Bill Friskics-Warren

The impetus for this groundswell of interest? A phenomenon known as the Beyoncé Mass, a Christian worship service inspired by the life and music of its namesake, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.

The brainchild of the Rev. Yolanda Norton, a Hebrew Bible scholar and the H. Eugene Farlough Chair of Black Church Studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary, the Beyoncé Mass explores how issues of race and gender impact the lives, voices and bodies of African American women. It makes its New York debut this week at a pair of local churches with strong black leadership: Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn and Thursday at St. James Presbyterian in Harlem.

“The Mass says to young black girls, You are part of what God had in mind when, during creation, God said, ‘It is good,’” Norton explained over lunch in Hell’s Kitchen last month. “By making the stories and realities of young black women and girls central components of this liturgical art, we’re affirming their realities in a world that is persistent and dogged in its attempts to reject them.”

Those who have attended the Mass say it left them with a great sense of well-being. “I haven’t been involved in the church for years, but stepping back into that space felt amazing,” said Lydia Middleton, dean of Black Student Affairs at the Claremont Colleges in Los Angeles, who attended the Mass held in Southern California on Martin Luther King Day. “It felt warm and inviting, and I left feeling healing. By the end of the service, people were weeping, people were joyous, people were hugging each other.”

The Mass, which features black women singers, dancers and officiants, is a complete church service with a sermon, scripture readings and the Lord’s Supper. It is not, however, about worshipping Beyoncé.

“Absolutely not, and I’m a card-carrying member of the BeyHive,” Norton said, referring to the singer’s vast international fan base. Instead, the Mass uses Beyoncé’s story and songs, from “Formation” to “Flaws and All,” to reframe the narratives and struggles of black women through the lens of the Christian Gospels and their message of radical hospitality and inclusion.

“Black artists have always been central to the struggle for black freedom, whether we’re talking about Nina Simone or Harry Belafonte or Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock,” said the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary, where Norton is currently a scholar in residence. “Beyoncé is a part of this legacy. There is this natural correspondence between the kinds of things she does in her music and the black church.”

Douglas cited the song “Freedom” as an example. “Here you have Beyoncé calling you to be free, to find your freedom, to be yourself, and that’s what black girls see her doing,” she said, talking about Beyoncé’s performance of the song in “Homecoming,” the Netflix documentary about her headlining appearance at the Coachella Festival in 2018.

“In the video Beyoncé includes not just one black female body,” Douglas continued. “She has all kinds of black female bodies. There’s no body-shaming. There’s no colorism. That’s very inspiring to a young black girl.”

Both Douglas and Norton locate the Beyoncé Mass within the tradition of womanist thought and practice as articulated by the writer Alice Walker in her 1983 collection of essays, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.”

Distinct from feminism, which historically has centered the experience of white women, “Womanism privileges the intellectual and intimate space of black women,” Norton said. “It has to do with black women’s need to participate in communities that are bigger than their own for the thriving of all humanity.”

For Norton, 37, having Beyoncé serve as the inspiration for the Mass — the singer has yet to comment publicly about the event — was a personal choice as well as a scholarly one. “As her life evolves, my life evolves,” she said. “I can hear Beyoncé songs, or Destiny’s Child songs, and know what stage of life I was in.”

The Mass’ specific messages for black women and girls notwithstanding, it welcomes anyone who has been excluded by the church.

Andy Deeb, 27, a former student of Norton’s who identifies as transgender and is white, has played bass guitar in all but one of the Masses to date. “The message I hear coming from the service is one that makes room for everybody,” he said. “As a transgender person, church has not been somewhere that’s been safe or welcoming for me.”

Deeb was also enrolled in the first installment of “Beyoncé and the Hebrew Bible,” the class taught by Norton that gave birth to the Mass, in which students were given the assignment “to use the music of Beyoncé to construct a transformative worship experience.”

Beyoncé is an ideal vessel, Norton said, because her messages of empowerment are rooted in her own disappointments and triumphs.

“If you listen to Beyoncé’s testimony,” she said, “she tells you about how she hears the critiques of people, how she criticizes herself, how she struggles. Just because she has not had to struggle for money doesn’t mean she hasn’t, as a human being, had physical and emotional and spiritual struggles.

“It’s powerful and freeing for those of us who are not Beyoncé,” Norton went on, “to allow ourselves to feel the things we feel, knowing that this person who appears to have it all has experienced some of the same trauma and woes that many of us have.”

This article originally appeared in

A Church Service Inspired by Beyoncé, No Halo Required

In April 2018, 900 people turned out for a midweek evening church service that typically draws 50 participants at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Days later, a YouTube video of the proceedings went viral, followed by invitations clamoring for the event to be reprised in cities from Los Angeles to Lisbon.

The cause was complications of cancer, his longtime bandmate, Jeff “Stick” Davis, said.

Smith’s smoky, coarse-timbered baritone was heard on the Amazing Rhythm Aces’ biggest hits, including 1975’s gospel-themed “Amazing Grace (Used to Be Her Favorite Song),” the group’s sole Top 10 country hit. “The End Is Not in Sight (The Cowboy Tune),” a soulful number written by Smith, earned the band a Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group the following year.

