As a member of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Barry Beckett was a keyboardist who played with many great names at the pioneering studio in the early 1970s.

And as a producer he made singles and albums with some of music’s biggest names, including Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Etta James and perhaps most significantly Bob Dylan.

Mr Beckett, who died on 10 June, 2009, aged 65, shared the helm with frequent collaborator Jerry Wexler for Dylan’s first two Christian albums, Slow Train Coming (1979) and Saved (1980), as well as the single Gotta Serve Somebody which brought Dylan back into the charts and reaped a Grammy Award.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama on 4 February, 1943, Barry Beckett was a founding member of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, also known as The Swampers, who founded the legendary Muscle Shoals studio in Sheffield, Alabama, in 1969.

Two of the biggest hits that feature his playing were The Staple Singers’ I'll Take You There (1972) and Paul Simon’s Kodachrome (1973), which reached number one on the R&B chart and number two on the pop chart respectively.

His output as a producer in subsequent years ranged from soul to rock to country. He left Muscle Shoals in 1985 to become an A&R man with Warner Bros. in Nashville where one of his biggest successes was co-producing the Country Music Award-winning song There's a Tear In My Beer (1989) for Hank Williams Jr.