Stars Fell on Alabama
A Summary
Logline: Stars Fell On Alabama chronicles the rise to fame of some of the greatest names in music history. W.C. Handy pioneered the blues. Big Mama Thornton, Lionel Hampton and Nat King Cole sang jazz with all their hearts. You aren’t a beach bum if you don’t know Jimmy Buffet songs, and you’ll get nowhere on the dance floor without help from Lionel Richie. Motown wouldn’t have been Motown without Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, The Temptations or The O’Jays; Rockabilly got a jumpstart from the Maddox Brothers & Rose; and the story of country music cannot be written without Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Tammy Wynette, Emmy Lou Harris, The Oak Ridge Boys, and the group named for the state where all this talent hails from: Alabama. Florence native Sam Phillips isn’t around to record how it all went down, so we will.
The story of American roots music simply cannot be told without an in-depth look at all the music greats that have come forth from Alabama. We use the broad label of “American roots music” because there are shining stars in every popular genre of our nation’s music that hail from the 22nd state in the Union. W.C. Handy is known as the “Father of the Blues” and Jimmie Rodgers, the “Father of Country Music”. That alone should tell you something.
One aspect of Alabama’s rich music history is a chapter known as “The Muscle Shoals Sound” that describes the rhythm and blues that emanated out from Sheffield, Tuscumbia and Florence in the state’s northwest region from artists like Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Clarence Carter. The contributions of the Fame Recording Studio from the 60s and 70s have been preserved as the lone documentary of substance in the state archive, but there remains the larger volume yet to be shared.
Stars Fell On Alabama was a popular jazz song popularized by Guy Lombardo and his Orchestra in 1934 on the heels of a book by the same name that described a spectacular meteor shower over the state 100 years earlier. It is a state song of Alabama and was once featured as a slogan on license plates, so it seems a perfect and fitting title for our multi-part docuseries on famous singers and musicians from Alabama. Covers of the song have been done by a veritable Who’s Who of singers from Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald to Frank Sinatra and Harry Connick Jr, but the most popular version belongs to Auburn University pre-law alumnus Jimmy Buffett.
Our multi-part docuseries will cover all the hit makers from W.C. Handy in the early 1900s all the way up to the present day. The project will be designed, first and foremost, for the burgeoning Video On Demand platforms of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple and others that have become huge consumers of content, feature films and documentaries alike. We will also offer a standard movie length edit designed for regular television, public broadcasting and DVD sales, as well as a short 15 minute highlight edit for state trade shows, tourism conventions and corporate real estate relocation packages. We fully expect the government of Alabama to add the Stars Fell On Alabama documentary into the state’s teaching curriculum and be a major supporter of our project.
We are reaching out to Tuskegee, Alabama natives Robin Roberts and Lionel Ritchie with an offer to host our series. Jimmy Buffet is another possibility that comes to mind.
The larger series will be broken down by genres and proceed chronologically, whereas the DVD edit will go year by year, all genres included. Our budget allows for the often costly licensing of quality audio and video components to supplement the narrative, and to that effort we will be contributing rare images, film and recordings from the historic Louisiana Hayride where Hank Williams and a host of other Alabama natives found fame.
Stars Fell On Alabama will fill a void in music history, both for the State of Alabama and the country at large. The project is multi-cultural in scope and portrayal, spanning as many ethnicities as genres of music. It will be painstakingly researched, thoughtfully assembled and edited, and extraordinarily presented. Baby Boomers to the current Generation Alpha will find commonality, entertainment value and pop culture trivia galore in this “Rest of the Story” style history lesson.
A partial list of artists to be profiled include the following, in no particular order:
W. C. Handy, the Delmore Brothers, Hank Williams Sr., Jimmy Buffett, Sonny James, the O’Jays, Lionel Richie, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Sam Phillips, the Louvin Brothers, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Martha Reeves, the Oak Ridge Boys, Eddie Floyd, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Brittany Howard, Odetta, Candi Staton, Gucci Mane, Chuck Leavell, Spooner Oldham, Wet Willie, Eddie Hinton, Emmy Lou Harris, Jimmie Rodgers, the Speer Family, Freddie Hart, Pinetop Smith, Big Mama Thornton, Zeke Clements, Nat King Cole, Gordon Terry, the Maddox Brothers & Rose, Vern Gosdin, Jason Isbell, Ray Sawyer, Ernie Ashworth, Sun Ra, Clarence Carter, Toni Tenille, Jim Nabors, Wayne Perkins, Dan Penn, George Butler, Ottokar Cadek, Willie King, Bobby Goldsboro, Jerry Wexler, Erskine Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, Eddie Levert, Shelby Lynne and, of course, Alabama.