Rick Hall (85) – producer/session musician with Fame Studios – was born January 31, 1932 to a family of sharecroppers in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, and after his mother left home was raised by his father and grandparents in Franklin County, Alabama. He moved to Rockford, Illinois, as a teenager, working as an apprentice toolmaker, and began playing guitar  in local bar bands. When he was drafted into the military for the Korean War, he declared himself a conscientious objector, joined the honor guard of the Fourth United States Army, and played in a band which also included Faron Young and the fiddler Gordon Terry.
When Hall returned to Alabama he resumed factory life, working for Reynolds Aluminum in Florence. When both his new bride and his father died within a two-week period, he lost interest in regular work and began moving around the area playing guitar, mandolin, and fiddle with a local group, Carmol Taylor and the Country Pals. The group appeared on a weekly regional radio show at WERH in Hamilton, Alabama. Subsequently, Hall formed a new R&B group, the Fairlanes, with the saxophonist Billy Sherrill fronted by the singer Dan Penn, with Hall playing bass. He also began writing songs at that time.
Hall left the Fairlanes to concentrate on becoming a songwriter and record producer. He had his first songwriting successes in the late 1950s, when George Jones recorded his song “Achin’, Breakin’ Heart”, Brenda Lee recorded “She’ll Never Know”, and Roy Orbison recorded “Sweet and Innocent”.
In 1959, Hall and Sherrill accepted an offer from Tom Stafford, the owner of a recording studio, to help set up a new music publishing company in the town of Florence, to be known as Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, or FAME. However, in 1960, Sherrill and Stafford dissolved the partnership, leaving Hall with rights to the studio name. Hall then set up FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where one of his first recordings was Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. The commercial success of the record gave Hall the financial resources to establish a new, larger and better equipped FAME recording studio.
Though Hall grew up in a culture dominated by country music, he had a love of R&B music and, in the highly segregated state of Alabama, regularly flaunted local policies and recorded many black musicians. Hall wrote:
“Black music helped broaden my musical horizons and open my eyes and ears to the widespread appeal of the so-called ‘race’ music that later became known as ‘rhythm and blues”.
Hall’s successes continued after the Atlanta-based agent Bill Lowery brought him acts to record, and the studio produced hits for Tommy Roe, Joe Tex, the Tams, and Jimmy Hughes. However, in 1964, Hall’s regular session recording group—David Briggs, Norbert Putnam, Jerry Carrigan, Earl “Peanut” Montgomery, and Donnie Fritts—became frustrated at being paid minimum union-scale wages by Hall, and left Muscle Shoals to set up a studio of their own in Nashville. Hall then pulled together a new studio band, including Spooner Oldham, Jimmy Johnson, David Hood, and Roger Hawkins, and continued to produce hit records.
In 1966, he helped license Percy Sledge‘s “When a Man Loves a Woman“, produced by Quin Ivy, to Atlantic Records, which then led to a regular arrangement under which Atlantic would send musicians to Hall’s Muscle Shoals studio to record. The studio produced further hit records for Wilson Pickett, James and Bobby Purify, Aretha Franklin, Clarence Carter, Otis Redding, and Arthur Conley, enhancing Hall’s reputation as a white Southern producer who could produce and engineer hits for black Southern soul singers. He produced many sessions using guitarist Duane Allman. He also produced recordings for other artists, including Etta James, whom he persuaded to record Clarence Carter’s song “Tell Mama”. However, his fiery temperament led to the end of the relationship with Atlantic after he got into a fistfight with Aretha Franklin’s husband, Ted White, in late 1967.
In 1969, FAME Records, with artists including Candi Staton, Clarence Carter and Arthur Conley, established a distribution deal with Capitol Records. Hall then turned his attention away from soul music towards mainstream pop, producing hits for the Osmonds, Paul Anka, Tom Jones, and Donny Osmond. Also in 1969, another FAME Studio house band, Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, affectionately called The Swampers, consisting of Barry Beckett (keyboards), Roger Hawkins (drums), Jimmy Johnson (guitar), and David Hood (bass), left the FAME studio to found the competing Muscle Shoals Sound Studio at 3614 Jackson Highway in Sheffield, with start-up funding from Jerry Wexler. Subsequently, Hall hired the Fame Gang as the new studio band.
Hall’s FAME studio prospered through the 1970s. In 1971, Hall was named Producer of the Year by Billboard magazine, a year after having been nominated for a Grammy in the same category. Later in the decade, Hall moved back towards country music, producing hits for Mac Davis, Bobbie Gentry, Jerry Reed, and the Gatlin Brothers. He also worked with the songwriter and producer Robert Byrne to help a local bar band, Shenandoah, top the national Hot Country Songs chart several times in the 1980s and 1990s. Hall’s publishing staff of in-house songwriters wrote some of the biggest country hits in those decades. His publishing catalog included “I Swear” written by Frank Myers and Gary Baker. In 1985 he was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, his citation referring to him as the “Father of Muscle Shoals Music.”
In 2007, Hall reactivated the FAME Records label through a distribution deal with EMI.
Hall’s life and career are profiled in the 2013 documentary film Muscle Shoals. During an interview before the release of the movie, Hall told a journalist that in 2009, he had donated his home to a charity for abused and neglected children. The hits he had recorded over the years, and the sale of two of his six publishing catalogs had made him wealthy. Nevertheless, at the age of 81, he was still trying to make recording deals.
In 2014, Hall was awarded the Grammy Trustees Award for his significant contribution to the field of recording..
Hall published his memoirs in a book titled The Man from Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame in 2015. On December 17, 2016, Hall was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of North Alabama in Florence.
He died from cancer on January 2, 2018, aged 85, at his home in Muscle Shoals, after returning from a stay in a local nursing home shortly before Christmas.
