Fifteen students from Montgomery County Community College's Blue Bell campus recorded two original songs at FAME Recording Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama from Aug. 17 through Aug. 20.

The group, all enrolled in MCCC's Sound Recording and Music Technology (SRT) program, traveled to the studios for the college's inaugural Muscle Shoals Recording Residency, Main Line Media News first reported. The students weren't there to tour. They worked alongside session musicians, set up equipment, developed arrangements and helped engineer recordings of songs written by members of their own group.

SRT Director David Ivory, a Grammy-nominated producer and engineer, organized the residency. Ivory previously founded Iris Sound Studios in Philadelphia and spent a decade at Sigma Sound Studios, where he earned a Grammy nomination for his work on "Things Fall Apart" by The Roots.

"We didn't want our students standing behind a rope looking at where records were made," Ivory told Main Line Media News. "We wanted them on the other side of the glass, making records themselves."

The session musicians included Spooner Oldham, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who played keyboards on Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" and Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman." Guitarist Will McFarlane, keyboardist Clayton Ivey and Justin Holder also joined the sessions.

FAME Recording Studios was founded in 1959 in Florence, Ala., and has hosted Etta James, Wilson Pickett, Alicia Keys and Jason Isbell, among others, according to the studio's official history.

SRT student Shaun Brown had studied Stax Records and the Memphis Sound in MCCC's SRT 159 course. Months later, he was inside FAME watching Oldham and Ivey play on his own composition. Brown said the residency gave him the chance to meet Oldham and hear him perform on Brown's original song.

Student Zach Wheitsel described watching Oldham sit down at the Wurlitzer piano, the same instrument used on Franklin's classic recording, and play on classmate Brown's song as the moment he would remember most.

Student Jakob Seeds said the experience made him feel like he belonged in the room. Seeds compared it to recording with the Swampers, the nickname for the famous Muscle Shoals rhythm section immortalized in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama."

The MCCC Legacy Fund covered travel, lodging, studio time and collaboration fees for the four-day residency. MCCC's SRT program, based at the college's 340 DeKalb Pike campus in Blue Bell, offers an Associate of Applied Science degree and features a professional mixing suite with a Solid-State Logic SSL 9000k console and Dolby Atmos capability, according to the college's program page.

Planning is underway for a second residency, Ivory said, though no date has been announced.