According to Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 500 Songs, “Mustang Sally” nearly ended up on the studio floor – literally. After Pickett finished his final take at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the tape suddenly flew off the reel and broke into pieces. But the session engineer, the legendary Tom Dowd, calmly cleared the room and told everyone to come back in half an hour. Dowd pieced the tape back together and saved what became one of the funkiest soul anthems of the ’60s.”
Spooner Oldham, who is one of the top Muscle Shoals musicians, played the keyboard on this song. The keyboards are one of the most distinctive parts of the song, but they weren’t on the demo – Spooner had to create the part so he could play on the record (and get paid).
I was sitting on a stool, and we listened to a demo of Sir Mack Rice who wrote the song, and the first thing I noticed was there was no keyboard on that record. But I’m here, I want the job – what am I going to do that will work within that song? And I just closed eyes for a second, daydreaming, and said, ‘I wonder what it would sound like if I pretended I was a Harley Davidson motorcycle and was driving through the studio, what would that sound like?’ There’s a little pause in that record where there’s not much going on, and I do rorp-rorp-rorp kind of revving engine thing. And Jerry Wexler liked it, because he later tried to get me to do it again when I was in New York. Of course, I didn’t, it was specific for that song.
Although Wilson Pickett’s version might be the most famous, he did not write the song. “Sir” Mack Rice wrote and recorded the song in 1965, a year before Pickett rode it up the charts. Born Bonnie Rice in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1933, Sir Mack Rice emerged as an R&B/blues vocalist and songwriter in Detroit during the 1950’s, first as a member of the Five Scalders and then as a member of the Falcons from 1957-63, a group whose members included Eddie Floyd, Joe Stubbs, and Wilson Pickett.
In 1963, The Falcons broke up, and in 1965, Rice wrote a song called “Mustang Mama” after visiting his friend, the actress/singer Della Reese, in New York City. Reese told him that she was thinking about buying her drummer Calvin Shields a new Lincoln for his birthday, which Rice, being from Detroit, thought was a great idea. When he mentioned this to Shields, the drummer replied, “I don’t want a Lincoln, I want a Mustang.”
As Rice explained on the 2007 Rhythm & Blues Cruise, he had never heard of a Mustang before, but Shields filled him in. They went for a drive and saw a billboard for a Mustang – Rice couldn’t believe Shields wanted such a small car instead of a big ol’ Lincoln. When he returned to Detroit, Rice started writing the song as “Mustang Mama,” with the chorus “ride, Sally, ride.” His publisher knew Aretha Franklin well, and brought Rice by her house, and he sang some of the song for her. Aretha suggested he change the title to “Mustang Sally” to better suit the chorus.
Rice got part of the chorus from the children’s game song (recorded by various artists) “Little Sally Walker,” versions of which include the lyrics “Ride Sally ride, wipe your weepin’ eyes”, with variations. His variation goes, “All you wanna do is ride around, Sally/Ride, Sally, ride/One of these early mornings/You’re gonna be wipin’ your weepin’ eyes.”
In May of 1965 Bonny Rice released his original version of this song as Sir Mack Rice, and it hit the R&B charts, peaking at #15.
Wilson Pickett came across the song when Rice was booked to play at The Apollo theater, and the headliner Clyde McPhatter didn’t show. Rice called his old bandmate Pickett, who performed in McPhatter’s place. When Pickett heard Rice perform “Mustang Sally,” he decided to record it himself. His version hit the R&B and Pop charts a year and a half after Rice originally recorded the song.
Before Pickett had a chance to do so, The Young Rascals (Good Lovin, Groovin’) released their version on March 28, 1966 on their album “The Young Rascals”.
In the liner notes for The Rascals Anthology, Felix Cavaliere states that The Young Rascals recorded “Mustang Sally” and “Land of a Thousand Dances” before Pickett and that Atlantic Records “copped those two songs from them and gave them to Pickett” to record.
In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Wilson Pickett’s recording of the song at #434 on a list of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
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