- Born: January 06, 1907, Big Stone Gap, VA
- Died: March 03, 1984, Nashville, TN
- Active: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s
- Genres: Country
- Instrument: Vocals, Guitar
- Representative Albums: "Roy Rocks
- Representative Songs: "Sweet Love on My Mind", "Three Alley Cats", "Off-beat Boogie
Biography
It's likely that no one will ever be able to sort out 100 percent of the truth about Roy Hall's life -- especially as he used a borrowed name for much of his career, and his legend still seems to get printed in lieu of what he claimed to scholar/historian Martin Hawkins was the truth. The legend is pretty well known in rock & roll circles -- born James Faye Hall in Big Stone Gap, VA, in 1922, he learned the piano from a local bluesman who was also a dedicated drinker, with the result that he became a keyboard wizard and also a serious drunkard when he was barely out of his teens. The truth was a bit more mundane, as he explained to Hawkins in a couple of meetings in the mid-'70s. He was, indeed, born James Faye Hall in Big Stone Gap in 1922, but he was introduced to the piano by his mother, and she was his first teacher. He discovered early on that he was a natural pianist, capable of playing by ear as a boy, and formal lessons proved superfluous. He absorbed all manner of influences around him, including country and blues, and one of those players whom he did cite as a major influence was Piano Red aka Willie Perryman, the itinerant pianist 11 years his senior, who began making his name in juke joints, honky tonks, and barrelhouses in Tennessee (and Hall grew up right on the Tennessee border with Virginia), Alabama, and Georgia. Rather ironically, both men, though born a long time before its advent, would play important roles in the early history of rock & roll. By the time he was 11, he'd played enough around Bristol, VA, straddling the Tennessee border, that he was picked to play backup behind Uncle Dave Macon on a traveling broadcast offshoot of the Grand Ole Opry. That was in 1933 or 1934. Over the ensuing years, he played with lots of other outfits in the Roanoke, VA, area, and sometime in the mid-'40s joined an existing sibling act called the Hall Brothers, built around banjo man Clayton Hall and fiddler Saford Hall. There had been a third brother, named Roy Hall, who had played piano but had died in a car accident in 1943. It was a natural jump, especially as the name was open and he was filling the slot in the group, but James Faye Hall picked up the name Roy Hall himself after the trio quit, initially so that he could extend his string of popularity by association. Whatever the motivations, it stuck, and so did the success, to the degree that Hall was leading his own band, the Cohutta Mountain Boys. Named for the Cohutta area where he lived in Appalachia, they included Tommy Odum and Bud White on lead and rhythm guitar, respectively, Flash Griner on bass, and fiddle player Frankie Brumbalough. Hall played piano and did some of the singing, but he left a lot of the vocalizing to his bandmates.They were good enough so that they actually got to cut some sides in Detroit, MI, for the Fortune label, making their debut in 1949 with "Dirty Boogie," a classic piece of hillbilly boogie sung by Brumbalough. The single, which appeared with two different B-sides, was a serious jukebox hit around the upper Midwest and he followed it up with two much more traditional country records that didn't get quite as much notice. The records got them gigs, however, including one as the backing band to a singer named Tennessee Earnie Ford who, in turn, helped get them some gigs in Nashville, where he was based. But where Ford was already recording for Capitol Records, then an up-and-coming major label, not quite a decade old and growing, the best recording deal that Hall and his band could make was with Bullet Records, a Nashville concern that was on its way out.
The band continued a journeyman existence, playing in Tennessee and Kentucky and making its way back to Detroit as a base, where Hall eventually put together a new group, called the Eagles, which cut sides for Citation with Flash Griner on lead vocals. None of these -- not even the estimable "Skinny Minny from Texas City" -- did the kind of business needed to sustain a group, and by the early '50s, Hall had moved back to Nashville and was running a club, known in various recollections as either the Music Box or the Musicians' Hideaway, where he also played piano, picking up odd session work with various musicians, in the recording studio and at the Grand Ole Opry. The next few years saw Hall working in relative anonymity, crossing near the orbits of less talented people who seemed to be getting somewhere, while he always ended up back at the Hideaway, behind his own piano, nursing a drink or two (or more). At one point in late 1952, he even reactivated the Cohutta Mountain Boys, and cut sides for Fortune Records with Skeeter Davis, born Mary Frances Pennick; he subsequently played piano on demos by the Davis Sisters, which consisted of Pennick and her non-sibling partner Betty Jack Davis. None of this helped Hall get any steady recording work, and across the decades, he recounted those "lost" years of 1953 and 1954 in colorful terms, claiming that at one point he had
