Chips Moman

Chips Moman was a renegade, mysterious record producer yet his fingerprints are all over some of his era’s top songs: Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” “In the Ghetto” and “Kentucky Rain;” The Box Tops’ “The Letter;” Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” and Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man.” Moman also worked with The Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson) and the Class of ’55, a project that brought together  Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins.

With years of experience writing about and acting as a confidante, author James L. Dickerson’s perspective on Moman is a unique one. Chips Moman: The Record Producer Whose Genius Change American Music is the success story of a man armed with an eighth-grade education. Moman’s charisma, talent, guile and drive ultimately led to the formation of his American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. The studio’s house musicians, the 827 Thomas Street Band rivaled the much-better known Wrecking Crew. As a top-flight producer, Moman applied their talents like paint on a canvas.

Dickerson traces Moman’s career move to Nashville then back to Memphis where a project for a new studio intended to return that city to its musical glory days went sour. It was the beginning of the end. With a view from the inside, the author compassionately assesses Moman’s mercurial mood swings as an undiagnosed bipolar disorder that self-medication only made worse. As history shows, Moman’s track record speaks for itself and it never hurts to have a biographer who can tell the story.