His most enduring original was “Third Rate Romance,” a droll yet tender song about a one-night stand that has been recorded by artists ranging from Elvis Costello and Rosanne Cash to proto-new wave band the Fabulous Poodles.

“I called my mama when I first wrote that song and I played a little of it on the telephone to her,” Smith recalled in an interview published on classicbands.com. “I called her and said, ‘Mama, I think I’ve written a hit song.’

“She listened to it,” he went on, chuckling about the song’s suggestive content, “and said, ‘You might ought to think about going back to school next year.’”

Originally recorded by singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester, the song, which evinces empathy and wit akin to that of Randy Newman or John Prine, became a Top 20 pop and country hit in a lilting Caribbean-style arrangement recorded by the Amazing Rhythm Aces in 1975.

Smith’s singing and songwriting drew on the broad array of Southern roots music, from blues and honky-tonk to bluegrass and rock ’n’ roll. His work with the Aces, who toured with the likes of Jimmy Buffett and the Eagles and released seven studio albums before disbanding in 1981, was a harbinger of the Americana and alternative-country movements of the 1990s and beyond.

Howard Russell Smith was born to Howard and Rosa (Russell) Smith, on June 17, 1949, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was one of two children. His father was an insurance agent and an amateur bluegrass musician, his mother a homemaker.

Raised in Lafayette, Tennessee, a small town 60 miles northeast of Nashville, Russell worked as a disc jockey as a teenager. After graduating from high school, he moved to Knoxville, where, in the late ’60s, he formed the band Fatback with several future members of the Amazing Rhythm Aces.

In the early ’70s, the group relocated to Memphis, where they rebranded themselves the Amazing Rhythm Aces and released their acclaimed debut album, “Stacked Deck,” in 1975.

Working as a solo artist after the group split up, Smith had just one Top 40 country hit, a remake of Boyce and Hart’s 1968 Top 10 pop single “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight.” He had much greater success as a songwriter for others during this period, composing chart-topping country hits for Ricky Van Shelton, T. Graham Brown and Randy Travis.

Before getting the Amazing Rhythm Aces back together in the mid-90s, Smith was the lead singer of Run C &amp; W, a novelty band that recorded a pair of albums consisting mainly of bluegrass-style covers of soul hits from the ’60s. The name of the group, which also featured the former Eagle Bernie Leadon and Nashville musicians Vince Melamed and Jim Photoglo, was a tongue-in-cheek mashup of the acronym for country &amp; western music and the name of the hip-hop trio Run DMC.

Smith is survived by his sons, Matthew and Jesse; a sister, Cathy Smith Kemp; and two grandchildren.

“Russell Smith showed me the real beauty of country music,” said Davis, the Aces’ original bassist, speaking from his home in Florida for this obituary.

“I hadn’t been around anybody like him before,” he went on. “Russell Smith was a real artist. He wrote songs that told stories, and his songs brought those stories to life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/obituaries/russell-smith-dies-at-70.html" id="84081807-2e88-37ca-a20c-8158ff406d77">The New York Times</a>.

Russell Smith, the lead singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist for the country-rock band the Amazing Rhythm Aces, died July 12 in Franklin, Tennessee. He was 70.

Russell Smith, Lead Singer of the Amazing Rhythm Aces, Dies at 70

Carole Scates, his partner for more than 20 years, said the cause was cerebral atrophy.

Conley had 24 Top 10 country singles in the ’80s, several of which he wrote or co-wrote, including 18 that reached No. 1. Only two artists that decade topped the country charts more times than he did: the vocal group Alabama, which had 27 No. 1 singles, and singer Ronnie Milsap, who had 23. All but one of Conley’s No. 1 hits were recorded for RCA, starting with “Somewhere Between Right and Wrong” in 1982.

Many of Conley’s songs, among them “Holding Her and Loving You” and “Don’t Make It Easy for Me,” both No. 1 hits, plumbed the complexity of romantic relationships. Abounding with sincerity, his rich, smoky baritone was well suited to his material, which appealed primarily to adult audiences, much like the vintage country and soul music of the 1960s and ’70s.

Conley’s affinity for soul music was evident on many of his recordings, maybe nowhere as much as on “Too Many Times,” a 1986 duet with Anita Pointer of the Grammy Award-winning Pointer Sisters. That record reached No. 2 on the country chart and earned Conley an invitation, rare for a country artist, to perform the song with Pointer on the R&amp;B-themed; television show “Soul Train.”

“There was such soul in everything he did,” Joe Galante, who was chief executive of RCA Nashville from 1982 to 1990, said in an interview with The Daily Tennessean.

“You always talk about finding something unique,” Galante continued. “His voice certainly was that.”

Conley placed an average of two singles a year on the country charts in the 1980s, on his way to becoming an inspiration to future country hitmakers like Randy Travis and Blake Shelton.

By the early ’90s, with the rise of new stars like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, sales of Conley’s records had dropped, and he received less and less airplay, prompting him to take an extended break from touring and recording. He resurfaced again in 1998, and, though he never achieved the kind of success he had in the ’80s, he was active into this decade.

