Sunday, September 20, 2026
Saturday, September 19, 2026
Leon Russell
This past weekend, I stopped by The Church Studio in Tulsa, a squat stone building at Third and Trenton that looks a little like a church and a little like a small castle. The name is wonderfully literal. It was a church before it was a studio, and somehow both identities still seem to fit.
The building dates to 1915, when it opened as Grace Methodist Episcopal Church. Other congregations followed, and the rough stone exterior that gives it its present character was added in the 1950s. By the early 1970s, however, the old church had fallen into disuse.
Then Leon Russell saw it.
Russell was eating nearby with his Shelter Records partner, Denny Cordell, when they noticed the building was for sale. Russell climbed the steps, looked around, and apparently saw something other than an abandoned church. In 1972, he bought it.
That decision makes considerably more sense once you know Leon Russell’s story.
Russell had been born Claude Russell Bridges in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1942, but his family moved to Tulsa when he was a boy. He had played piano since childhood, and by his teenage years he was already working Tulsa clubs. The young musician who would become famous for his long white hair, beard, sunglasses, and top hat was then simply a kid trying to get close enough to the music. Even the name “Leon Russell” reportedly came from identification borrowed from an older friend so that he could get into clubs where he was too young to perform legally.
Tulsa in those years provided an unusually good education for a young musician willing to listen. Country, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and early rock and roll collided in clubs and dance halls. Russell played with musicians who would become part of the larger Tulsa story, including J. J. Cale and drummer Chuck Blackwell. At Will Rogers High School, his contemporaries included David Gates, later of Bread, and Elvin Bishop.
These were not musicians developing in neat little genre boxes. They were borrowing from one another, sitting in with one another, and learning whatever happened to work. That looseness became one of the defining qualities of what came to be called the Tulsa Sound: blues and R&B underneath, country around the edges, rock and roll when necessary, and seldom much interest in keeping the categories straight.
Russell eventually left Tulsa for Los Angeles and became one of those musicians millions of people heard without knowing his name. He entered the world of the studio players later collectively known as the Wrecking Crew and appeared on recordings associated with artists ranging from the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean to the Byrds, Herb Alpert, and Frank Sinatra.
Before Leon Russell became a rock star, he had already learned one of the most important lessons of his career: sometimes the person holding the whole thing together is not the person standing in front.
By the end of the 1960s, however, Russell was becoming difficult to keep in the background. He produced and arranged, worked with Delaney & Bonnie, wrote “Delta Lady,” and helped organize Joe Cocker’s wonderfully excessive Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour. His 1970 solo album opened with “A Song for You,” a song that would eventually be recorded by scores of other artists. The following year, he appeared with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and others at the Concert for Bangladesh.
For a man who had spent years helping make other people sound good, Leon Russell was suddenly difficult to miss.
And then, at roughly the moment when musicians traditionally discover that Los Angeles contains everything worth having, Russell went back to Tulsa.
That is the part of his story I find most interesting.
Russell and British producer Denny Cordell had established Shelter Records in 1969. When Russell bought the old church three years later, he did not merely install some microphones and call it a recording studio. He and Cordell developed a kind of musical compound. Russell acquired nearby houses where musicians, producers, engineers, and guests could stay. Shelter moved operations into the neighborhood. People could write, record, argue, experiment, eat, sleep, and presumably repeat the process the following day.
It was less a shrine than a workshop.
For a few years, an extraordinary assortment of people found their way through that old Tulsa church. J. J. Cale recorded there. So did Willie Nelson, the Gap Band, Kansas, Dwight Twilley, and Tom Petty. Freddie King was part of the Shelter world. Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Buffett, Phoebe Snow, Peter Tosh, and numerous others worked, recorded, or spent time around the studio.
The names become almost ridiculous when placed beside one another, which is precisely the point. This was not a country studio, a blues studio, or a rock studio. Russell seems to have been suspicious of walls in music, even while doing his work inside a building made of very thick stone ones.
The Tulsa connections mattered as much as the famous visitors.
Russell’s relationship with J. J. Cale helped define the loose, restrained approach associated with the Tulsa Sound. In North Tulsa, Russell encountered the Wilson brothers, whose group became the Gap Band, their name eventually referencing Greenwood, Archer, and Pine. Russell signed the group to Shelter, and they appeared behind him before developing their own considerable career.
The Church therefore became more than a place where famous outsiders occasionally appeared. It sat inside a local network of Black R&B and gospel musicians, white country and rock players, club veterans, session musicians, and young performers moving back and forth among traditions that were never as separate in practice as record-store bins made them appear.
Tom Petty’s connection may be one of the best examples of what Russell and Cordell had created. Petty arrived before there was any reason for most of America to know his name. Shelter gave him an early recording contract, and the Tulsa operation became part of the machinery that moved him from the Florida band Mudcrutch toward the career that followed.
Petty was only one of several musicians for whom Shelter functioned less like a corporate record company than an entry point into a community.
That seems important because it complicates the usual picture of Leon Russell.
The photograph most people remember is the magnificent eccentric at the piano: long hair, beard, dark glasses, and hat, looking rather like an Old Testament prophet who has somehow acquired a rhythm section. But The Church Studio tells another story.
Russell was a connector.
His career repeatedly placed him in the middle of other people’s music. He was the session player behind the singer, the arranger behind the record, the bandleader assembling musicians, the songwriter whose compositions became standards in other voices, and eventually the studio owner creating a place where everyone could collide.
His own career had its rises and falls. Popular attention moved elsewhere, as it always does. Yet his influence never quite disappeared. Elton John, who had long regarded Russell as an important influence, worked with him on the 2010 album The Union, introducing him again to listeners who had forgotten him or never known how much music he had touched. Russell entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. He died in 2016.
Standing at The Church Studio more than half a century after Russell bought it, what struck me was how appropriate the building ultimately seems.
Churches are built on the assumption that a community needs a place to gather. Leon Russell changed what people gathered there to do, but not necessarily the basic idea.
He did not return to Tulsa at the height of his fame and build himself a monument.
He bought an abandoned church and filled it with other musicians.
There may be no better explanation of Leon Russell than that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)