About Daryl Hall
Daryl Franklin Hohl , known professionally as Daryl Hall, is an American rock, R&B, and soul singer-songwriter and musician. He is best known as the co-founder and principal lead vocalist of Hall & Oates, with guitarist and songwriter John Oates. Outside of his work in Hall & Oates, he has also released six solo albums, including the 1980 progressive rock collaboration with guitarist Robert Fripp titled Sacred Songs and the 1986 album Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine, which provided his best selling single, "Dreamtime", that peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100. He has also collaborated on numerous works by other artists, such as Fripp's 1979 release Exposure, and Dusty Springfield's 1995 album A Very Fine Love, which produced a UK Top 40 hit with "Wherever Would I Be". Since late 2007, he has hosted the streaming television series Live from Daryl's House, in which he performs alongside other artists, doing a mix of songs from each's catalog. The show has been rebroadcast on a number of cable and satellite channels as well.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Hall scored numerous Billboard chart hits and is regarded as one of the best soul singers of his generation. Fripp, who worked with Hall several times, has written, "Daryl's pipes were a wonder. I have never worked with a more able singer." He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2014. On November 1, 2023, his TV series returned on Daryl Hall's YouTube channel with a new episode featuring Squeeze singer/songwriter Glenn Tilbrook. The new batch of episodes also featured Blackberry Smoke singer/guitarist Charlie Starr, King Crimson guitarist and Daryl Hall solo album producer Robert Fripp, Lisa Loeb and Howard Jones.
Hall was born in Pottstown, a Pennsylvania borough 40 miles from Philadelphia; his family is of German descent. Both of his parents had a background in music; his father came from a choral-group clan and his mother was a vocal coach. He began recording music while a student at Owen J. Roberts High School, from which he graduated in 1964.
At college at Temple University in Philadelphia, he majored in music, while continuing to record. He worked with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff as both an artist and a session musician. During his first semester at Temple, in the fall of 1965, he and four other Temple University students formed the vocal harmony group the Temptones.
They were popular additions to the largely black Philly soul scene, defeating both The Ambassadors and The Delfonics in a contest at the Uptown Theater. The Temptones recorded a handful of singles for Arctic Records, produced by Jimmy Bishop. While performing at the Uptown Theater, Hall formed creative affiliations with artists including Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, and many other top soul singers of the 1960s.
In 1967, Hall met John Oates, who was also an undergraduate at Temple University. According to Daryl Hall, they met when "We got in the middle of a fight at a dance–I have no idea what the fight was about. I guess the Greek letters on one gang's jackets didn't appeal to the other gang. We both beat it out the back and met on the elevator while leaving the place rather quickly." Hall was by then a senior while Oates was a freshman. They played together until Oates transferred to a different school at age 19. Hall did not let Oates' departure discourage him from pursuing his own musical career: he dropped out of college in 1968 and worked with Tim Moore in a short-lived rock band, Gulliver, and released an album on the Elektra Records label. He was a member of the studio group behind the project Electric Indian whose song "Keem-O-Sabe" became a big hit in 1969. In 1969 Hall again began recording songs by other artists, which led to the duo Hall & Oates signing their first record contract in early 1972.
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