It started with water rushing over rocky shoals – a sound the American Indians living along the banks of the Tennessee River said "sang" to them in the beautiful voice of a woman.

They called the great inland waterway the "Singing River."

That musical rush of water has syncopated its melody into the souls of countless generations since the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws and Creeks populated this tiny corner of north Alabama.

The sound they heard lingers still. In another form, the music of the Muscle Shoals has been heard both here and around the world.

W.C. Handy heard it. So did Sam Phillips and Buddy Killen, James Joiner and Bobby Denton, Rick Hall and Arthur Alexander, Jimmy Hughes and Percy Sledge and hundreds of others. Together they transformed that faint melody into popular music that has influenced the last century of the millennium.

The family of Irish immigrant James Jackson, one of the founders of Florence, recorded tales told to them by the Indians living along the river in the early 1800s. One tale told of the disembodied spirit of a goddess that inhabited the river. Another told of a voice from the river that sang. The voice, which belonged to a woman or possibly a princess, sang loudly and quietly, the Indians said, depending on the mood of the river.

Tom Hendrix of Florence, an Indian historian of Creek heritage, says the building of dams by the Tennessee Valley Authority softened the river’s voice. But descendents of the people who lived here centuries ago return each fall to celebrate their heritage at the Festival of the Singing River.

"The Native Americans have passed down the Singing River name – the Choctaws and Chickasaws who are now in Oklahoma," he said.

Hendrix also says there is evidence the early Indians living near the shoals were very musical people. He said flutes or whistles made of waterfowl wing bones and cane have been discovered in the area.

Handy, in his 1941 autobiography "Father of the Blues," tells of growing up in Florence in the late 19^th century near the banks of the Tennessee and Cypress Creek, and of the musical sounds he heard from the wildlife around his family’s cabin.

Born in Florence in 1873, Handy also embraced the spiritual sounds of Greater St. Paul, the AME church where his father and grandfather served as pastors. Handy soon seasoned his musical tastes with more secular sounds.

"It was my good fortune as a youngster to be the water boy in rock quarries, iron furnaces, on farms and on the Tennessee River canal," Handy would later recall, "where I heard Negro laborers and steamboat roustabouts sing many work songs, which since those days have been a part of musical America. It was such snatches of song that turned my attention to what we now know as the blues."

Handy moved to Memphis as a young man and established his reputation as the "Father of the Blues," writing songs that still influence musicians today -- songs with titles like "St. Louis Blues," "Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues" and even the "Muscle Shoals Blues."

Phillips, born on a tenant farm outside Florence in 1923, also moved to Memphis as a young man. Trained as a disc jockey at WLAY Radio in Muscle Shoals, the future "Father of Rock ’n’ Roll" considers his native area a "melting pot" of musical influences.

"When I was growing up, we heard it all," Phillips said. "In the fields we heard the black man’s blues, in the churches we heard black spirituals and white gospel, and on the radio we heard the Grand Ole Opry and those glorious songs from Tin Pan Alley. Out of that we created a sound that’s hard to define, hard to pigeonhole, because it includes the best elements of all those tremendous sources."

Inspired by Handy’s worldwide renown, Phillips followed his fellow Florentine to Memphis in 1945. He worked in radio for five years before opening a custom recording studio, the Memphis Recording Service, at 706 Union Ave. The studio’s slogan was, "We record anything – anywhere – anytime."

Phillips began by recording Delta-based blues and R&B artists -- Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Little Milton, Rufus Thomas and Roscoe Gordon. One of his early recordings, 1951’s "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats (featuring a young Ike Turner), today is generally considered the first genuine "rock ’n’ roll" record.

"I was hearing something in black music that others had heard, but it seemed like nobody wanted to do anything about it," Phillips said. "Then we started supplying material to labels like Chess and RPM. That’s when I decided to start my own label."

Phillips’ Sun Records scored a national hit in 1953 with Thomas’ "Bear Cat." The next year, searching for "a white man who could sing with a black man’s soul," Phillips recorded the fateful first sessions by a Tupelo, Miss., truck driver, Elvis Presley. The singer’s first Sun single combined radically revamped covers of blues (Big Boy Crudup’s "That’s All Right, Mama") and bluegrass (Bill Monroe’s "Blue Moon of Kentucky").

"Nobody could put a label on what I was doing," Phillips said. "Nashville tried to get Billboard not to review our stuff. They called it junk. Preachers preached sermons about it. Parents hated me for putting out rock ’n’ roll. They said, ‘Man, this is ruinin’ my young-uns.’ ‘The devil’s music,’ they called it. But I didn’t see it that way."

After Presley’s breakthrough success at Sun, Phillips continued discovering and recording young, white country boys who, under his guidance, altered the course of popular music and, many say, Western culture. Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and other Sun artists combined country, blues, gospel and rhythm-and-blues into the first international burst of rock ’n’ roll.

"I didn’t want professionals," Phillips said. "I just wanted to take these boys, these young men, and say, ‘We either get it or we don’t.’ If I couldn’t communicate with them through music, I felt like I hadn’t done my job. I had to find that one piece of what I call soul magic."

Like Phillips, fellow Florence native Buddy Killen, born in a shanty shack on the east side of town in 1933, left home to pursue musical fortunes in a larger metropolitan area. At that time, Killen’s musical tastes centered almost exclusively on country music. As a result, the struggling young musician moved to country’s capital, Nashville, Tenn., within 24 hours after his high-school graduation.

"Growing up, I remember playing all those spoon houses and dances down in Florence," said Killen, who remains today one of Nashville’s top publishers, producers and entertainment entrepreneurs. "That experience helped me get to the point where I was good enough to go to Nashville."

After backing up Grand Ole Opry acts and touring with Music City legends Hank Williams and Jim Reeves, Killen worked as a song plugger for Tree Music, making $35 a week. Eventually Killen would own Tree, a company he developed into the world’s largest publishing house. In 1991 the so-called "Quincy Jones of country music" sold Tree for $40 million.

"I was the first from here to move to Nashville, but I certainly wasn’t the last," Killen said. "That just started the ball rolling. Once I was there, I was able to help open some doors for people back home – people who had their own dreams about the music business. Years later many of them stayed here and made those dreams come true. But in those early days, if your heart was set on music, you couldn’t stay in Alabama."