Earl Thomas Conley, the third of eight children, was born on Oct. 17, 1941, in Portsmouth, Ohio, a small town across the Ohio River from Kentucky, to Ruth (Davis) and Arthur Conley. When his father lost his job with the railroad, Earl, then 14, moved in with one of his older sisters.

He was offered a scholarship to attend art school but opted instead to join the Army, where he first began writing songs and singing in public.

After his discharge, Conley worked for the railroad and in steel mills while traveling to and from Ohio and Nashville to write songs with producer Dick Heard. Their song “Smokey Mountain Memories” became a Top 40 country hit for honky-tonk singer Mel Street in 1975.

The next year Conway Twitty had a No. 1 country hit with Conley’s “This Time I’ve Hurt Her More Than She Loves Me.”

In 1981, after an unproductive stint recording for Warner Bros. Records, Conley had his first No. 1 hit, a song he wrote called “Fire &amp; Smoke,” released on the independent Sunbird label.

In addition to Scates, Conley is survived by his brothers, Fred and Steve; his sisters, Ronda Hodges and Becky Miller; a son, Ty, and a daughter, Amy Edmisten, from his marriage to Sandra Smith, which ended in divorce; two younger daughters, Kat Scates and Erinn Scates; and five grandchildren.

A versatile stylist, Conley was as much at home with the Appalachian music of his childhood as with rock- and soul-inflected arrangements. He recorded tradition-steeped duets with Emmylou Harris (“We Believe in Happy Endings”) and Keith Whitley (“Brotherly Love”).

“My stuff started with bluegrass music,” Conley once explained in an interview. “That’s what inspired me, the people that came out of those hills in West Virginia and Kentucky. And, of course, Hank Williams Sr. down in Alabama.

“I was born in ’41, and I was raised up on that early stuff,” he went on. “Coming out of those mountains, there’s a different soul and a different feeling and a whole different deal than what it would be like to come from the city.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/obituaries/earl-thomas-conley-dead.html" id="43b3de8c-4db8-3331-aaf1-caec3a03ced9">The New York Times</a>.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Earl Thomas Conley, one of the most popular and prolific country singers of the 1980s, died here Wednesday. He was 77.

Earl Thomas Conley, Country Star of the 1980s, Is Dead at 77

The cause was kidney failure, his companion and caregiver, Janie Boyd, said.

Wiseman first made his mark in the 1940s playing with bluegrass legends, first as a founding member of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys, and then with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys.

As a sometime lead singer with Monroe’s group, Wiseman was featured on classics like “Can’t You Hear Me Callin'” and “Travelin’ This Lonesome Road.” He appeared as a headlining act on the bluegrass circuit in the 1950s and ‘60s.

But his musical instincts were always too wide-ranging to rest comfortably within the sometimes hermetic confines of bluegrass.

“Not to sound too critical, but the ‘bluegrass’ classification was the worst damned thing ever happened to me,” Wiseman said, talking about his first decade as a solo artist, in an interview with the roots music magazine No Depression in 2006. “Up until then I was getting as much airplay as Marty Robbins or Ray Price.”

Wiseman’s biggest hits as a solo artist were “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” in 1955 and “Jimmy Brown, the Newsboy” in 1959, both of which reached the Top 10 of the country chart. His other early successes included interpretations of songs like “Love Letters in the Sand,” which had been a No. 1 pop hit for Pat Boone, and “I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home,” a parlor favorite recorded by the Carter Family.

Wiseman’s signature song, “'Tis Sweet to Be Remembered,” was written in 1902, and his version owed as much to vintage pop and swing music as it did to country or bluegrass. “'Tis sweet to be remembered, on a bright or a gloomy day / ‘Tis sweet to be remembered, by a dear one far away,” he crooned in a limpid tenor in the song’s waltzing chorus.

The record, his first release as a solo artist, was typical of the earnest, reverberating delivery that would sustain him in a seven-decade solo career, in which he released more than 60 albums.

Not merely a gifted singer, Wiseman was also a successful music producer and entrepreneur. He was the founding secretary of the board of the Country Music Foundation in 1958. Before that he spent four years as creative director of the West Coast office of Dot Records. He also managed the WWVA Jamboree, a weekly barn dance and radio broadcast in Wheeling, West Virginia, from 1966 to 1970.

Despite feeling hemmed in by the bluegrass label, Wiseman was elected to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1993 and was for decades regarded as one of the idiom’s elder statesmen.

Robert Shelton of The New York Times, reviewing an appearance by Wiseman at Carnegie Hall in 1962, wrote that he “used the penetrating, driving idiom of the bluegrass vocal leader in a most winning fashion.” Sharing the bill that evening were Mother Maybelle Carter, Johnny Cash and other popular country and bluegrass entertainers.

Malcolm Bell Wiseman was born on May 23, 1925, in Crimora, Virginia, in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains. His parents, Howard Bell Wiseman, a miller, and Myra Ruth (Humphreys) Wiseman, oversaw a musical household; Mac first performed in public as an adolescent.

