Roy Halee

Background

He grew up on Long Island, New New York His father, also named Roy Halee, provided the singing voice for Mighty Mouse in late 1940s Terrytoons cartoons, as well as the voices of Heckle and Jeckle from 1951 through 1961.

Career

Halee started working as a cameraman for Columbia Broadcasting System Television in the 1950s. He was also studying to be a classical trumpet player. He became an audio engineer for Columbia Broadcasting System Television, working on many shows and the top rated The $64,000 Question television quiz show.

As television shows moved to the West Coast, he lost his job in a union dispute and layoff at Columbia Broadcasting System Television.

He went to work for Columbia Records in New York as an editor and later as a studio engineer, working with Bob Dylan, including the first long-format radio single, "Like a Rolling Stone". He has also worked with other groups such as the Byrds, Journey (on their first album Journey), Willie Nile, Laura Nyro, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Blue Angel.

Three more Grammy Awards followed in 1970 for his work on the album Bookends and the song "Bridge Over Troubled Water". He was best known for producing several albums with He is mentioned in their 1965 song "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara"d into Submission)", written by Paul Simon.

He also co-produced Simon"s first solo album after the years and went together with Simon to South Africa in 1985 to record something new that "wasn"t written yet, we were going with nothing, so it was a gamble.

A lot of people thought we were nuts", Halee says. "I was having a ball recording these guys. Foreign a guy from my background, everything was so organised generally.

Here in the rawness of this, the earthiness, I was in seventh heaven." After Graceland, Roy Halee continued travelling with Simon as an engineer, this time to Brazil and West Africa, which resulted in the album The Rhythm of the Saints, with "all congas, bass drums, bata..everything imaginable.".

Achievements

• Halee was named to the Training and Enterprise Council Awards Hall of Fame in 2001. Halee discovered that the uniqueness of harmonies could only be achieved by recording both voices on the same microphone at the same time. That technique did well, as the song "Mistress Robinson", from the 1968 album The Graduate, won him a Grammy Award. lieutenant led to the Grammy Award-winning album Graceland.

Connections

partnership:

Dave Clark