The big break came in 1961, after the partnership had been dissolved, with Hall keeping the Fame name. They named their company Fame (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) and opened their first primitive studio above a drugstore. He had met one of them, Billy Sherrill, the future producer of Tammy Wynette’s records, when they played together in a band called the Fairlanes. He emerged in 1960 when he and two partners started a company based in Florence, Alabama. Eighteen months later his wife, Faye, died in a car crash, and two weeks after that his father was killed when a tractor Rick had bought him overturned. Rick Hall, right, with Robert “Bumps” Blackwell and Little Richard, left, at Fame Studio, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 1970. Eventually he graduated to guitar and began to play in local country bands while working as a toolmaker. His father, Herman, who worked in a sawmill and later as a sharecropper, was keen on gospel music, and Rick’s first practical involvement in music came at the age of six, when an uncle gave him a mandolin. His mother, Dolly, left the home before his fifth birthday and worked in a bordello. Hall was born in Forest Grove, Mississippi, and brought up in Franklin County, Alabama. But the profound soulfulness of what they had recorded in Alabama caused a sensation when I Never Loved a Man was released a few weeks later, giving Aretha a No 1 hit that set the course of a triumphant career. Towards the end of the session, however, the singer’s then-husband, Ted White, got into a drunken argument with a trumpeter, and when Hall visited Franklin’s hotel later to smooth things over, he and White came to blows.įranklin flew back to New York the next day and never visited Muscle Shoals again. On the first day of a scheduled fortnight, as they recorded a song called I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You), the atmosphere of Hall’s studio was clearly giving Franklin the freedom to express herself without constraint. Wexler believed that taking her to Muscle Shoals, one of a group of four small towns straddling the Tennessee river, would put her back in touch with her roots. Under an earlier contract with the Columbia label, Franklin had made records that failed to exploit the gospel-trained emotional directness of her remarkable voice. The most significant of those visits was in January 1967 by Aretha Franklin and her producer, Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records.
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