First Published in Country Music International – January 1999

Born in the Deep South of Birmingham, Alabama, Barry Beckett served his musical apprenticeship with the prestigious Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section before his soaring career as a producer took him to the heights of Music City

Barry Beckett, a world-reowned producer as well as legendary keyboard player, is a product of America's Deep South. Musically he is immersed in the blues, rock'n'roll, soul and country music.

As a session musician he has played on hundreds of recordings running the whole musical gamut from Paul Simon through Bob Dylan to Dire Straits to the Oak Ridge Boys to Vince Gill and Aretha Franklin.

His credits as an A-team producer are as equally impressive, and alongside chart-topping country hits by the likes of Eddy Raven, Lorrie Morgan, Alabama, Lionel Cartwright, Lee Roy Parnell, Confederate Railroad and Neal McCoy, he has also produced Bob Seger, Glenn Frey, Hank Williams Jr. Feargal Sharkey, Lynyrd Skynyrd, KT Oslin, T. Graham Brown, and Etta James.

A native of Birmingham, Alabama, he began learning Floyd Cramer piano licks as a teenager, assisted in no small way by his musically-inclined mother. “She gave me piano lessons”' he recalled. “Then she got me in a band. She figured I'd like to play in a band. We were playing rock'n'roll, late-1950s music of that time. We played a lot of clubs and bars. A little later, I got a job playing the piano in a dancing school.”

Growing up in the triangle between Nashville, Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Beckett listened to a wide cross-section of music, everything from Ray Charles to Jerry Lee Lewis to Elvis to George Jones. His teenage years, like so much of his life, have been consumed by music. “I got tired of going to college,” he says. “I knew a band I'd been working with in Birmingham and they got some work down in Florida, so I went with them.”

After moving to Pensacola, Florida, he was hired to play a session with James and Bobby Purify at Fame Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He was soon asked to move to Muscle Shoals permanently to fill the keyboard slot vacated by Spooner Oldham. “That was about 1968,” he explained. “There was Roger Hawkins on drums, David Hood on bass. We replaced the earlier Muscle Shoals band of David Briggs and Jerry Carrigan that had moved to Nashville.”

An integral part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, he started getting involved in production around 1969 with an r&b duo called Mel & Tim, on Stax Records. An in-demand session player, during the 1970s and early 1980s, Barry played keyboards on recordings by such diverse acts as Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Delbert McClinton and the Oak Ridge Boys.

His first hit as a producer came with The Sanford Townsend Band's Smoke From A Distant Fire in 1977. That was followed by Mary MacGregor's Torn Between Two Lovers, which was his first Number One record on the pop charts that same year. His production career started taking off in a big way when he worked on Bob Dylan's Slow TRAIN COMING and Dire Straits' COMMUNIQUE in 1979. That was followed the next year by big-selling albums with Bob Seger and Glenn Frey.

Like so many of the musicians down in Muscle Shoals, Barry had always had one ear turned towards Nashville, and he started hearing things from Music City that he really liked. “People like Rodney Crowell and John Anderson were doing some real interesting things in Nashville,” he said. “They were putting a little bit of soul and feel into country that I loved.”

“I was always into all music and I like a lot of the country music,” he continues. “As a band at Muscle Shoals, we pretty much had a lot of freedom to play. We were dependent upon coming up with ideas on the floor, whereas Nashville was not that way at all. It was much more conservative with set arrangements.”

He began working in Nashville in 1984, eventually moving there in 1985 and started bringing a lot of fresh ideas to Music Row. He became director of A&R at Warner Bros. Nashville and began co-producing Hank Williams Jr with Jim Ed Norman. “He had pretty much broken through with country,” he says of Hank Jr. “The first album we worked on, MONTANA CAFE, took him to a new level and went gold.”

The next album that Barry produced, HANK LIVE, also went gold, and BORN TO BOOGIE went platinum, winning CMA Album Of The Year in 1988. He left Warners in 1987 to concentrate on his production career, but continued to produce Hank Williams Jr. In 1989, There's A Tear In My Beer, a posthumous duet between Hank Jr. and Hank Sr won the CMA Vocal Event of the Year.

He had now become the owner of Beckett Productions, and merged back into rock'n'roll, producing Grammy-nominated Etta James' SEVEN YEAR ITCH and STICKIN' TO MY GUNS, as well as Delbert McClinton's I'M WITH YOU, Bob Seger's THE FIRE INSIDE, and Lynyrd Skybyrd's THE LAST REBEL and ENDANGERED SPECIES. He also began producing many international acts including the Waterboys, Doro, Brendan Croker, JP Capdevielle and Anne Haigis from Germany.

He had not forsaken country, though, and as well as playing hundreds of sessions, he was responsible for the production of several platinum albums by Confederate Railroad, not to mention recordings by Lee Roy Parnell, Asleep At The Wheel, T Graham Brown and Bobbie Cryner.

Having proved that he could turn out radio hits as effortlessly as any producer in town, Beckett was called upon to ignite the career of Neal McCoy, one of country music's most exciting live performers, yet at the time in 1994, almost totally ignored by country radio.

“When they asked me to go talk with him, I think he'd had had three albums out,” Barry recalled. “I went out to see him and realised this guy's not country. Country is a very general thing right now. It used to be very specific; if you heard a country singer, you knew he was a country singer.”

“Neal has that bluesy feel, all that he needed was a great song. He needed a song that would take advantage of his style and the biggest problem was to go round and find great songs like that. There are not that many writers in Nashville who really understand that combination between country and blues.”

McCoy and Beckett hit pay-dirt with No Doubt About It and Wink, the latter topping the country charts for four weeks. That same year he produced the late Tammy Wynette's WITHOUT WALLS duet album which included such greats as Sting, Elton John, Aaron Neville, Smokey Robinson and Wynonna. Two years ago, Barry joined forces with Charles Tharp to form BTM Records and signed Wayne Toups as their first artist.

“I started the label really to have some fun,” he says. “I found a blues act, Wayne Toups. He had a great following down in Louisiana and Texas. His record, THE NEW BLUES SESSIONS, did well, sold around 25,000, which is pretty good. Then we signed Vern Gosdin, who is a great country singer, a great blues singer.”

As well as being the head of a record label, Beckett still finds time for independent productions. Last spring he took young Dutch singer Ilse DeLange in the studio and produced the stunning WHEEL OF HURT album, which he said has been the most enjoyable project he's been involved in during his 30-year career.

“She is a natural” he enthuses “Very few acts that I've worked with are naturals. She has an unbelievable natural southern accent which really surprised me when I first heard her. To work with a great singer with