Afflicted with polio at a young age, he went on to win a scholarship from the National Foundation for Polio to study piano, music theory and radio broadcasting at a conservatory in Dayton, Virginia, in the northwest part of the state.

In 1946, after a brief stint as a singer and disc jockey in nearby Harrisonburg, Virginia, the young Wiseman moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, to work as a harmony vocalist and upright bass player for country singer Molly O’Day. He appeared both on her popular radio show and on the recordings she made for Columbia that year.

In 1947 he began performing on WCYB in Bristol, Virginia, where he met Lester Flatt. A friendship ensued, and Wiseman joined the first edition of Flatt &amp; Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948, with Flatt on guitar and Scruggs on banjo. After that apprenticeship and his subsequent time in Bill Monroe’s band, he formed his own group, the Country Boys, who headlined the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond, Virginia, from 1953 to 1956. He reunited with Flatt to record three albums for RCA Records in the early 1970s.

Wiseman recorded for Capitol, MGM and a number of other labels after leaving Dot in 1963, creating versions of songs as varied as the New Orleans rhythm-and-blues standard “I Hear You Knockin’ ” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.” He performed in venues of all stripes, from college campuses and bluegrass band shells to the Hollywood Bowl.

Wiseman hosted an annual bluegrass festival in Renfro Valley, Kentucky, from 1970 to 1983. He received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2008.

Survivors include two sons, Scott and Randy; three daughters, Maxine Wiseman, Chris Haynes and Linda Parr; a brother, Kenny; a sister, Virginia Davis; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Wiseman was a harbinger of a crossover sensibility in bluegrass, as later heard in the repertoires of artists like the Dillards and Alison Krauss. He recorded with everyone from big-band leader Woody Herman to folk iconoclast John Prine. Emotional resonance, rather than the constraints of a particular genre, was his guiding principle when selecting collaborators and material.

“I liked all kinds of music,” Wiseman said in 2006, reflecting on his years growing up in the music-steeped Shenandoah Valley. “I liked Bing Crosby and Montana Slim, and the reason that I mention those two is that they both had network radio shows, two 15-minute programs in the morning, back to back out of New York, when I was 8, 9 years old — and it just struck me that I liked one as well as the other.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/obituaries/mac-wiseman-dead.html" id="b7bb4758-8897-3e57-ad66-ac767953d85f">The New York Times</a>.

Mac Wiseman, the bluegrass balladeer and guitar player known as “the Voice With a Heart,” whose hallmark was crossing musical genre lines, died Sunday in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 93.

Mac Wiseman, Bluegrass Star Who Was More Than That, Dies at 93

Mac Wiseman, the bluegrass balladeer and banjo player known as “the Voice With a Heart,” whose hallmark was crossing musical genre lines, died Sunday in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 93.

His publicist, Martha Moore, said the cause was complications of a stroke.

Foster’s most enduring early success came as the producer of Roy Orbison’s No. 1 singles “Running Scared” and “Oh, Pretty Woman” in the early 1960s. Along with the likes of “Crying” and “Only the Lonely (Know How I Feel),” all Orbison’s hits from this period were issued by Monument Records, the label Foster established in Washington in 1958 (it took its name from the Washington Monument) and moved to Nashville two years later.

Before Foster became involved with his career, Orbison had released only two minor singles on Sun Records, neither one a big hit.

Foster also provided a boost to the fortunes of the 19-year-old Parton, whom he signed to Monument in 1965. She recorded her first two Top 40 country hits, “Dumb Blonde” and “Something Fishy,” for the label before going on to become a star on “The Porter Wagoner Show” on television and with RCA Records.

“You saw things in me that nobody else did,” Parton said, referring to Foster’s willingness to take a chance on her, at the 2016 ceremony at which he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“Sometimes you just know — sometimes,” Foster explained, alluding to his instincts about Parton in a comment published by the Hall of Fame. “And that makes up for all the times you had to guess.”

Maybe even more prescient than his patronage of Orbison and Parton was Foster’s signing of Kris Kristofferson to a songwriting contract with Combine Music, his fledgling publishing company, and later — despite Kristofferson’s commercially questionable singing voice — to Monument as a recording artist.

Kristofferson’s 1973 single “Why Me” was his only recording for the label to reach the pop Top 40, but “Me and Bobby McGee,” on which he and Foster share the writing credit, became a posthumous No. 1 pop hit for Janis Joplin in 1971.

Combine also published Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” a pair of mystical, existential ballads that became enduring crossover hits, “Sunday Morning” for Johnny Cash and “Help Me” for Sammi Smith, and have subsequently been recorded by scores of others.

Tony Joe White’s compositions “Polk Salad Annie,” a Top 10 hit for him, and “Rainy Night in Georgia,” a Top 10 hit for soul singer Brook Benton, were also Combine titles, as was the Elvis Presley hit “Burning Love,” written by Dennis Linde.

Fred Luther Foster, the youngest of eight children, was born on July 26, 1931, on a farm in Rutherford County, North Carolina. His father, Vance Hampton Foster, raised cotton and sorghum and played the harmonica. His mother, Clara Marcella (Weaste) Foster, was a homemaker.

