I’m as guilty as anyone in music journalism of bandying about the word “legend” recklessly in articles, bios and press releases. Depending on the laziness or limitations of the writer, maybe one out of twenty times the appellation might be appropriate — though never when applied to Buddy Cannon.
One of the most distinguished record producers in Nashville history, he’s helmed Number One singles for Kenny Chesney, Reba McEntire, Jamey Johnson, Sara Evans and Joe Nichols among many others. As an A&R executive, he played a central role in discovering such artists as Shania Twain, Billy Ray Cyrus and Sammy Kershaw. He’s an award-winning songwriter too, with hits by Mel Tillis, George Jones, George Strait, Glen Campbell, John Michael Montgomery, Chesney and Kershaw bearing his signature. And in recent years his collaborations as producer and co-writer with Willie Nelson have become an important part of the singer’s legacy.
During my time at CMA, Buddy and I developed a passing acquaintance. Though I wrote a PR bio for his gifted daughter Melonie’s debut release, we never got much further than a friendly nod in the CMA lobby. Once, when I attended a songwriter circle in Boston that included Chesney, we spoke for a minute or two after the show.
Then, in 2015, I saw Buddy one night at The Cannery, during a performanceI I was covering for Acoustic Guitar Magazine by Madisen Ward and Mama Bear as part of the annual Americana Music Festival. I’d heard that he was thinking about doing some work with them, so seeing him there wasn’t a surprise. But having him motion me to join him definitely was.
Turns out he felt the time had come to update his website bio. Would I be able to work with him on this? Absolutely! And so I began researching his story — an epic that began in poverty and culminated in (but by no means ended with) his election to the Country Music Hall of Fame. When we met for our interview in his office in Berry Hill my aim was to flesh out the story with humanizing details. That proved to be no problem at all.
Through most of our time together, Buddy leaned back in his desk chair. He smiled and chuckled freely as I encouraged him to speak freely. On all matters he spoke candidly, pausing only to ask that one or another recollection might be taken off the record. The reason for this usually involved the story having a somewhat juicy punch line.
As a raconteur, Buddy has few peers, owing to his disarming shyness, candor and humor. Sometimes in public, at least as I’ve seen it, he can seem to be a little uncomfortable. Not in private, though. I attribute this to the fact that his most memorable contributions to American music usually trace back to recording or writing sessions, where the work is done with an artist or fellow composer. In these circumstances it’s understood that the results will speak to posterity not through performance but through a process that to me at least seems magical.
There was trust involved in our process too. Without it, it’s impossible to dig into the personal truths behind the personas of those we’re trying to serve. Understandably, most of the artists who had asked me to write their PR profiles declined to let me include our transcript in this book. Buddy is the exception. Knowing him better now, and honored by his permission to do so, I wouldn’t have expected otherwise.
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Your hometown was Lexington, Tennessee.
I actually grew up in a little community called Juno, which is eight miles west of Lexington, between Lexington and Jackson, out in the middle of nothing. I lived with my two sisters, my mother and my grandmother. Mom and Dad were divorced when I was three years old. I don’t remember him until much later in life.
Were you the youngest in your family?
I am the middle. I have an older sister and a younger sister. Later on my mom remarried and I have a half-sister, a daughter she had by her second husband. Then there’s a stepbrother.
What do you remember about the house where you grew up?
We moved into four or five different houses. I could throw a rock from one to the other. I don’t know why we moved all the time. It was just a habitual thing with my grandmother and her family. We had big yards but if you looked across the pasture our neighbors were there. When day would come, all the kids would go outside and play baseball or whatever. It was a small community vibe.We had some apple trees in the yard. The front yard sloped but we still played baseball on it because it was the biggest open yard in the neighborhood.
How did your family get by with your dad out of the picture?
My grandmother was a caretaker for the kids. My mother worked in a shirt factory in Lexington. Later on, when I was maybe in the fifth grade, my grandmother remarried. Her husband, my grandfather, had died before I was born. That brought in a little more money. I didn’t realize that we didn’t have any money. We were just happy kids.
It was always weird to me that everybody else had two parents. Back then, divorce was a rare thing. I remember when the teachers in school had something for us to take home for our parents to sign, they’d always say, “Get your dad to sign this and bring it back.” It was never “have your mother sign this.” It embarrassed me because it made me feel like I was different.
Did your family grow its own vegetables and fruits?
Oh, yeah. We did that every year. We had a wood stove.
