Jerry Carrigan
Jerry Carrigan was a drummer from Florence, Alabama, who played in the first rhythm section at Rick Hall’s FAME Studio in Muscle Shoals and then spent three decades as a Nashville session player. He is the drummer on the Osborne Brothers’ “Rocky Top” (1967), and in 2019 the Musicians Hall of Fame inducted him with the original Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
He was born in Florence on September 13, 1943. Self-taught, he started playing at twelve and drummed in his junior high school band. As a teenager he played with the bassist Norbert Putnam and the pianist David Briggs in the Mark V, an R&B band that Carrigan’s father, Larry, booked into fraternity parties at the University of Alabama, Ole Miss and Auburn. The band’s repertoire of James Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ray Charles and Hank Ballard shaped his shuffle-based style.
Carrigan, Putnam and Briggs became the rhythm section for Rick Hall, and while still teenagers they helped create what came to be called the Muscle Shoals sound. Carrigan played on Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On,” recorded at FAME in 1961, and on Jimmy Hughes’s “Steal Away” (1964). He also drummed on Tommy Roe’s 1963 single “Everybody,” playing the bottom of his snare drum for a thicker sound. In February 1964 the three were part of the band backing Roe and other acts that opened the Beatles’ first American concert, in Washington, D.C.
He moved to Nashville in late 1964, a few months ahead of Putnam, and was soon working constantly; he later said he played on about ninety percent of the sessions at RCA in his first year there. Producers Owen Bradley, Chet Atkins, Billy Sherrill and Jerry Kennedy hired him, and he worked on Sherrill’s records with George Jones and Tammy Wynette as well as with Charlie Rich (“Mohair Sam,” 1965), Kris Kristofferson, Dolly Parton, John Denver and Elvis Presley. In country sessions he changed his shuffle to a triplet feel, and he favored a loose, deep-sounding snare that Sherrill liked; he described himself as the first drummer in Nashville to play a hard snare on country records. Nashville’s growth as a recording center also brought him work with Henry Mancini, Joan Baez, Al Hirt, Johnny Mathis and the Boston Pops.
His bluegrass sessions included two with the Osborne Brothers at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee: on September 30, 1966, for “The Kind of Woman I Got” and “One Kiss Away from Loneliness” on Modern Sounds of Bluegrass Music, and on November 16, 1967, for “Rocky Top” and “My Favorite Memory,” released together on Decca 32242. He was also one of the drummers on Cal Smith’s 1974 MCA sessions, which produced “It’s Time to Pay the Fiddler.”
In February 2009 the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum honored him in its “Nashville Cats” series, and in 2010 he was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. Carrigan died in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in June 2019, at the age of 75. That October the Musicians Hall of Fame inducted him, posthumously, with Briggs, Putnam and the rest of the original Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
