Old Time Rock And Roll - Remastered 2011

This is one of the few songs Seger recorded that he didn't write. It was written by the songwriters George Jackson and Thomas Jones - they worked for Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, where the song was recorded. Although Seger worked on the lyrics, he didn't take any songwriting credit. This means that Seger doesn't own the publishing rights to the song, and Jackson and Jones control when it is used in movies and commercials. According to Seger, he was feeling generous that day, and says not seeking composer credit was "the dumbest thing I ever did." Seger claims he changed all the original lyrics except for the "old time rock and roll" part. He made sure to take a dig at disco music, which was fading in popularity.

Seger recorded this with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, a famous group of studio musicians who owned their own recording studio in Alabama. Other singers they had worked with include Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, and Rod Stewart. They gave many songs a feeling of authenticity, which was important to Seger because his previous album, Night Moves, was very successful and he didn't want to be perceived as selling out to pop radio. Jerry Masters, who was a recording engineer at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, told Songfacts the story: "We cut a demo on the writer of the song, George Jackson, there at the studio when we didn't have anything else to do. It was a great demo, along with some others we cut that day. Seger liked the song so much he tried to cut it himself, but after numerous tries, with the Swampers and with his band, he finally gave up. He and Punch Andrews [Seger's manager] decided to buy the demo track from us and put his vocal on it, and that ended up being the record. It's a classic. We also did 'Katmandu' and several more that were on the Night Moves and Stranger In Town LPs. So the classic 'Old Time' was in reality a demo we cut on the writer a couple of years earlier."

The original demo for this song had George Jackson on vocals, which didn't work when pitching the song to Bob Seger. David Hood, who was the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section bass player, told Songfacts, "After we got through recording it, we listened to it and thought, Well, pretty good, but George is a black guy. And he just didn't sound like a rock and roll singer. So Jimmy [Johnson, MSSS guitarist] and I were working with a rock group that we were trying to produce at the time. We brought in the singer from that group, a young man named Dennis Gulley, and put him on the track, the rock and roll track. And when we heard his version of it, we thought, Wow, that sounds just like something that Bob Seger would do. We had been recording with Bob for some time by then. We knew that Bob didn't really cut other people's stuff very much, but we thought, well, there's a chance. So we sent it to Bob. He liked it, wanted to make a couple of changes to make it suit him a little bit more. So he came back in and re-recorded the song with us and also recorded it with his band, the Silver Bullet Band, and it just never came off. And so he ended up putting his voice on our demo, the demo that we had done at our Studio B with George Jackson. They just took George's voice off, put Bob's voice on there, and that's the hit record."