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Rick Hall 1/2018

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.

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Grady Tate 10/2017

October 8, 2017 – Grady Tate was born on January 14, 1932 in Hayti, Durham, North Carolina. In 1963 he moved to New York City, where he became the drummer in Quincy Jones’s band.

Grady Tate’s drumming helped to define a particular hard bop, soul jazz and organ trio sound during the mid-1960s and beyond. His slick, layered and intense sound is instantly recognizable for its understated style in which he integrates his trademark subtle nuances with sharp, crisp “on top of the beat” timing (in comparison to playing slightly before, or slightly after the beat). The Grady Tate sound can be heard prominently on many of the classic Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery albums recorded on the Verve label in the 1960s. Continue reading Grady Tate 10/2017

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David Axelrod 2/17

Composer David Axe AxelrodFebruary 5, 2017 – David Axelrod was born on April 17, 1931 in Los Angeles, California. His father was active in radical labour union politics who died when he was 13 and he was raised in tumultuous LA’s South Central Crenshaw neighborhood, where Axelrod’s future musical direction was influenced by the multicultural environment of the mostly black neighborhood.
 
At the time Axelrod’s parents moved into the area, it was changing from a working-class white district south of downtown Los Angeles into an area of predominantly African American stores, businesses, and homes. Even today, Crenshaw remains one of the most notable African-American communities in Los Angeles, with a cultural scene that includes museums devoted to black history and an active political life strengthened by some of the city’s most ardent black activists. During Axelrod’s youth, the Crenshaw district included the main thoroughfare of African-American cultural life in Los Angeles: Central Avenue–a street filled with music clubs, barber shops, beauty parlors, and other institutions of the African-American community. The fact that Axelrod was white did not prevent him from absorbing many of these influences.

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Tommy Allsup 1/2017

January 11, 2017 – Tommy Douglas Allsop (Buddy Holly)was born on November 24, 1931 near Owasso Oklahoma.

His musical career started right after highschool in Claremore, Oklahoma in 1949 with the “Oklahoma Swingbillies.” In 1950 he went to work with fiddle player Art Davis in Miami, Oklahoma; from there to the Cowboy Inn in Wichita, Kansas with singer, fiddle player Jimmy Hall. In 1952 and 1953, he moved back to Tulsa, Oklahoma to join the “Johnnie Lee Wills Band.” From 1953 to 1958, he had his own band, “The Southernaires” in Lawton, Oklahoma with homebase being the Southern Club.

In 1958, Tommy’s career would take a different direction. On a trip to Clovis, New Mexico to record at Norman Petty’s famous studio, he met the late Buddy Holly. In April, he started playing lead guitar with Holly and the Crickets. He continued playing with Buddy until the fatal plane crash that took Buddy’s life, along with the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. It was Allsup who flipped a coin with Ritchie Valens for a seat on the ill-fated plane.

After Holly’s death, Allsup moved to California to join Liberty Records as A & R Director of all Country and Western product to begin producing the great Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. His association with Wills lasted through Wills’ “For The Last Time” LP, recorded on December 2-3, 1973, in Dallas, Texas, where Bob Wills recorded his first records in 1935. Allsup used some of the original Texas Playboys on the last recording (McAulliff, Shamblin, Dacus, Strickland). Bob Wills directed the sessions from his wheel chair.

While at Liberty, Tommy would produce Tex Williams, Willie Nelson, Joe Carson, Warren Smith, Billy Mize, and Cliff Crofford. While there, he worked with great artists such as Walter Brennan, Bobby Vee, Johnny Burnette, Julie London, and Vickie Carr, who sang harmony with Bob Wills on the LP “Bob Wills Sings and Plays.” After leaving California, Allsup moved to Nashville to head up Metromedia Records in 1968. In 1972, he met Ray Benson and Asleep At The Wheel and produced their first LP for United Artist Records. Later he produced 4 LPs for Capitol Records with the group.

Tommy Allsup had been a big supporter of Western Swing music over the years. He had produced 5 LPs with the great Hank Thompson and his Brazos Valley Boys, 2 LPs with the Original Texas Playboys, and 2 LPs with the great Western Swing vocalist Leon Rausch. Tommy produced Swing LPs with Jody Nix, Curley Chalker, Mack Sanders, Johnny Bush, Willie Nelson, Tex Williams, and Billy Mize.

Tommy, who had few regrets, once said: “I never really wanted to be a big star, I figured I’d leave that to someone else.” In 1979, he started a club, “Tommy’s Heads Up Saloon”, in Fort Worth, Texas. The club was named for Allsup’s coin toss with Valens 20 years beforehand.

The last surviving member of Buddy Holly’s “touring” Crickets for the 1959 Winter Dance Party, Tommy Allsup died on January 11, 2017, at 85 years old in a hospital in Springfield, Missouri, after complications from hernia surgery.

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Patti Page 1/2013

January 1, 2013 – Patti Page was born Clara Ann Fowler on November 8, 1927 in Claremore, Oklahoma (although some sources give Muskogee ) into a large and poor family. Her father worked on the MKT railroad, while her mother and older sisters picked cotton. As she related on television many years later, the family went without electricity, and therefore she could not read after dark. She was raised in Foraker, Hardy, Muskogee and Avant, Oklahoma, before attending Daniel Webster High School in Tulsa, from which she graduated in 1945.

Clara Ann Fowler started off her career as a songstress with Al Clauser and his Oklahoma Outlaws at KTUL. Fowler became a featured singer on a 15-minute radio program on radio station KTUL, Tulsa, Oklahoma, at age 18. The program was sponsored by the “Page Milk Company.” On the air, Fowler was dubbed “Patti Page,” after the Page Milk Company. In 1946, Jack Rael, a saxophone player and band manager, came to Tulsa to do a one-night show. Rael heard Page on the radio and liked her voice. Rael asked her to join the band he managed, the “Jimmy Joy Band.” Rael would later become Page’s personal manager, after leaving the band.

Page toured with the “Jimmy Joy Band” throughout the country in the mid-1940s. The band eventually ended up in Chicago, Illinois, in 1947. In Chicago, Page sang with a small group led by popular orchestra leader, Benny Goodman. This helped Page gain her first recording contract with Mercury Records the same year. She became Mercury’s “girl singer”.

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