Roe Erister Hall was born in 1932. His family were sharecroppers in Forest Grove, Mississippi. He acquired a nickname, Rick. His mother left home when he was only four years old. He grew up with his grandparents, father and sister in Franklin County, Alabama, where Hall learned to play guitar. Later, during his military service, he played in a band and started thinking about a career in music.
After his stint in the army, he took a job in Florence at Reynolds Aluminum. He married in 1955, but within eighteen months, his wife Faye died in a car crash. This tragedy was compounded by the death of his father just two weeks later in a farm accident. Hall sought solace in alcohol and went through some tough times. He also joined a local music group called Carmol Taylor and the Country Pals, playing guitar, mandolin and fiddle, touring the local area and playing on a weekly radio show on WERH in Hamilton. As he recovered from the dual tragedies of 1957, he set up a new group with Billy Sherrill and Dan Penn, which they named the Fairlanes. It was during this time that Hall started writing songs, with some success. Roy Orbison, George Jones and Brenda Lee all recorded songs that he had written during the late 1950s.
In 1959 Tom Stafford offered to form a music publishing company with Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill, which they called FAME, Florence Alabama Music Enterprises. It operated out of one of the rooms above a pharmacy in Florence, which was owned by Stafford’s father. Tom had set up a small recording facility there, which he called SPAR, Stafford Publishing and Recording. He had also formed a song-writing partnership with a young singer called Arthur Alexander. They all worked out of the same building. Many of the young musicians who were later to help establish FAME Studios came to SPAR.
Suddenly, in 1960, Hall was left with nothing, when his two partners dissolved the partnership, possibly because they found Hall too demanding. Fortunately, he decided to carry on without them. He paid a dollar to keep the FAME name, borrowed some money and set up a studio in an old tobacco warehouse on Wilson Dam Road in Muscle Shoals in 1961, which he called FAME studio. Sherrill left the partnership soon after Hall, as he was offered a job at Sam Phillips’ new studio in Nashville. He went on to work with some of Country music’s top names, including George Jones and Tammy Wynette.
Meanwhile, one of Rick Hall’s first recordings in the Wilson Dam Road studio was a song called “You Better Move On”, which he recorded with that young black singer from SPAR Studio, Arthur Alexander. Hall took the tape to Nashville and tried to find a record company interested in leasing the recording. After a number of rejections, Noel Ball signed a deal at Dot Records. Ball took not just the recording but Alexander too! Hall watched as the single went on to achieve gold record status. Hall had signed a contract that gave him just 2% of sales income from the song, but it sold well enough to subsidise the building of a new studio in Avalon Road, for which Hall retained the FAME name.
Hall sought advice from Owen Bradley, a producer from Nashville, in the design of the new facility. The building was twenty feet by seventy feet, with just one studio space. Bradley added echo chambers, which were a key element of the studio’s rich sound.
Rick Hall in the FAME Studio 2014
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith (Wikimedia Commons)
The session musicians that Hall had brought together at SPAR and at the Wilson Dam Road studio included members of a band called Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, who travelled around in a hearse. Jerry Carrigan, Norbert Putnam and David Briggs were young, but they had style! Together with Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery, Spooner Oldham and Terry Thompson, they now became the first session men at Avalon Road and started to build a reputation that was later to bring a string of big names to Muscle Shoals.
Norbert Putnam has spoken about the music that they wanted to play: “Our entire orientation was R&B. We were strictly young kids who loved soul music.” The simple set-up in the studio suited these songs, with open-miked recording and low amplification.
In several ways, Hall’s story echoes that of Jim Stewart at Stax Records. Like Stewart, Hall grew up in an environment where Country music was dominant. Both these men were, however, attracted to music of Black origin and opened the doors of their studios to everyone. It was a surprising thing to do, especially in the southern states where segregation was deeply embedded. Hall has explained the importance of this decision: “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’.
He was fortunate to find in Dan Penn and the Pallbearers a group of young session musicians who had the ability to deliver the sound that he was striving for and a budding songwriter, who would go on to write hundreds of songs.
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith Library of Congress (Wikimedia Commons)
