BROUGHT ELVIS BACK TO LIFE

BORN 1937

One of the many stellar sidemen, producers and songwriters to rise to prominence in Memphis in the 1960s, the career of Lincoln Wayne Moman, far better known as Chips from his love of gambling, spanned multiple genres – rockabilly, rock, pop, soul, country – yet he was never defined by one, so profound was his grasp of each form. Born in LaGrange, Georgia, by his teens he was in Memphis, playing rockabilly. In the late ’50s he started working in R&B and soul for the pre-Stax Satellite label, but despite participation on early hits like Gee Whizz and Last Night, a row over money saw him quit in 1964. He soon opened his own Memphis studio, American Sound, where his finest and most lasting work would be done. With a core of musicians closer in style to the Muscle Shoals house band than to Stax’s, Moman’s set-up became the city’s new go-to studio, catching the ear with pop hits for Sandy Posey (Single Girl, 1966), and The Box Tops. Their US Number 1 The Letter (1967) was produced by Dan Penn, who with Moman would write the deep soul classic The Dark End Of The Street, definitively recorded by James Carr. Jauntier hits like B.J. Thomas’s Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head and Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline also emanated from American Sound. But perhaps its most famous recording came at the end of the ’60s when Elvis Presley was persuaded to return to a Memphis studio for the first time since quitting Sun. After years of fairly execrable movie music, Moman pressed on Presley songs worthy of his gifts – particularly In The Ghetto and Suspicious Minds – and 1969’s From Elvis In Memphis would start the King’s final great flourish. American closed in 1972, and Moman latterly worked mostly in Nashville in the country music field that was happiest in.