Was there music in your family?
My uncle, who was a really good musician, played all stringed instruments. He could have played with anybody. He lived about a mile up the road from us. He watched over us.
“When I was ten or eleven, I bought my first guitar with money I made from picking cotton.”
That was your mother’s brother?
Yes. We picked cotton every fall. We didn’t have any cotton; we hired out to other people. When I was ten or eleven, I bought my first guitar with money I made from picking cotton. It was a $12.95 Silvertone that I ordered from Sears. That old guitar was awful. It came with a little book that showed how to make chords and stuff. It hurt my hand, so after a few attempts I just put it under the bed and didn’t mess with it for I don’t know how long.
There was a talent show at school. I was singing all the time, so I decided I was going to play that guitar and sing at that talent show. I got the guitar out from under the bed. I got that book out. The first thing I learned how to play was a gospel song — maybe it was “Precious Memory” or one of those old songs — by looking at the book. Then I started hearing it. I made it in a short time to that talent show. I played the guitar and did that song. And I was off to the races.
My uncle who was a good musician started seeing that I was catching on to it. He had a Gibson guitar. One of his musician buddies had gotten drunk and stepped on it. He’d cracked the top off. But it was a Gibson. He came to my house with that guitar one day and he said, “I want to trade guitars with you.” He gave me that Gibson and took my Silvertone — he probably burned it. But with that Gibson, it was like going from a bicycle to a Rolls Royce.
He also had a really nice ’57 Fender Stratocaster, which I now have. He let me keep that guitar and his Gibson amp in my house when he wasn’t playing. I totally credit him with any advances I made.
What was his name?
Dalton Tate. He was my encourager.
Raised On Country
Did you listen much to the radio in those days?
We were right between Memphis and Nashville, so I could pick up a little bit of Memphis and the Grand Ole Opry for sure.
Were you listening only to country music?
At that time, yeah. When Carl Perkins, Elvis and all that stuff started kicking in, there was a guy named Carl Mann. He was in the Sun camp. He was doing rockabilly versions of classic songs, like “Mona Lisa,” “Pretend You’re Happy When You’re Blue” and “Some Enchanted Evening.” Those three records really impacted me.
Were you playing gigs by the time you got to high school?
Yeah, but before that my uncle played every night with a group of guys called the Rhodes Brothers. Vernon Rhodes played guitar and sang tenor. His brother played guitar, fiddle and mandolin. Their cousin Vaughn played bass. My uncle played electric guitar. They had a Dobro player and a banjo player. People came in and out of the group. They taped a show every Wednesday night and they played every Saturday morning. My uncle took me with him and they let me sing. Then they told me to come back every week. It became a weekly thing for me. I was eleven or twelve when that started. At that time I was just singing; I wasn’t really playing.
I guess I was maybe sixteen when I started with little groups of guys in high school for dances after the football game. We were playing the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and early/mid Sixties rock.
Did you grow your hair out?
Oh, yeah. As soon as we saw what the Beatles looked like, that was us.
What was the name of that band?
We were called the Landells, which was my mother’s name. I don’t remember doing that on purpose but I guess we couldn’t think of anything else. There’s probably a picture of us on my Facebook page.
Were you thinking even then about getting into music as a career?
I was just doing it because it was fun and the girls liked it.
Did you have other aspirations for when you got out of school?
I had no idea. We didn’t have enough money for me to even think about going to college. That never crossed my mind.
I met my wife when I was a junior in high school. We went to the same school. She was younger than me. At about the time I graduated her family moved to the Chicago area. I had gotten a job working in a factory in Lexington. Within a few months I decided I was going to go up there too. I had never been any farther than Memphis. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have anything. I didn’t even tell them I was coming.
I had somebody take me to Jackson and I got on the train to Chicago. It was about sixty degrees. When I stepped off in Chicago the temperature was twenty below zero. And it was windy. I hardly had any money. I knew their address in Maywood, twelve or fourteen miles out. I got a taxicab to their house. I forget how much it was but it took almost everything I had to pay that taxi. I knocked on their door. Like I said, they were not expecting me. But they welcomed me in. I got a job. My wife’s stepdad was working at this Motorola television factory. Back then, recommendations went a long way.
I didn’t play music at all for a few months. Then I got the itch to play. I came across a bunch of guys who needed a bass player. Well, I never had played bass but I went and got one and got the job. I don’t remember the name of that band but they were good guys. They just played one night a week.
