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. 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).Īmong those who influenced Hawkins’ playing was Al Jackson Jr, the drummer with Booker T and the MGs in nearby Memphis. Regular recording work started to come his way at the producer Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals.
When a Man Loves a Woman, recorded in 1965 on rudimentary two-track equipment, was the first big hit on which Hawkins played. 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. 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. At 13 he was given his first drum kit and was soon playing country music in a band with his friends. The more imaginative Hawkins devised a reggae-influenced combination of ticking hi-hat and snare-drum rimshots that gave the song an irresistible momentum.īorn 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. For Respect Yourself (1971), another drummer might have come up with a funky, bottom-heavy beat. 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. 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. Hawkins’s contribution could be both subtle and indelible. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Roger Hawkins, second left, on tour with Traffic in the early 1970s.
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