Royal Studios

Royal Studios has made records since 1957 in a converted South Memphis movie theatre, and it never got rid of the floor. The building went up in 1915 as the Shamrock Theater, became the Rex and then the Royal, and closed in 1955. Joe Cuoghi rented it for $60 a month and, with John Novarese and Quinton Claunch, turned it into the home of Hi Records. The seats came out but the slope stayed. Boo Mitchell, his son, says the drums usually go in the low-ceilinged end with the other instruments further back. Willie Mitchell, who came to run the place, had his own theory of why it worked: going down the slope, he said, the music gets bigger and it separates. Mitchell arrived as a session trumpeter in the early 1960s and took over the running of it after Cuoghi died in 1970. Cotton insulation hangs from the ceiling and burlap covers the dividers to dry the room out, and Boo dates the room as his father wanted it to about 1969. Mitchell met a young singer named Al Green at a club in Midland, Texas, and promised him stardom inside two years. Green's records for Hi, cut at Royal with the Hi Rhythm Section and with drums by Al Jackson Jr. and Howard Grimes, sold more than twenty million copies by the studio's count, and Let's Stay Together reached number one. The city renamed this stretch of Lauderdale Street Willie Mitchell Boulevard in 2004. Mitchell died in 2010 and Boo Mitchell has run the studio since, winning a Grammy for engineering Uptown Funk, partly recorded in the building.