I started going around and listening to other bands in those honky-tonks. A lot of country music was being played up there. I came across this one band with a singer named Bobby Pierce. The band was called Bobby Pierce and the Nashville Sound. These guys sounded like records, like they’d stepped out of a Nashville studio. I wanted to be in that band. I started stalking them; wherever they’d go, I’d show up. They had a good bass player. But somewhere early on that guy quit and their bass player slot came open. They hired another guy but for some reason he didn’t work out. So I got the call.
“I was playing until three in the morning, then getting up and going to work at 7:30. After a few months I decided one of them had to go and it wasn’t going to be my music.”
We were playing five, six or seven nights a week. I kept my factory job for a while. I was playing until three in the morning, then getting up and going to work at 7:30. After a few months I decided one of them had to go and it wasn’t going to be my music.
We played at a place out in Palos Hills called the Lake and Park Inn. It was named after the Lincoln Park Inn, the Tom T. song that was right at that time. They might have tried to use that but were afraid of the trademark problem, so they just changed it to Lake and Park. Bobby Pierce and the Nashville Sound got hired to be the house band at that club. Nashville artists would come and play there on Saturday nights. They preferred to hire acts that were having hits but didn’t have a band because they could get them in there cheaper. That’s where I made all of my early Nashville contacts.
Who were some of the first artists you met up there?
Waylon [Jennings] came through there. It was Waylon, a bass player and a drummer. I’m not sure, but the drummer might have been Richie Albright. That’s where I met Bob Luman; he came through without a band. I remember the night I met Tompall and the Glaser Brothers.
Was it kind of intimidating to back up these big-time artists?
You know what? Our band was so good that it was not a problem. We’d learn their songs and play them back just like the records. And when Bob Luman or whoever would come through, they didn’t ask a lot of us. But ninety-five percent of the time, the bands they were playing with sucked. They couldn’t play their shit. So when they came across a band like ours, we knew all the turnarounds, the instrumental parts, the intros — it sounded like their records. So they remembered us.
On the Road to Music City
How did you end up moving to Nashville?
We played that club and then we started bouncing around to different clubs in Chicago. We got a few gigs out of town, just enough to let me know there was more to just sitting in a club in Chicago. I was with that band maybe six years when I decided I wanted to come to Nashville.
My wife and I were having troubles — no fault of hers. She had just about decided she’d had all she was going to take. So she moved back to her mom in West Tennessee. By then I had two kids, so I kind of followed her once again. But I came to Nashville.
The very first day I was here I called this guy named Johnny Carver. He was an artist on Epic at the time. Bob Luman was on Epic too. I had gotten to be good friends with Johnny. I said, “Hey, I’ve moved here. If you hear of anybody looking for a bass player, please call me.” He said, “Funny thing. I ran into Bob Luman at Epic today. He said his bass player just quit. Let me call him.” So he called Bob and called me back. He said, “Can you meet his guitar player somewhere and go out to Bob’s house tonight?” This was on a Thursday night.
That night I went to Bob’s house in Hendersonville, across the street from Roy Orbison’s house. Johnny Cash’s house was about a block down. I was in the basement with Bob and his guitar player. As soon as he saw me, he remembered the band in Chicago. So we played a few of his songs and he said, “OK, you’ve got it. We’re doing the Opry tomorrow night. I’m playing my new record.” I hadn’t heard that new record, so I was scared to death.
“As a new guy, just getting to walk into Tootsies, that little bitty place, and rub elbows with Jimmy Dickens, it was surreal. It was like I’d fallen into the radio.”
What was Nashville like at that time?
At the time the Opry was at the Ryman. All the people that I wanted to be around went from Tootsies to the Opry, back and forth. It was like a revolving party. It was small but it was full. As a new guy, just getting to walk into Tootsies, that little bitty place, and rub elbows with Jimmy Dickens, it was surreal. It was like I’d fallen into the radio.
How long were you with Luman?
I stayed with Bob for three and a half years. I loved that band. Bob liked you to play loud and fast. He was a rocker. His first success was as a rockabilly artist. It was not an easy thing to leave that band. I was good friends with all of them. But it was just time to do it. A club gig had come open here in town and I ended up going to that. It was with a group called the Four Guys. I did not like playing in that club. I didn’t like the music they played. They wanted to do show tunes and that was boring as shit to me. I mean, the songs were good but I’d just come out of a kick-ass band and these guys just wanted to look good. They didn’t give a shit about these songs. I don’t have a problem with that kind of music if it’s played good. And these guys I played with in that band did not give a rat’s ass.
