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Date Posted: 10/ 8/09 3:52pm
Author: Bobbe Seymout
Subject: R.I.P. Old Friends

Hello fellow players,

The passing of Shelby Singleton yesterday has hit me very hard because of our personal friendship and business relationship. About two years ago, I was wondering where to go with my Rhythmatic project and thought I’d go by Shelby’s record company, Sun Records and see what he would recommend for me promoting my recording project.

And as most of you know, it was near impossible to even get an appointment with any record company in Nashville. If they don’t call you first, you don’t get to see them.

Because of our past relationship, Shelby listened to my CD in his office and exclaimed, “You don’t need to go anywhere else. Let Sun Records be your plugin to the industry. But let’s get you on iTunes. Give me several of your CDs and we’ll get you where the whole world can hear what you’re doing.”

This was my latest business deal with Shelby. Some of the first ones were even more interesting. Like the time Shelby hired me to come into his studio in the early seventies to duplicate the string section on the Jonathan Livingston Seagull movie soundtrack.

I was duplicating string sections on major record sessions with a fuzz tone and tape echoplex and Shelby thought that I could do it. After a couple days in the studio, he must have been happy because he sent me home with a check. I told Shelby that the amount was too much, that he had overpaid me.

His reply was, “Do you have any idea how much it would have cost me for 24 string players, an arranger and a conductor?”

So I put the check in my pocket and went home.

Shelby used steel guitar and dobro on almost every session he put out and the way he felt about the sideman musician should endear him in the hearts of everyone that plays or likes music.

Below is the article from the Nashville Tennessean newspaper.

Shelby Singleton died just before 1 p.m. Wednesday in Alive Hospice Care at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, at age 77.

Mr. Singleton was a renegade producer, record executive, song-hunter and promoter who helped fuse country and R&B music in the 1960s and who perpetuated the Sun Records label since 1969. He had been battling brain cancer.

“A lot of people in this town owe a lot to Shelby,” said friend and protégé Jerry Kennedy, himself a famed producer. “He created a place here for a lot of us. Shelby did things in a different way. He was a maverick.”

Mr. Singleton produced Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” a No. 1 country hit that became one of the biggest independent records in Nashville history when released on his Plantation Records. He was an essential enabler in the careers of Ray Stevens, Jerry Reed, Roger Miller, Merle Kilgore and many others, He may be the only producer to record three No. 1 country records in one day on three different artists: Stevens, Leroy Van Dyke and Joe Dowell.

He was also, as Belmont University music business professor Don Cusic noted, “A wheeler-dealer.” And, as Kennedy said, “A clique-buster.” Most everyone who came into contact with him agreed that he was a character. He was also the owner of a brand new Rolls Royce.

“The Rolls came in on Monday,” Cusic said. “I’d seen him last week and he told me he’d ordered it. He said he’d always wanted one, and he said, ‘At my age and in my condition, I figured I’d better get it soon.’”

If Mr. Singleton’s career in music is any indication, it’s likely a very, very nice car. And he probably got it at a good price. During the early 1960s, he headed Mercury Records’ Smash imprint, where over and again he found quality recordings and viable artists, snapped them up for Smash and released hit records.

He heard a Texas pop duo named Jill and Ray on a recording of a song called “Hey Paula.” The recording was soon reissued on Smash, but not before Mr. Singleton changed the duo’s name to Paul and Paula. Jill and Ray didn’t like the idea at first, but they grew used to it by February 1963, when the song topped American pop charts.

A year earlier, he heard Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby,” a song that featured distinctive harmonica from a young Delbert McClinton. That one became a No. 1 hit for Smash after Mr. Singleton bought the master recording. With Smash, Mr. Singleton also presided over a roster that grew to include Roger Miller, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby Hebb, Ivory Joe Hunter, Pete Drake, Patti Page and James Brown. That roster included artists of varying styles, and it was not uncommon for Mr. Singleton to preside over sessions that featured African-American artists and white musicians.

“He brought (African-American) artists to town and put them up at his house,” said Kennedy, who often engineered sessions that Mr. Singleton produced, and who also produced hundreds of records for Kennedy-owned labels. “He brought people like Clyde McPhatter, Brook Benton and Ruth Brown here, and the only hotel where they were allowed to stay was the old Eldorado, in North Nashville. So most of the time, the artists stayed with Shelby.”

When Mr. Singleton heard Roger Miller singing witty, up-tempo numbers that were at odds with the serious-sounding material Miller was recording for RCA, Mr. Singleton signed Miller and told him he’d been singing the wrong songs. Miller immediately entered the studio and recorded 16 sides, including “Dang Me,” and his career turned a corner. And when Mr. Singleton — at the time a southeastern regional promotions man for Mercury — heard Stevens singing in an Atlanta nightclub, he soon offered the young performer a job in Nashville.

“When I left that job, he did the same thing for Jerry Reed,” Stevens said. “Shelby brought a lot of people to town. And working with him on the music later on, he had good instincts. Sometimes he did things I didn’t think were right at the time, but it turned out the decisions he made were right. Like, ‘Ahab’ was a four-minute song. He sliced it up and made it shorter. That bothered me at the time, but there’s no way the song would have been a radio hit if it had been four minutes long.”

In 1967, Mr. Singleton left Mercury and started Shelby Singleton Productions Inc. with $1,000. Twenty months later, his corporate value was estimated at more than $2 million. Much of that increase was due to “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” a song from the pen of Tom T. Hall. On Friday, July 26, 1968, Mr. Singleton produced Riley’s recording with featured instrumentation on the “pickin’ Dobro” from Kennedy. That night, he rushed the finished product to influential WSM disc jockey Ralph Emery. By daybreak, it was a hit: a literal overnight success. In a country music era dominated by Music Row’s major labels, Mr. Singleton’s little Plantation label sold millions of copies of “Harper Valley P.T.A.”

