Rick Hall
Inspired soul music entrepreneur who founded Fame studios and created the ‘Muscle Shoals sound’
RICK HALL, who has died aged 85, was a record producer and executive who, as the founder of Fame studios, almost single-handedly established the small Alabama town of Muscle Shoals as a crucible of some of the greatest soul music to be produced in America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Don Covay, Etta James and Clarence Carter were just a few of the rhythm and blues artists who recorded under Hall’s supervision, using the superlative group of session musicians who formed the basis of what became known as the “Muscle Shoals sound”.
Hall was the embodiment of a type that flourished in the early days of the record industry: a musician and businessman who could write, arrange, produce and engineer a song, release it on his own label and persuade disc jockeys to play it and distributors to sell it. There were any number of such “record men” – notably Berry Gordy at Motown, Sam Phillips at Sun, and Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic – yet few combined all these skills with Hall’s dynamism, aplomb and adaptability.
He would go on to make hits with pop artists such as the Osmonds and Paul Anka, and country artists like Mac Davis and Shenandoah.
Hall’s early life could have served as the subject of the kind of hardscrabble country songs that he would produce. He was born Roe Erister Hall on January 31 1932 in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, and grew up across the state line in the poor rural area of Franklin, Alabama. His father Herman was a sawmiller and sharecropper, and Hall grew up in a shack with dirt floors, sleeping on a straw mattress.
When Hall was four, his elder brother died after scalding himself with boiling water and his mother Dolly abandoned the family, leaving Hall and his younger sister to be brought up by their father. Herman Hall would later discover that his wife was working in a bordello in nearby Muscle Shoals. Thereafter, Herman carried a .32 Colt revolver, “hoping to see her and kill her,” Hall recalled.
As a child, encouraged by his father’s love of country and gospel music, Hall learnt to play the mandolin and fiddle. Determined to escape the hardship of his childhood, and as he put it to “be somebody” in the music business, he started playing in country bands, while working in a succession of manual jobs. In 1955 he married a 16-year-old named Faye, but she was to die just a few months later when, on a country road, Hall swerved to avoid an oncoming car, flipping the car over.
Two weeks later his father died when a tractor that Hall had brought for him overturned, trapping him underneath. Hall went to pieces, and for the next four years there was hardly a day when he was sober. “I was sleeping in my car,” he said. “I was thrown in jail four or five times. That was a bad man.”
He continued to make a modest living playing in country and rock and roll bands, and started writing songs. In 1960, along with a friend, Billy Sherrill, later a prominent Nashville writer and producer, and a third partner, Tom Stafford, he set up Florence Alabama Music Enterprises (“FAME”), making demo recordings and peddling songs to producers and record companies in Nashville. But the partnership soon ended acrimoniously, leaving Hall with just the rights to the company name, Fame.
He then set up on his own as a writer, mostly of radio jingles for local businesses. With a loan from one of his customers, a second-hand-car dealer named Hansel Cross (who in Hall’s jingles styled himself “hustling, handsome Hansel Cross”), Hall opened his own studio in an abandoned tobacco warehouse in Muscle Shoals. He also married Hansel’s daughter, Linda.
One of Hall’s first recordings as producer was You Better Move On, a country-soul song, written by a singer called Arthur Alexander, which Hall licensed to Dot records in Los Angeles. It became a hit, enabling Hall to launch Fame as his own label and ultimately move his studio to larger premises.
Despite his background in country music, Hall realised that R&B was both a more musically interesting, and lucrative, proposition. It was in this field that he would establish Fame’s early success, with artists such as Jimmy Hughes, Clarence Carter and Candi Staton.
He gathered around him a group of talented session musicians, the nucleus of which – the guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bass-player Roger Hood, keyboard player Barry Beckett, and drummer Roger Hawkins – became known as “the Swampers”, and who developed a sinewy combination of soul, country and gospel rhythms that became known universally as the Muscle Shoals sound.
At a time when the Deep South was struggling, often violently, with the issue of segregation, Fame – like Stax records in Memphis – was built on a remarkable synthesis of black singers and white musicians. Hall, his musicians and the singers he worked with could share jokes, food and drink in the studio, but it would have been unthinkable for him to have taken a singer such as Arthur Alexander or Jimmy Hughes to a restaurant in town. “Well, you could,” Hall once observed, “but you’d get your ass beaten. Or shot.”
A tall, imposing figure, who in later life sported luxuriant sideburns and an upturned waxed moustache that lent him the appearance of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, Hall, by his own admission, could be a difficult man and his temper sometimes got the better of him, with unfortunate consequences.
In 1966 he signed an agreement with Jerry Wexler of Atlantic records that resulted in Wexler bringing artists including Wilson Pickett and Don Covay to Muscle Shoals to record. Pickett made some of his finest work at the studio, including Land of 1,000
Dances and Mustang Sally.
But the relationship between Hall and Wexler came to a bitter end in 1967 when Wexler brought Aretha Franklin to Muscle Shoals to make her first recordings for Atlantic.
The singer was accompanied by her husband and manager, Ted White, a man of a particularly menacing mien. Anxious about racial sensitivities, Wexler had asked Hall to hire a black horn section for the sessions, but Hall, as Wexler would remember, “goofed”, and he arrived to find that all the horn players were white.
The first session produced one of the greatest recordings in the entire soul music canon, I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Love You). But matters quickly deteriorated as, between takes, White and one of the horn players began drinking out of the same bottle, egging each other on in what Wexler described as “a dangerous camaraderie”. When the musician made an overly familiar remark about Aretha Franklin, Ted White insisted that he be fired on the spot, and the day’s recording ended in a mood of sour recrimination.
Later that night, Hall, in a misguided attempt to retrieve the situation, and himself the worse for wear, made his way to the motel where White and Aretha Franklin were staying and knocked on the door. Fisticuffs ensued, which resulted in White and Franklin leaving Muscle Shoals the next morning, never to return.
Incensed, Jerry Wexler never worked with Hall again. He would inflict further damage on Hall, in 1969 bankrolling the Swampers to establish their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, where artists such as Dire Straits, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon and the Rolling Stones came to record.
Undeterred, Hall recruited a new assembly of studio musicians, the Fame Gang, and continued to turn out hits. In 1970 he produced Patches by Clarence Carter, a sentimental reflection on growing up dirt-poor, which sold a million copies and in 1971 won the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues Song. Carter had initially been reluctant to record it, arguing that it would degrading for a black man to sing a song so redolent of impoverished subjugation, until Hall persuaded him it was much about as his own upbringing as Carter’s.
In a radical change of style, Hall also produced The Osmonds’ One Bad Apple and Paul Anka’s You’re Having My Baby. In 1976 he was operated on for a life-threatening illness and withdrew from the music business, but he returned to enjoy a second act, producing more hits for country artists such as Mac Davis and Shenandoah.
Recording and publishing royalties made Hall rich. In 2009 he and his wife Linda turned over their 23-room house in Russellville, Alabama, to a charity for abused and neglected children, Hall explaining: “We didn’t need it any more.”
Hall is survived by his second wife, Linda, whom he married in 1968, and by three sons.
Rick Hall, born January 31 1932, died January 2 2018