Birth of a Songwriter
When did you start writing songs?
I didn’t really think about trying it until I was riding down the highway with the Bob Luman band, with nothing to do. I was bored. We had a really good piano player named Gene Dunlap. He and I started messing around with songs. After I left the band, I kept going over to his house and trying to write songs. We wrote this song about the Golden Nugget in Vegas. I had played there with Bob and two or three other artists. The curtain there was on a timer. It came up on the hour. You had forty or fifty minutes or whatever, and when the clock hit that mark, the curtain came down. If you weren’t there, the curtain still came up.
Gene and I had both played there and seen this thing. We made up this song about a guy who was playing at the Golden Nugget. The curtain comes down on him in the middle of one of the songs. It was just a funny song. We had seven or eight more songs.
Did certain songs serve as models for you when you began writing?
Not really. I didn’t know what I was doing. We were just writing something to play. I’m totally uneducated musically. I never did learn how to read music; I’ve done everything by ear. Every day I wish I knew how to read music but I never did want to study. I was still playing with the Four Guys, hating every minute of it. You don’t have to put that in there. We were playing five or six nights a week. Back then the Opry was doing three or four shows on Saturday, and every time the curtain came up we were on it, for a sit-down Nashville gig.
Anyway, I’d given Jimmy a copy of that demo. He took it and played it for Mel. This was the day after Mel had won CMA Entertainer of the Year. His career was like a stick of dynamite. That night I was at my club gig. We were in the middle of the night; we’d played one set and were getting ready to play another, so we were taking a break. One of the waitresses comes up to me and says, “There’s somebody on the telephone for you. He says he’s Mel Tillis.” I figured someone was messing with me. I go get the phone and it’s Mel. I never had met him before but I could tell from his stuttering it was him.
He said, “Hoss, I just recorded one of your songs. We’re going to listen to it.” I said, “When?” He said, “Right now. Get your ass down to my office at Nineteenth and West End.”
I walked up to the stage and I told one of the guys in the band, “I don’t know how y’all are gonna finish this night. But it ain’t gonna be with me.” I turned my amp off, got my bass and went to my car. I still don’t know how they finished the night. They must have played with a bass. It probably sounded better [laughs].
I went down to Mel’s office and rang the backdoor bell. He comes to the backdoor and lets me in. He had cut that “Golden Nugget” song. He said, “Hoss, that happened to me. I was in the middle of a joke and it came down on me.” That was the beginning of my connection with him. And the next day he cut three more of the songs on that demo.
“I was thinking, ‘This guy [Mel Tillis] is one of the greatest songwriters ever in country music. If he likes my songs, there must be something to them.’ That was an awakening.”
Did you play with Mel’s band, the Statesiders?
No, he signed me as a songwriter. It was almost two years before I worked in his band. I was thinking, “This guy is one of the greatest songwriters ever in country music. If he likes my songs, there must be something to them.” That was an awakening.
You had your first Number One with Mel, “I Believe in You.”
That was about two years later.
You wrote that with Glen Campbell in mind.
Yeah, we did. Mel was real good friends with Glen. As soon as we wrote it, he sent it to Glen and he said, “I like it but there’s just something about the lyric that doesn’t feel right.” So Mel and I rewrote it three or four times. And Glen still said, “I don’t know. That’s still not it.” Finally I said, “Mel, it’s yours.” So he cut it as an original.
From that point on, your career is very well documented. Maybe you can pick out a few pivotal events that had a significant impact on you as a songwriter, producer and executive.
Well, I was smoking a lot of dope. I was drinking a lot of beer. Mel’s office was party headquarters. All of the old publishing houses used to be that way. But Mel’s was the last one still going full-throttle. Every day at 2:30 or 3 o’clock, people started showing up at his office with bags of beer. If they didn’t, Mel would send somebody to the store. He was hanging out in there all the time when he was in town. We’d drink beer, smoke pot, play music and listen to demos.
I never really had written anything with an artist before. Mel and I wrote one song together that he and Nancy Sinatra recorded. But the first time I had any experience writing with an artist was with Vern Gosdin. We hit it off from the start. I had a nine-to-five gig, not just writing but also plugging songs at the office. I figured Mel would want me to write on the side and then be there to do the other job during the daytime. He saw that me and Vern were working on the song rather than him but he didn’t give a shit where I went. I rode the bus with Vern. To him, that was collecting songs. That made me more aware of the business side of things than I’d thought about before.
