Wilson Pickett was moderately well-known among northern R&B fans in the early ’60s. The Detroit-based singer performed with the Falcons in 1962; he left the group the following year to do a solo album for Lloyd Price’s Double-L Records that yielded a regional hit called “If You Need Me” (covered for a Top 3 R&B hit by Solomon Burke). In 1965 he was signed to a major label--Burke's home, Atlantic Records. But Atlantic wasn’t sure how to use him. Later that year, they decided to see what would happen if they teamed him with Steve Cropper and Stax/Volt’s Memphis magicians.

THE STORY. Steve Cropper: “Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records in New York called (Stax owner) Jim Stewart and said, ‘I have an artist that we haven’t really been able to do anything with, but he’s a great soul singer. I’d like to bring him down to Memphis and cut him with the guys down there.’ So Jim called me in and said, ‘Hey, they’re going to bring this guy down called Wilson Pickett.’ I didn’t know who Wilson Pickett was, I’d never heard of him. So they told me he used to be in the Falcons and he’d recorded some things back before that, with some spiritual groups.”

Cropper wandered out to the record shop near Stax and began searching through the record bins, looking for something Pickett had done. “I found two or three things--some spiritual things that he had sung lead on,” Cropper says. Cropper noticed that at the end of each song Wilson would launch into an improvised rap about “the midnight hour:’ [Authors’ note: an example of Pickett’s habit can be found on the Falcons’ “I Found a Love.” He says: “Sometimes I call her in the midnight hour.”]

CROPPER: “In every song in the fade-out, he’d go into this ritual, ‘I’m going to wait till the midnight hour, oh in the midnight hour,’ and he’d start preaching this ‘midnight hour’ thing, and I said ‘That’s it!’ [Laughs.]” Obviously “in the midnight hour” was Pickett’s favorite saying. So Cropper started working on a song based on the phrase. He worked on it until three o’clock that afternoon, when he and Jim Stewart went to the airport to pick up Pickett and Jerry Wexler. “Jerry and Jim went off to eat,” Cropper recalls, “and Wilson and I went off to the hotel room to start writing songs. ‘In the Midnight Hour’ was the first one that came up. It took a piece of something that Wilson had been working on and a little bit of what I’d been working on and that’s the tune that came out.” It took just one hour to write the soul/rock classic that established Wilson Pickett as a star.

FOR THE RECORD. Initially, the beat of “In the Midnight Hour” was different--more straightforward. But Jerry Wexler, who was producing the record, ran out of the control room insisting they change it to fit the rhythm of the latest dance craze, the Jerk. The musicians didn’t know what he was talking about. So Wexler broke into a version of the dance right there in the studio. He said, “Do it this way, this is the way they’re doing it.” At first, the guys cracked up at the sight of Wexler doing the Jerk (“How else was I gonna make them understand?” he later said. “Draw a diagram?”) But then Duck Dunn started laying down a smooth bass line. And the rest just fell into place.