RC Hall In the PRess
From the Telluride Daily Planet
For Rico, Colorado’s RC Hall, music is in his bones. The self-described “music mongrel” was bound to pick up a guitar and croon after being raised around the sounds of classic bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin.
He explained his earliest musical memory involves Hank Snow and the family’s Ford Galaxie 500.
“My first intro to music? My old man bellowing out Hank Snow tunes in the old Galaxie 500 on family road trips when I was a kid,” Hall said. “I grew up in backcountry Missouri listening to The Beatles, Skynyrd, Iron Maiden and Zeppelin, alongside ’80s and ’90s country. I may be a musical mongrel, but lately country and Americana styles have drawn me back in.”
Read the complete article by Justin Criado in The Daily Planet.
A profile on RC Hall, from Americana Music Magazine
When asked about his introduction to music, RC Hall recalls, “my old man bellowing out Hank Snow tunes in the old Galaxie 500 on family road trips when I was a kid.” He adds, “I grew up in back country Missouri listening to The Beatles, Skynyrd, Iron Maiden and Zeppelin, alongside ’80s and ’90s country.”
RC has lived what to some would seem like many lives. At 55, he’s been a wrangler, ski bum, mountain guide, and even a National Geographic photographer and writer, which literally led him to the ends of the Earth, including Antarctica, Patagonia and Mozambique on once-in-a-lifetime assignments. But after suffering burnout, RC put his camera away for the first time in years, and reacquainted himself with an old friend: the guitar.
I had never intended to be a singer-songwriter, but in the winter of 2011-12, I spent six months woodshedding by myself in a cabin in the Ozarks trying to become a competent chicken picker. With all that time to myself, songs just started popping out. I wrote them down and kept playing them, along with my favorite covers.”
“I have been in some wild situations in my life, but I have never been so terrified as I was at that first gig at the VFW Hall in Buena Vista,” RC says. It was enough to keep him moving forward. He had borrowed a guitar from a “cowboy” singer that night, and when he handed the instrument, the guy said, “You got it, son!…It felt really good to hear that…I just decided to keep chipping away at it.”
By 2015, RC had started laying down some demos at his home studio. When he hit 55 years on the planet, he felt it was “now or never” for his pursuit of music. “In 2021, I decided to contact Lloyd Maines to see if he would produce an album for me.” Hall says. His “crappy home-made demos” were enough to get Lloyd’s attention and, a year and-a-half later he has produced his first offering, Wood, Wire and Whiskey.