I’d gotten to be friends with Dean Dillon. It ended up that me and Dean were in the middle of that Vern thing together.
Let’s toss a few names out and you can say whatever comes to mind. We can start with Jimmy Bowen.
If you ask Bowen, he’d probably say, “Who?” But Bowen produced that first song of mine that Mel cut. Mel had known Bowen through the years. I don’t remember what the background was, but Bowen had just gone through a divorce. He was pretty much busted. When he decided to move to town, he operated out of Mel’s office for a while. That’s where he made his phone calls and stuff. That was just before I came into the picture.
Bowen let me just sit in the corner while he was working. He never told me, “Get out of here.” I was digging the music. I didn’t even realize I was absorbing stuff. I was just enjoying being in a room where records were being made. I got to see Bowen mix. I always had a lot of pot on me. Bowen loved to smoke pot. Tompall was always over there too. Bowen was working with the Glaser Brothers, so Tompall’s office was right below the control room. I got to be friends with him.
I always mention Bowen’s name because he let me hang out and learn. I didn’t realize I was learning but I was.
You pretty much discovered Sammy Kershaw.
Mel had sold his publishing company to PolyGram, so PolyGram hired me away from Mel. They chose me over a couple of other guys because I’d been with the catalog the longest and was more familiar with it. By then I knew that I wanted to produce records. I’d been in the studio for ten years, recording demos and pitching songs. I knew what the other side was and I wanted to be over there.
PolyGram Publishing didn’t have an office, so they moved me into the Mercury Records building. Steve Popovic was running Mercury at the time. A year or so after that they decided to get rid of Steve and bring in somebody else to run the label; they thought it would be more competitive. However it happened, Harold Shedd ended up with the job and I ended up moving into the A&R department as a song finder for Harold. He and I had been close friends for a few years. But it was very hard to get Harold to let me do that. Back then, producers didn’t want other producers. But I was persistent. I knew what I wanted to do. They were gonna have to run me off to shut me up.
A guy named Jim Dowell was a songwriter. He was trying to get into management. He called me up one day and said, “I got a guy from Louisiana I want you to hear.” I said, “Alright, come on down.” He brought me in this cassette of Sammy. The guy sounded like he’d been influenced by George Jones. He didn’t sound like George but I could hear that he’d listened to every George Jones record ever made. I took it to Harold and he said, “I kind of like him. See if you can get him to set up a showcase and we’ll go and see him.”
I got in touch with Jim and said that Harold wanted to set up a showcase. Back then they had a club out at the Opryland Hotel, a little lounge. They set up a showcase out there. We went to see him and he did great. It perked Harold’s interest and he said, “Look, I want you to cut three or four with him for a demo. We’ll see what happens.” So I did that and they came off good.
Then Harold — reluctantly — said, “Norro Wilson has produced a lot of records and he’s not doing anything. He’s kind of down right now. I want you to produce this project with Norro.” Now, when I was plugging songs, he never would call anybody back! So I didn’t want to do this but I said, “Great!”
We ended up cutting that first album together. The first single was a smash. It blew up; I think we sold two million copies. I came to find out that Sammy and George Jones were real good friends. A lot of times when George was missing and nobody could find him, he was with Sammy, hiding out in a motel somewhere.
Norro and I started working together from then on. I grew to love him. It’s hard to say that I learned this or that from him, but I guess I soaked up his experience. The only thing I did learn from him was that you didn’t have to be dead serious all the time when you’re making music. Whenever we would be recording, no matter who it was, Norro would always get his chair and pull it right out into the middle of the band. We had a headphone station set up for him out there. I’d sit in the control room to make sure everything was going good. And Norro kept the band elevated. He kept everybody laughing all the time. We always had fun. I think the records show that.
Talk about your work with Kenny Chesney and Willie Nelson.
When Kenny starts on a record, he already has a mental plan formulated. He has a purpose already cooking way out in the future, even if we haven’t found all the songs yet. He knows where he wants it to go before we ever start recording. Kenny is more focused than anybody I’ve ever seen. It’s all about business. I mean, we have fun. We laugh a tremendous amount. But the goal at the end is business. Every time we record, Kenny is thinking, “How will this affect the people in the seats at my concerts?” Everything that we do in the studio is aimed directly at the person sitting in the furthest seat from the stage. My job in that process is to try to find a group of songs that’s better than what everybody else has.