Enthralled by music at a young age, Foster moved to Washington when he was 18 to pursue a career in the record business. He worked in various capacities there, including as supervisor of country singer Jimmy Dean’s first recording session, a 1953 date that yielded the Top 10 country single “Bumming Around.”

Foster worked as a talent scout for Mercury Records. He later recalled that he had urged his superiors there to bid aggressively for the talents of Elvis Presley, then largely unknown, but to no avail; he signed a contract with RCA instead.

In 1963 Foster established Sound Stage 7, an R&amp;B-oriented; subsidiary of Monument. Soul singer Joe Simon’s 1969 recording of “The Chokin’ Kind” for the label became a million-selling pop and R&amp;B; hit.

Monument also released several influential instrumental recordings in the 1960s, including saxophonist Boot Randolph’s “Yakety Sax,” a Top 40 pop hit in 1963. Another recorded version of the song served as the opening theme for the long-running British comedy series “The Benny Hill Show.”

Foster is survived by his son, Vance; his daughters, Micki Koenig, Leah Alderman, Brit Rothstein and Kirsten Foster; and four grandchildren.

Foster sold Monument and Combine in the 1980s but continued to work as a producer, most notably on “Last of the Breed,” a 2007 album that teamed Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Ray Price. The project earned Price and Nelson a Grammy Award for best country collaboration with vocals for their performance of the Hank Williams staple “Lost Highway.”

In 2016 the Recording Academy presented Foster with a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.

“I tried to do something time would not be critical of,” Foster said that year in an interview with The Tennessean, reflecting on his contributions to the music industry that year.

“It’s like Orbison said to me one time, ‘What’s the most important thing we’re going to do?’ I said, ‘We’re going to eliminate every gimmick you come up with. They don’t endure.'”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/obituaries/fred-foster-dead.html" id="3f7fcf4f-e7e0-3ada-ad81-6f0246791ae0">The New York Times</a>.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Fred Foster, the record producer and song publisher who championed the emerging careers of Roy Orbison, Kris Kristofferson and Dolly Parton, died here Wednesday. He was 87.

Fred Foster, Nashville Champion of Talent, Is Dead at 87

His death, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was confirmed by his daughter Beverly Bradley.

Beginning in the 1940s, Bradley’s work on six-string bass and guitar was also featured on records by, among many others, Red Foley, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Loretta Lynn.

Bradley, known for his spare, soulful playing, also played banjo and other instruments. But according to Guitar Player magazine and other sources, he is among the most recorded guitarists in history.

The younger brother of pioneering record producer Owen Bradley, Bradley also served for decades as the de facto leader of Nashville’s A-Team, the elite circle of first-call session musicians immortalized in the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 Top 10 hit “Nashville Cats.”

“Clear as country water” is how that song characterized the intuitive, uncluttered playing of the team under Bradley’s direction, an expansive ensemble that also included pianist Floyd Cramer and pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake. By the late ‘60s, the group’s laid-back, no-frills approach drew folk and rock luminaries like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Byrds to Nashville to record with them.

“Everything that was happening in the studio — that was my world; that was as big as it got,” Bradley said, looking back on Nashville’s 1950s and ‘60s heyday in a 2013 interview with NPR.

“And then one day, my brother came up and he said, ‘We’ve got 25 out of the top 50 songs,'” Bradley continued, referring to the profusion of hit singles that featured Nashville’s A-Team. “All of a sudden I’m thinking, ‘That stuff we did in the studio, people are listening to that all over the world.'”

Although he was a capable lead guitarist, Bradley made his mark as a rhythm specialist. His signature style featured a clicking, propulsive figure, often performed on six-string electric bass, that mimicked the lines of the acoustic bass.

Known among industry insiders as “tic tac,” Bradley’s less-is-more approach furnished the supple rhythm bed for both Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away” and Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.” In the process he helped shape not only the pop-inflected “Nashville sound” of singers like Arnold and Cline but also the more soulful “countrypolitan” sound of Wynette, George Jones and Conway Twitty.

As accomplished an entrepreneur as he was a musician, Bradley, with his brother Owen and Owen’s son Jerry, was among the first to build independent music studios on Nashville’s Music Row. By 1955 the three of them had merged their initial two ventures into Bradley Film and Recordings Studios, a musicians’ haven more commonly known as the Quonset Hut.

During its first months of operation, the Quonset Hut produced blockbuster hits like Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” Marty Robbins’ “Singing the Blues” and Sonny James’ “Young Love.” By the time Columbia Records purchased the facility in 1962, the Bradleys, along with visionary record executives like Chet Atkins and Don Law, had established Nashville as a major recording center.

Later in his career, as subsequent generations of studio players rose to prominence and he worked fewer sessions, Bradley became active in the Nashville chapter of the American Federation of Musicians. From 1991 to 2008 he was the union’s president. He was also vice president of the international division for more than a decade.

Bradley was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006. He was the first instrumentalist without a significant career as a solo artist to be so honored.

Harold Ray Bradley was born on Jan. 2, 1926, in Nashville, one of six children. His father, Vernon, was a salesman for Cumberland Tobacco Works for 46 years. His mother, Letha Maie (Owen) Bradley, was a homemaker.

