The famed producer/songwriter had worked with many, including Elvis, and he even co-write "Do Right Man - Do Right Woman" for Aretha Franklin.

RIP

Chips Moman, Hit-Making Producer and Songwriter, Dies at 79
By William Grimes JUNE 14, 2016

Chips Moman, a producer and songwriter who helped define the Memphis sound in soul music in the 1960s, generated dozens of pop, soul and country hits and helped resuscitate Elvis Presley’s career in the late ’60s, died on Monday in LaGrange, Ga. He was 79.

The cause was complications of emphysema, said Donny Turner, a friend.

Mr. Moman was a session guitarist at the renowned Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles in the late 1950s when he teamed up with the founders of Stax Records in Memphis, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. At Gold Star, he had paid close attention to the engineers and producers as they worked, and at Stax, he applied his newly learned lessons, producing Carla Thomas’s Top 10 hit “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)” in 1960 and William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” in 1961.

After a dispute with Stax, Mr. Moman created American Sound Studio with settlement money from a lawsuit against his former employers and assembled a dynamic house band, known informally as the Memphis Boys. Between 1965 and 1971, the studio accounted for more than 120 records on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, beginning with the Gentrys’ “Keep On Dancing.”

Artists who recorded at American Sound included the Box Tops (“The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby”), Neil Diamond (“Sweet Caroline”), B. J. Thomas (“Hooked on a Feeling”), Joe Tex (“I Gotcha”), Dusty Springfield (“Son of a Preacher Man”) and Wilson Pickett (“I’m in Love” and “I’m a Midnight Mover”).

With Dan Penn, Mr. Moman wrote the soul classics “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” for Aretha Franklin and “The Dark End of the Street” for James Carr. He also played lead guitar on Ms. Franklin’s first breakout hit, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You).”

Perhaps his greatest triumph as a producer came in 1969, when Presley, who had not had a hit record since 1965, did an end run around his controlling manager, Col. Tom Parker, and decided to record at American Sound, where Mr. Moman tapped into Presley’s roots in country and blues music.

The sessions yielded four hit singles — “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Don’t Cry Daddy” and “Kentucky Rain” — and two career-defining platinum albums: “From Elvis in Memphis, ” which The Daily Telegraph of London in 2009 called “the pinnacle of Presley’s midcareer return to glory,” and “From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis,” a mixture of live and studio recordings.
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At a news conference after the sessions, Presley said, “We have some hits, don’t we, Chips?” Mr. Moman replied, “Maybe some of your biggest.”

Mr. Moman went on to produce some of country music’s biggest stars, notably Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.

Lincoln Wayne Moman was born on June 12, 1937, in LaGrange, where his parents, Abraham Lincoln Moman and the former Mildred DeBerry, worked in textile mills and, after World War II, moved the family to a farm. He started playing guitar when he was 3, accompanying his mother as she sang.

After leaving school at 14, he went to live with relatives in Memphis. Warren Smith, a rockabilly star who recorded for the Memphis label Sun, heard Mr. Moman strumming his guitar in a drugstore and asked him to accompany him at an Arkansas club on a bill with Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison.

Mr. Moman toured with Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and, after teaming with the rockabilly artists Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, went to Los Angeles and found a niche at Gold Star. His nickname came from his skill at the poker table.

After returning to Memphis, Mr. Moman began playing guitar at sessions for Satellite, a fledgling country label that evolved into Stax, which Mr. Moman helped establish as an R&B powerhouse. As a producer and engineer, he worked with Rufus Thomas, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, and the Mar-Keys. He left Stax in 1962, shortly after Booker T. & the M.G.’s recorded their hit “Green Onions.”

While struggling to get American Sound Studio off the ground, Mr. Moman did session work at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., playing on recordings by Ms. Franklin and Mr. Pickett, and wrote songs.

A local garage band, the Gentrys, bailed him out with “Keep On Dancing,” which reached No. 4 on the pop charts and eventually sold more than a million records. “They were just kids, and I wasn’t much more,” Mr. Moman told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis in 2008. “But that got me started to the point where I could afford to hire a secretary.”

The secretary was Sandy Posey, who recorded the 1966 hit “Born a Woman” for Mr. Moman. “After that, people started calling me to produce records,” he told The Commercial Appeal.

Among his discoveries was Bobby Womack, who started out as a guitarist and songwriter at the studio and went on to record his own songs, starting with “What Is This?,” “It’s Gonna Rain” and “More Than I Can Stand.”

Mr. Moman’s phenomenal run at American Sound — one week the studio accounted for a quarter of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 — eventually slowed, and he closed the business in 1972.

In 1971, he married the songwriter Toni Wine. The marriage ended in divorce. Mr. Moman is survived by his wife, the former Jane Calhoun; a sister, Angeli Moman; a son, Casey; and a daughter, Monique Moman.

After starting an unsuccessful label in Atlanta, Mr. Moman moved to Nashville, where he and Larry Butler wrote “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” for Mr. Thomas. It rose to the top of the pop and country charts in 1975 and won the Grammy Award for best country song.

Mr. Moman soon established himself as one of the most successful producers in country music, often working with the renegade artists associated with the so-called outlaw movement. With Bobby Emmons, he wrote “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” for Waylon Jennings. He produced “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” a duet with Mr. Jennings and Willie Nelson, and Mr. Nelson’s version of the ballad “You Were Always on My Mind.”

Over the next 12 years in Nashville, he worked with Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash, Tommy Roe, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Milsap, Tammy Wynette and Billy Joe Royal. He produced “Highwayman,” the first studio album by the country supergroup the Highwaymen, consisting of Mr. Cash, Mr. Kristofferson, Mr. Jennings and Mr. Nelson.

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Moman was lured back to Memphis by the mayor and a prominent banker who hoped to revive the city’s former reputation as a music capital. He quickly recorded the album “Class of ’55,” a reunion of the Sun artists Mr. Cash, Mr. Perkins, Mr. Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. But an ill-fated Ringo Starr album, never released, put an end to the Memphis experiment.

Mr. Moman returned to Nashville, where he worked successfully for another decade before returning to his hometown in the mid-1990s.

In 2012, the blog Nashville Cream asked Mr. Moman to describe the sound he created at his Memphis studio. ”I don’t know how I would describe it,” he said. “Simple. Only way I would know how is to say, ‘Listen to this, and listen to that.’”

[Edited 6/15/16 18:50pm]