’ Hamilton with him. ‘Dumpy Joe’ was Hank Jr.’s bass player for a long time so we were excited about having him n the band. But about all we got out of him was ‘Don’t Mess With My Toot-Toot’. He couldn’t sing much else. Come to think of it, he couldn’t sing that much either.
We played together for a little over a year until a new club opening up across town called wanting to hire us away from the MGM club. We all declined because Ken Murray had been good to us and liked us and we felt we had ‘job security’ (if you can have any of that in a nightclub). Anyway….in the end, they offered Sonny a LOT of money to come work over there and he just couldn’t turn the money down. It was sad to see him go, because we were all very close by this time. He did take ‘Dumpy Joy’ with him.
In September of 1986 we were back to ‘square one’. We needed a new singer. I had met Marty Raybon in Nashville working on ‘Printer’s Alley’ at a bar called ‘The Western Room’ a year or so earlier.
‘The Western Room’ on Printer’s Alley in Nashville where Marty Raybon was playing before he joined the guys with Shenandoah.
Marty was literally living on canned corn up there and just about to starve to death when my brother Bud befriended him and let him move in with him rent free in exchange for keeping the house clean. As a matter of fact Marty was about to move back home to Florida when they met because he were getting kicked out of his apartment because his room mate had taken the rent money and bought drugs with it.
So it was on my visits up to Nashville to hang out with Bud that I got to know Marty. As a matter of fact, the band Marty was playing with actually came down to Muscle Shoals before we started playing together and played in a neighboring club for a weekend. In their band was Brian Prout (Diamond Rio’s drummer) and John Marcus (Tim McGraw's bass player).
Knowing Marty already, I went over to their hotel to meet the guys in his band. I remember the conversation getting around to ‘lighting farts’..haha.. and they didn’t believe it could be done. Well being the crazy person I am sometimes, I laid down in the floor, hiked my rear end up in the air and out came the prettiest blue ball of fire you ever saw. We all laughed our butts off. (What is it about me and ‘first impressions’?) Anyway….when the job came open for a new lead singer, I called Marty to see if he wanted to work with us.
Pickwick Village Apartments where Marty and Mike lived in the beginning. Circled is the actual apartment where they lived.
All Marty needed to know was that it was ‘steady’work and that he could live with me in my apartment at Pickwick Village Apartments. That nailed down, it was time to find a bass player.
Ralph Ezell was the studio manager and played bass down at FAME so all of us knew him from there. Everybody worked down at FAME during the day writing and playing on song demos etc… Ralph moonlighted down at another club up the street called ‘Babe’s’(an all night joint) and having club experience we figured he was a logical choice. So all the sudden there were were, Marty, Jim, Ralph, Stan and me….SHENANDOAH… we just didn’t know it yet…