Bradley first learned to play the tenor banjo, but he switched his focus to guitar after his brother Owen observed that guitarists were in greater demand than banjo players. At 17 he became lead guitarist in Ernest Tubb’s band, the Texas Troubadours.

After serving in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Nashville and began playing in his brother’s local dance orchestra, which featured future pop stars Snooky Lanson and Kitty Kallen as vocalists.

Bradley worked his first studio session in Chicago in 1946, recording with Grand Ole Opry star Pee Wee King and his Golden West Boys. He did not make his Nashville session debut until four years later (the city would not emerge as a recording hub until the 1950s), when he played acoustic guitar on Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” a No. 1 country and pop hit.

Bradley also produced numerous television variety shows and movie soundtracks and made a brief appearance in Robert Altman’s acclaimed 1975 film, “Nashville.”

In addition to his daughter Beverly, Bradley is survived by his wife of 66 years, Eleanor Allen Bradley; another daughter, Bari Bradley Brooks; and two grandchildren.

Although he released three instrumental albums under his own name, Bradley regarded himself primarily as a contributor to the work of others.

“We had a setup,” he said, reflecting modestly on his decades as a session musician in Nashville in 2013.

“We would work from 10 to 1, 2 to 5, 6 to 9 and 10 to 1 at night,” he continued. “To me, it was like going to a party. A Brenda Lee party in the morning, then a Ray Stevens party in the afternoon. A Bill Monroe party and then end up with Henry Mancini and Patsy Cline and Elvis and just other people. I was just glad to be on board.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/obituaries/harold-bradley-dead.html" id="6d3ffc6a-31fa-3cb2-a40e-191bbc858b02">The New York Times</a>.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Harold Bradley, who played on thousands of country, pop and rock ’n’ roll recordings, including landmark hits like Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” died Thursday in Nashville. He was 93.

Harold Bradley, a Nashville Studio Master, Is Dead at 93

His wife, Jenny Young, said the cause was heart failure.

Young played guitar on hundreds of hit recordings in a career that spanned more than six decades.

Among his best-known credits are the Box Tops’ “The Letter” and Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” both No. 1 pop singles in the late ‘60s, and Neil Diamond’s 1969 Top 10 hit “Sweet Caroline.”

Young also played the funky chicken-scratch guitar lick on “Skinny Legs and All,” soul singer Joe Tex’s 1967 Top 10 pop hit. He contributed the reverberating fills and swells that punctuate James Carr’s timeless soul ballad “The Dark End of the Street,” also from 1967. And his bluesy riffing buttressed the sultry, throbbing groove on “Son of a Preacher Man,” a Top 10 single for British pop singer Dusty Springfield in 1968.

Young appeared on all these recordings, including those associated with Presley’s late-'60s return to the limelight, as a member of the Memphis Boys, the renowned house band for the producer Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio.

Living and working in Memphis, where there had long been a fertile cross-pollinization between country music and the blues, was critical to the development of Young’s down-home style of playing, a muscular yet relaxed mix of rhythmic and melodic instincts.

“In Memphis, it’s sort of in between Nashville and the Southern Delta down in Mississippi, so I’m kind of a cross between B.B. King and Chet Atkins,” Young said in an interview published on the website Soul and Jazz and Funk in 2017.

“Most of the soul music back then was in Memphis,” he added. “That’s where I came from.”

In addition to playing guitar, Young added the psychedelic accents of the electric sitar to a handful of influential recordings, among them the Box Tops’ “Cry Like a Baby” and B.J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a Feeling,” both of which reached the Top 10 in 1968.

After American Sound Studio closed in 1972, Young moved to Nashville, where his soulful less-is-more approach graced hits like Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” Waylon Jennings’s “Luckenbach, Texas” and Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind.”

Young’s Nashville session credits also include Billy Swan’s “I Can Help,” which topped both the country and pop charts in 1974.

Young made an indelible contribution, especially during his years in Memphis, to the Southernization of pop music in the 1960s and early ‘70s. This influence was felt not just by the number of records made in the South that were played on AM radio throughout the nation. It was also evident in the procession of artists, among them Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon and jazz flutist Herbie Mann, who came from outside the region to make records steeped in the Southern musical vernacular.

Reggie Grimes Young was born on Dec. 12, 1936, in Caruthersville, Missouri, and was raised in Osceola, Arkansas, and later in Memphis. His father, Reggie, was an accountant who played Hawaiian-style classical guitar and taught his son to play when he was 14. His mother, Thelma (Mayes) Young, was a homemaker.

In 1956 Young joined Eddie Bond and the Stompers, a rockabilly band that had a regional hit with a record called “Rockin’ Daddy” and opened shows for Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins.

Three years later he joined Bill Black’s Combo, an instrumental quintet led by Presley’s former bass player. He played on two No. 1 R&amp;B; singles with the group, “Smokie” and “White Silver Sands,” before joining the Army in 1960, and rejoined after his return to civilian life in the early ‘60s.