The Magic of Willie Nelson
Now, with Willie you never know what’s gonna happen. You don't know how many people are gonna show up in the control room. One day he brought so many people into the control room that the band couldn’t come in. I’m not kidding! We had twenty people in the control room — I counted! They were all Willie’s buddies. He’s just having fun. He wants to keep singing and playing. I’m thankful that he thinks I’m one of the people that can help him do that.
The fact that you write a lot with Willie must also affect how you work with him in the studio.
He leaves that up to me. In fact, he wants me to get it ready for him to sing and play on. If something feels like it needs to go in a different direction, he will say something. Most of the time, though, he just rolls with it. When you’ve got a bunch of great musicians in there and you turn them loose, anything can happen. It’s a mystery until it’s done.
When did you and Willie start writing together?
The first time we wrote together was in 2010, when he had me bring the band down to his place in Austin. We wrote the song by a text messaging process. We do that all the time now. We’ve done thirty or forty songs. This new record has eleven songs, all of them brand new.
Do you ever write face-to-face?
We’ve never done that. When we’re writing, he’s usually in Maui and I’m here in Nashville. We’ve never sat down with a guitar to write. Usually I’ll cut the initial track with some sort of a sketchy melody. We finish it up when we’re in the studio together, doing his vocal.
Does he co-write with other folks?
He’s only co-written a very few songs. Early in his career he wrote a song or two with Hank Cochran. It was just random things here and there.
What about you? Have you worked via text message with other writers?
No, not at all. He started it! He sent me a piece of a song and that got me into it. He sends me whatever pops into his head. I read what he’s got, get it into my head and whatever comes to me I’ll send back to him. There’s no dickering around with the lines. It’s what he says, then it’s what I say. He’ll send me back another verse, I’ll send him back another piece. Any changes we make, we make without asking the other guy. Co-writing can be a very intimidating thing. When you’re writing a song, you’re pretty much baring your soul. If you don’t do that with whoever you’re writing with, you’re not writing as well as you could.
Occasionally I’ll read an article where Willie talks about how our working relationship has led to the continuation of his writing songs. To think that I may have some part in extending his songwriting career is unbelievable.
Are there characteristics that you hear in your overall work with Willie?
There’s humor in most of our songs. They’re not all funny songs, although Willie is one of the quickest-witted people I’ve ever known — maybe the funniest and the fastest. But even if a song is funny, it’s serious, like when we were recording “Still Not Dead.” There was another song on that session and I said, “That’s a serious song.” And he said, “They’re all serious.” Some of them even have a kind of darkness. It’s just whatever pops out of our heads.
“I like to have a good singer, a great song and a great bunch of musicians, then throw them all up in the air and see how it comes down.”
How do you get to know artists when you begin producing them?
When a record label comes to me with a new artist they want me to produce, most of the time it’s someone I don’t know. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to get to know those people and the situation is just to let it unfold. I don’t really go into an unknown situation with a preconceived plan. I think it’s up to the artist. He or she is the singer; I’m the guy that tries to get it recorded.
Take for instance Aaron Lewis. I did a record on him a couple of years ago. He’d had a very successful career in a rock ’n’ roll band. He’s a great country singer, but when they asked me if I’d be interested in producing him I didn’t know who he was. If you live your life in one kind of a bubble, you don’t know what’s going on in the bubble right next to you. I’d never heard of Aaron Lewis. I didn’t know anything about Staind. But it doesn’t take long to get someone, especially if they’re loud and boisterous like Aaron is.
But then you go from there to an Alison Krauss, somebody who’s less loud, I guess. Every situation is different. I’ve learned that you have to treat them all differently. Let the artist be the artist. I don’t go into the studio and start giving people instructions and orders on what to play. I like to have a good singer, a great song and a great bunch of musicians, then throw them all up in the air and see how it comes down.
You don’t want it to sound like a Buddy Cannon production. You want it to sound like the artist best sounds.
That’s my way of doing it. It’s about making the best record for the artist. Some producers have a different approach. When a record by the great Billy Sherrill comes on the radio, you instantly know who it is by the way the musicians are playing. Larry Butler was kind of the same way; he learned from Billy Sherrill. But to me, Billy’s records of George Jones, Tammy Wynette and all those artists had a voice of their own, just like George Jones had a voice. But that’s Billy Sherrill. He had different stuff in his brain than I do. It takes all kinds.
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