US singer, songwriter.
Born: December 28, 1948, Nashville, Tennessee.
Died: June 3, 1984, Big Bear, California.
Born to Southern Baptist parents. His father was a big-band trumpet player who encouraged his interest in music, which grew exponentially after the family moved to Pasadena, California in the 1950s.
Though he created numerous promotional singles for A&M Records, Epic, and CBS as the lead singer of the band Thumper, he released only one LP — the solo effort “POSSESSED BY THE MOON,” on CBS Records. The album was produced at the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with CBS Records President Stephen Paley and Muscle Shoals Sound Section alum Eddie Hinton producing.
His music found influences in soul, funk, rock, and bluegrass. When the album was released, Billboard Magazine took note in a blurb on its cover, calling it a “promising debut” and Hall “a musician to watch in the years to come.” The title track of “Possessed by the Moon” was an instrumental on which Hall played many of the instruments, but the best-known song would become "Be That Way”, from 1974, which was re-released on “Fat and Funky: 45 Kings III”, in 2006 and referred to as part of the ”blue-eyed soul” movement of the 1970s. Other songs from the album include the biographical “TWO SONS,” which hinted at Hall’s family, as well as trouble to come.
After the release of the album, Hall did session and tour work for Linda Ronstadt and others. Hall’s turbulent personal life, including a serious drug addiction, took its toll, as Hall spent the next decade in and out of prison for crimes including drug possession, weapons charges, and armed bank robbery. After being implicated in more than 30 bank robberies in Southern California, he died in a police shootout after a high-speed chase in Big Bear, California, at age 35, on June 3, 1984.