He arrived just in time to travel with Bill Black’s Combo when it opened for the Beatles on their 1964 tour of the United States. During that tour, Young had the opportunity to introduce George Harrison to the finer points of his Southern style of playing.

“George asked me, because I’m a blues player, ‘How do you bend and stretch your strings like that?'” Young recalled in the Soul and Jazz and Funk interview. “I told him, ‘You have to have light-gauge strings,’ and after that I think he went to lighter gauge strings on his guitar.”

A compilation album of 24 tracks from sessions on which Young played, including recordings by Merle Haggard, Jackie DeShannon and Bobby (Blue) Bland, is to be released by the English label Ace Records this week.

In addition to his wife, Young is survived by a son, Reggie III; a daughter, Cindy Evans; a sister, Alice Weatley; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Young played with so many luminaries over the course of his career that he said “it was nothing special” for him and his fellow Memphis Boys to be tapped to support Elvis Presley in the studio in the late ‘60s.

“We played with all the top stars of the time, and Elvis hadn’t had any hits for a while and didn’t have an album on the charts,” he said in a 2013 interview with Premier Guitar magazine.

“As he stepped into the studio though — boy,” he continued. “I never met any other person with such charisma. It was very special for me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/obituaries/reggie-young-dead.html" id="a7c64d3f-9fa5-34ce-a4b2-bb003719e62e">The New York Times</a>.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Reggie Young, a prolific studio guitarist who appeared on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and many others and played a prominent role in shaping the sound of Southern popular music in the 1960s and ‘70s, died Thursday at his home in Leipers Fork, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. He was 82.

Reggie Young, Guitarist Heard on Hundreds of Hits, Dies at 82

Howard Reitzes, a longtime friend, confirmed her death, at a rehabilitation hospital.

Guitar was best known for her recording of “Dark Moon,” a Top 20 country single on the Dot label that crossed over to the pop Top 10 in 1957. The record, a haunting nocturne sung in a clear-toned alto, was, along with Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” — which reached the pop Top 40 the same year — one of the earliest records by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart.

“Dark Moon,” which also made the pop Top 10 in a subsequent version by Gale Storm, earned Guitar an invitation to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in June 1957. Later that year she performed “Mister Fire Eyes,” her successful follow-up to “Dark Moon,” on the TV show “American Bandstand.”

But the achievement for which Guitar never really received her due, perhaps because she decided to remain in her native Washington instead of resettling in a major recording center like Los Angeles or Nashville, Tennessee, was her trailblazing work as a studio maven and entrepreneur. Over seven decades she did everything from engineer recordings to scout talent and run a record label.

In the late 1950s, returning to Seattle after a brief tenure as a session guitarist for producer Fabor Robison in Los Angeles, she established Dolphin Records with two local businessmen, Bob Reisdorf and Lou Lavinthal.

Under her creative direction, Dolphin — which soon changed its name to Dolton — signed the Fleetwoods, a doo-wop-inspired trio of teenagers from Olympia, Washington, whose gauzy pop recordings “Come Softly to Me” and “Mr. Blue” both topped the pop chart in 1959.

Guitar was credited only as the arranger on the trio’s big hits (Reisdorf, a refrigerator salesman, was listed as producer), but her role was more than such billing might suggest.

“Because they had so much air in their voices, I had to do a lot of different fooling with microphones to get enough sound on the tape to saturate the tape,” Guitar said of her work with the Fleetwoods in an interview with No Depression magazine in 2006.

“I knew that the sound would be interesting to people, because they were so used to the full sound. I wanted it to come out, but I wanted it to be intimate. And I knew also not to use a regular guitar sound. I put nylon strings on my guitar, and I played just little, tinkling notes behind them.”

Dolton’s other landmark release under Guitar’s supervision was “Walk — Don’t Run,” a No. 2 pop hit in 1960 for the instrumental combo the Ventures, which came to be regarded as a surf-rock classic.

Guitar had a minor pop hit as a performer for Dolton with a song she wrote, “Candy Apple Red.” On an album she recorded in 1959 for RCA, which went unreleased at the time but was eventually issued by Bear Family Records in 2013 under the title “Intimate Session — the Velvet Lounge,” she sang in the pop-torch mode of Peggy Lee and Julie London. Backing her on the sessions were her fellow guitarists Billy Strange and Tommy Tedesco and other future members of the famed Los Angeles studio entourage known as the Wrecking Crew.

Guitar and her business partners sold the Dolton label to Liberty Records in 1963. She returned to Dot, as a recording artist, producer and talent scout, two years later.

Bonnie Guitar was born Bonnie Buckingham on March 25, 1923, in Seattle. Her parents, Doris and John, raised her and her five siblings on a farm outside Auburn, Washington, some 70 miles south of the Puget Sound.

Guitar’s brothers gave her their flat-top Gibson guitar when she was 13. Soon after that, she started entering local talent contests and performing in a musical revue that appeared throughout the region. She also began using the stage name Bonnie Guitar.

In the early 1940s, she met and started taking music lessons from guitar teacher and inventor Paul Tutmarc. They married in 1944 and had a daughter, Paula, before parting ways in 1955.

