Was the Apple Green, Red, or Just Bad?

The Osmonds and the Muscle Shoals Sound

It feels revelatory.

No, not The Osmonds and their 1971 smash hit, “One Bad Apple,” but the fact that they recorded it at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which, along with its sister studio The Muscle Shoals Sound, also produced such recording stars as The Staple Singers, The Rolling Stones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Cher, Rod Stewart, and Aretha Franklin.

As music historian Charles L. Hughes documents in his book, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (UNC Press 2015), The Osmonds’ first hit is actually part of, a product of,

“THE MUSCLE SHOALS SOUND.”

“‘One Bad Apple’ is a nearly perfect example of the larger racial and stylistic crisscrossing that the Muscle Shoals sound was meant to symbolize” (121).

Get this: the song was written by George Jackson, an African American who was the first Black writer FAME ever hired. The Osmonds’ management at MGM Records (headed by conservative musician Mike Curb), wanted the band to sound like those other Jacksons, meaning like one of the Soul bands so popular in the early 70’s. George Jackson would have never been recommended had it not been for white musician/producer, and FAME cofounder Billy Sherrill, one of the “kings of country music.” And the musicians backing the Osmonds were the first “truly integrated studio band in Muscle Shoals” (118-21).

Of course, there were problems, and not just that the white boys from Utah lived in a trailer in rural Alabama during the sessions. More specifically, the soul-ed up sound pissed off Black artists everywhere, another instance, some felt, of the white “raping” of Black artists and Soul (122-3). And it wasn’t that the song did Soul badly; many actually thought it did it “too well“ (121).

The song went #1 on the Pop charts (also scoring high on the R&B/Soul charts), apparently preventing The Jackson 5 from achieving their fifth number one single, also ironic because the song was first pitched to Michael and his brothers.

What should all of this mean to you and me?

For the 15 year-old boy that I was back when “One Bad Apple” played every five minutes on the three big AM stations in Birmingham that I crisscrossed, it all boiled down to these white guys being “teeny-bop” and decidedly uncool, and The Jackson 5 being so enviably cool that mere words couldn’t do the sound, the style, and the affection from all the girls I loved justice. Sure, older guys thought them “teeny-bop,” too, but I wonder when alone, how many of them moved their Firebird-driving leg to “ABC” or “I Want You Back?”

Rather than describing what I felt when that song came on (or how quickly I pushed the button for another station on whatever car radio was closest), why don’t we give it a whirl:

I am just not musically-savvy enough to tell you what that annoying instrument playing the “da-dat-da-dat-da” refrain is. Flute? But listen to the rhythm, the arrangement of voices. It’s well-produced, and even at fifteen I understood that it was a hit.

Time makes fools of us all. Last week while visiting Canada, we were driving on Highway 1, watching the elk and bears, and my daughter and her boyfriend had “The 70’s on 7” tuned in. It was a replay of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 from, of course, the early summer of ‘71, and before I knew it, “One Bad Apple,” which had just risen into the Top 10, surrounded me.

Now, one could react in all sorts of ways to hearing this song again after, what? 50 years?

I was in the back seat, and it felt like my daughter and her fiancee were my parents, controlling the dial, with me not wanting to interfere and yet coming so close to asking why we couldn’t be listening to Outlaw Country?

And then, when that flute-y tingle emerged, I could hear teenaged me screaming:

“TURN IT TO ANOTHER STATION!”

And I almost screamed those words in the “there and now.”

But I didn’t. And they chose not to change the station, and I wish I had asked both of them (they’re roughly 30 years old) what they thought of that song. Does it stand out as Soul gone wrong? Does its hit quality shine through? Can it be differentiated from other bubblegum sounds of that time, as in The Archies of The Cuff Links? Edison Lighthouse or The Sylvers?

I’m compressing time a bit, but that’s what the years will do as people like me remember what we loved and hated, what we can’t forget even if we try, and then get amazed that we’d ever want to forget any of this, because letting any one song go opens too many others to those infernal exit doors.

And I’m trying so hard to remember, and to confess to you that despite all the lack of cool and all the racial anxieties and animosities, I do think it’s a wonder that in a trailer in rural Alabama, such a sound could be heard.