Rick Hall, right, with Robert “Bumps” Blackwell and Little Richard, left, at Fame Studio, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 1970 | Getty Images |tc504
The record producer Roe Erister “Rick” Hall, who produced a number of sessions for various artists which were released on Chess labels, died on 2 January 2018.
In 1960 with two partners he started Fame (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) and opened a first primitive studio above a drugstore. The partnership was dissolved in 1961, and Hall kept the Fame name.
That year Arthur Alexander came in with a song he had written, a mid-tempo country-inflected R&B ballad called You Better Move On. Hall liked it, put a small group of musicians together for a recording session, and took the tape to Nashville, 120 miles away, where he licensed it to Dot Records. The record was a hit and the $10,000 Hall earned was used to build a better studio.
One of the many Chess released recordings made at Fame and produced by Rick Hall is appended.