Guitar released a series of country hits for Dot in the 1960s, including three that reached the country Top 10: “A Woman in Love,” “I’m Living in Two Worlds” and “I Believe in Love.” She was named female vocalist of the year by the Academy of Country Music in 1966.

In 1969, Guitar married Mario DePiano. The couple raised cattle and quarter horses together on an 80-acre ranch in Sumner, Washington, about 30 miles from Seattle.

Guitar had all but retired from music business at that point, releasing only the occasional record, until her husband died in 1983. After that she started performing again, most notably as a regular at the Notaras Lodge near her home in Soap Lake.

She is survived by a granddaughter, a great-granddaughter and a great-great-grandson. Her daughter died in 2013.

Fewer than 5 percent of producers and engineers working in the music industry today are women, according to Women’s Audio Mission, a nonprofit organization that equips women for careers in creative technology. The number was doubtless a fraction of that when Guitar was staking her claim to a place at the controls of a recording studio.

“I worked in the mixing with the engineer, but I worked as an assistant there,” she recalled to No Depression, referring to her apprenticeship with producer Fabor Robison in Los Angeles in the 1950s. “I’d keep the records, do the cataloging and things. So I learned to operate the equipment.”

“Fabor was difficult to work with,” she added, “but I didn’t care. My whole intent was to learn to produce and learn the studio.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/obituaries/bonnie-guitar-dead.html" id="c76b737a-39b0-3517-a07a-2f85598b4f34">The New York Times</a>.

Bonnie Guitar, who had hit records as a country singer and guitarist, but whose biggest achievement may have been her work as a businesswoman in the male-dominated music industry, died Saturday in Soap Lake, Washington. She was 95.

Bonnie Guitar, Music Industry Trailblazer, Is Dead at 95

His death was confirmed by Mark Ford, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, which inducted Chesnut in 1996. Ford said Chesnut had experienced respiratory problems since October.

Chesnut had a gift for illuminating the struggles of working people, like the beleaguered factory hand in “Oney,” a song, drawn from his experience with a tyrannical employer, that became a Top 10 country hit for Johnny Cash in 1972.

“Looking at the World Through a Windshield,” a two-stepping country hit for singer Del Reeves in 1968, portrays a solitary trucker speeding through the night, longing for home. Written with Mike Hoyer, the song was also recorded by the country-rock bands Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen and Son Volt.

Chesnut, who grew up in rural eastern Kentucky, came by his working-class sensibilities honestly.

“I was born and raised in the coal-mining camps and the railroad center where they all came together,” he said in 2009 during a program held in his honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.

“To say the least,” he went on, “it was a very poor place to be from. When you’re from Harlan County, there’s no way to go but up.”

Chesnut wrote compellingly about heartbreak, as he did to great emotional effect in “A Good Year for the Roses,” a ballad that reached No.2 on the country chart for George Jones in 1970.

In that song, a man pines for the woman who just left him:

I can hardly bear the sight of lipstick on the cigarettes there in the ashtray

Lyin’ cold the way you left ‘em

But at least your lips caressed them

While you packed.

Turning his gaze to “the lip-print on a half-filled cup of coffee” that the woman had poured but didn’t drink, he agonizes further, “But at least you thought you wanted it / That’s so much more than I can say for me.”

Elvis Costello recorded “A Good Day for the Roses” 11 years later, introducing the song to a generation of rock fans on “Almost Blue,” an album of cover versions of hard-core country material.

Elvis Presley had a crossover hit with Chesnut’s “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” in 1975, when it reached both country and pop music’s Top 40s. (Presley had recorded another song with the title “Trouble,” a bluesy composition by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, in 1958.)

Chesnut’s other well-known compositions include “It’s Four in the Morning,” a No.1 country single in 1972 for Faron Young (who recorded it again in 1985 in a duet with Willie Nelson); “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like Daddy,” a Top 10 country hit in 1974 for Loretta Lynn; and “Holding On to Nothin’,” a Top 10 country hit for Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton in 1968. Jerry Lee Lewis’ shuffling rendition of Chesnut’s “Another Place, Another Time,” another Top 10 country hit from 1968, was nominated for a Grammy Award.

At least 30 members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, along with Southern soul singers like Brook Benton and Arthur Alexander, have recorded Chesnut’s material. In 1972 Billboard magazine named him country songwriter of the year.

Jerry Donald Chesnut was born on May 7, 1931, in Loyall, Kentucky. His father, Alvin Basil, whom people knew as either Basil or A.B., owned a grocery store. His mother, Ruby (Peterson) Chesnut, was a homemaker. Jerry and his older brother Ray grew up listening to country music on the “Grand Ole Opry” radio show and daytime broadcasts on WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Chesnut enlisted in the Air Force in 1949; he sang and played guitar on military bases, naval ships and radio during his four years in the service. Afterward he moved to St. Augustine, Florida, where he was a railroad conductor and played barn dances with a hoedown band.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Jerry Chesnut, a blue-collar songwriter who wrote hits for Elvis Presley, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and more than 100 other popular artists, including another Elvis, Costello, died Saturday at his home in Brentwood. He was 87.

Bill Friskics-Warren

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