Jimmy Gray Hall

Singer-songwriter Jimmy Gray Hall was born December 28, 1948, in Nashville, Tennessee 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. He created numerous promotional singles for A&M Records, Epic, and CBS solo and as the lead singer of the band Thumper. He recorded a solo album for CBS Records, but never re-recorded the lyrics for several of the songs, and so the album was never released (according to label exec Stephen Paley). The album was produced at the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with CBS Records A&R exec Stephen Paley and Muscle Shoals Sound Section alum Eddie Hinton producing. His music found influences in soul, funk, rock, and bluegrass. The unreleased album was released to critics, with Billboard Magazine labeling the album as 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," which was re-released on "45 KINGS, VOLUME III," and referred to as part of the"blue-eyed soul" movement of the 1970s. Other songs from the album include the biographical "YOU ONCE SAID" and "TWO SONS" which hinted at Hall's family, as well as trouble to come. In the years that he recorded the singles (released as 45s), Hall did session and tour work for Linda Ronstadt and Sly & The Family Stone, 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 felony 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. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.