Dusty in Memphis

Springfield signed to Atlantic hoping to reinvigorate her career and boost her credibility. She did it on the condition that she work with Jerry Wexler, who gave her dozens of demos. Together they settled on eleven songs. Eight came from songwriters associated with the Brill Building sound, and the idea was to give pop compositions a Southern soul rhythmic feel. Son of a Preacher Man was written with Aretha Franklin in mind, and Michel Legrand's The Windmills of Your Mind was the song she resisted and Wexler insisted on. Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote four of the songs. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Randy Newman and Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote others.

The Memphis sessions at American Sound Studio were overseen by Wexler, Mardin and the engineer Tom Dowd, with the Sweet Inspirations and the Memphis Boys, a group of studio musicians that included the guitarist Reggie Young and the bassist Tommy Cogbill. Terry Manning, in Memphis to write about the sessions for NME, ended up helping Dowd. Wexler wrote that of the songs first submitted she approved none. Springfield said she had chosen two, Son of a Preacher Man and Just a Little Lovin'. She said she was anxious about being compared with the soul greats who had recorded in the same studios, and that she had never worked with only a rhythm track or with outside producers before. Her final vocals were recorded in New York.

Reception

It sold poorly. It reached 99 in the United States and did not chart in Britain, even though Son of a Preacher Man was a top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone that it was a real drifting, cool, smart, sexually distracted soul album, though he found some of the songwriting uneven. In 1973 Robert Christgau called it a pop standard and classic and the perfect instance of how a production team should work. He described Dowd mixing so that it sounds as if Dusty is hiding in the speakers. Pitchfork's Jillian Mapes wrote that Springfield took a dreamier approach to cinematic soul and that what she created was a perspective all her own. Pitchfork placed it 19th among the best albums of the 1960s.

Rolling Stone ranked it 89th on its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums, it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001, and in 2020 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry. It was the first of a wave of albums by pop singers recorded at American Sound Studio, followed by Dionne Warwick's Soulful, Elvis Presley's From Elvis in Memphis and Petula Clark's Memphis. Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys has often called it his favorite album. It was reissued on CD by Rhino in 1992 and in a Deluxe Edition in 1999, and by Mercury in 2002.