On July 1, 1969, Mr. Singleton purchased Sun Records, the label for which Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich and others had recorded. Mr. Singleton began mining many of those artists’ back catalogs for release on Sun, and he oversaw licensing of reissues and the marketing of the ever-popular Sun Records T-shirts and other souvenirs.

“He was the all-around record guy,” Kennedy said. “Just a great merchandising guy, promoter and producer. He did it all, and he seemed to get along with everybody. Shelby was one of the biggest-hearted people around.”

Stevens, himself one of the most unique souls to smack boot heels on a Music City sidewalk, said, “Shelby Singleton was absolutely one of a kind.”

When Ruth McGinnis first came to Nashville from New York City, I was playing a job in southern Kentucky that was a live radio show and we backed up new stars like Tracy Lawrence, Trisha Yearwood, Clinton Gregory and many others.

I put the band together and used such great players as Steven Hinson, Willy Ackerman from Hee-Haw, Buddy Spicher, Nashville studio player and several other all-star musicians.

One of the fiddle players called one night and said they couldn’t make and suggested I call Ruth. Since it was about 75 miles from Nashville to the show in Kentucky, I told Ruth she could ride with me.

I was astounded when I met her at how tall and beautiful she was. But Ruth didn’t have any experience in country music. She couldn’t talk the language, didn’t know any country licks, didn’t know any songs in our C&W field, but I could tell she had mastery of her instrument so I yelled instructions to her from the bandstand all night.

She cried all the way home and asked me to work with her and teach her the Nashville country ropes. I hired her permanently and at the end of six months, she was a very good country musician. But to my astonishment, she auditioned for the Nashville Symphony and they hired her immediately.

She did country jobs with me on the weekends and played great symphony gigs and worked many reading jobs throughout the years to come. She even worked as a personal trainer for many of Nashville’s stars.

A brilliant talented musician that learned fast, had beauty and personality that Dolly Parton would be envious of, Ruth McGinnis will be missed deeply by this town and everyone that knew her.

Below is an article from another one of her many friends. I appeared in the Nashville Tennessean newspaper.

Amy Grant will always remember her friend Ruth McGinnis. The classically trained violinist and author, who frequently collaborated with Grant, died on Tuesday at her Nashville home after a battle with ovarian cancer. She was 52.

Grant has written a tribute for The Tennessean about her friend:
"The life of a musician is unique and beautiful in its never ending connectedness to others. Through her music, Ruth McGinnis was able to move so many of us to appreciate the exquisite beauty of a well-played melody on her violin. Evening-gowned or barefoot, she gave her whole self to extracting the emotion of the music and of the moment.

"And oh, the moments we shared. I don't believe there was a dry eye in the house when Ruth played 'An Ashoken Farewell' with the Nashville Symphony for the opening of the Schermerhorn back in September of 2006. Her hair was just beginning to thin from her first round of chemo treatments, having been diagnosed with ovarian cancer two months earlier. In her grace and dignity she personified the 'terrible beauty of life' that so inspired her artistry.

"One of my favorite memories of Ruth was on a trip to Camp Hole in the Wall Gang, in the backwoods of Connecticut during the summer of 1998. Several friends from Nashville had made the trip, and we found ourselves enjoying the porch of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward's private cabin overlooking the lake. Gazing out toward the water, with just the company of old friends, Ruth started playing 'Amazing Grace.' As the last note was fading from the strings, we heard a long slow breath releasing and turned to find those legendary Newman eyes taking in Ruth and all of her magic.

"This woman has captivated us with her music and stories for years, performing with her trio at Davis-Kidd on Friday nights, playing with the symphony during the early years of the annual Tennessee Christmas Concerts, participating in the three-year run of Sam's Place at the Ryman Auditorium.

"I've made music with Ruth from The Kennedy Center to the hillsides of Williamson County where we serenaded just the sky. How I will miss her easy laughter, her gentle eyes and her articulate voice. I'm so grateful for her recordings, through which her artistry lives on. To reference Frederick Buechner, 'As long as you remember me, I am never entirely gone.' Ruth McGinnis, I will remember you."

Another tragic death in the industry, one of my great idols as a western swing musician growing up out west. I was one of thousands of fans of the great Leon Chambers. Leon was a lead guitarist in the western swing world, living and working out of Dallas.

Leon played most of the Dallas steel guitar shows and worked with all of the great stars and musicians in the Texas arena of western swing, working with the Texas Starlighters, Hank Thompson, Bob Wills and many of the bands that Maurice Anderson worked with in Dallas and Fort Worth.

He worked many of the famous clubs in Dallas and Fort Worth such as the Stagecoach in Fort Worth, Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, the Blue Room in Dallas, the Bridgeport Club in Dallas and many of the country and western music clubs in Grapevine, Texas before the airport, DFW, was built on top of this music strip.

This man’s talents have done much to influence the younger players of a bygone era. His Fender Telecaster and two four-ten Bassman cabinets were all he needed to impress anyone. No fuzz, no echo, no tricks of any kind, just the correct pure notes at any speed you wanted to hear them.

Great chords and tone, personality and respect for his fellow musicians were his trademarks. A giant among giants, Leon Chambers, western swings greatest.

Respectfully,
Bobbe

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