Meet the genius behind many a country music hit

BY PETER COOPER
Staff Writer

George Jones kept talking in that Donald Duck voice, the one that drove producer Billy Sherrill to the brink.

Jones was drinking heavily, in the midst of what Sherrill recalls as "his Twilight Zone" period, and Sherrill was attempting to interrupt the duck talk and debauchery long enough to record a song he thought would be a hit.

Sherrill, who by this point in 1980 was Nashville's most powerful, important and visionary producer, knew a hit when he heard one. When he didn't hear one, he'd write one. There was no need for that here, though. "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was, he surmised, a surefire hit, so long as it was sung by George Jones and not by a waterfowl.

It wasn't a slam-dunk from the beginning. Sherrill requested a rewrite from songwriters Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman, and he'd requested that a recitation replace one musical passage. He also requested that Jones quit singing the song to the melody of Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night."

"It's a better melody," Jones repeated, sometimes in his cartoon voice and sometimes in a Southern slur.

"I'm sure Kris would think so," Sherrill responded, sighing.

"You know, 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' took a year to make, and 10 years off my life."

Sherrill ultimately produced the song to his satisfaction, though Jones told everyone in the studio, "Mark my words, nobody's going to buy that morbid (thing)."

Jones' words were marked but not heeded. Twenty-eight years after that recording, "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is considered among the greatest country singles of all time. Its soaring strings, a Sherrill trademark, accentuate Jones' pained delivery, and the song became the biggest hit of Jones' legendary career.

"Billy Sherrill is a genius," Jones says today, talking like a wise and knowledgeable human being. "He knew how to put these things together. He was behind so much of my success."

These days, the genius is retired, though he still hangs out in what must be the only Music Row office to include hardbound books of Winston Churchill speeches and a poster of professional wrestler "Macho Man" Randy Savage.

"Just things I like," Sherrill said in a rare on-the-record conversation. He spoke not because he's pushing a new album or book, but because his daughter told him it wouldn't be bad to be quoted every now and again. For the past 15 years, Sherrill hasn't kept up much with the music business. He said he knew only two people — Willie Nelson and Tanya Tucker — in a recent Billboard Top 100 country album chart.

"Almost all of my people are dead," said Sherrill, 72. "Tammy, Paycheck, Charlie Rich . . . they're gone."

A legacy remains

To be sure, though, a legacy remains. In the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Sherrill changed Nashville music. His sophisticated musical arrangements ushered in the "Countrypolitan" era, in which violins and violas softened hard country voices just enough to appeal to city listeners. As a Billboard magazine advertisement once noted, by the 1970s four of the biggest words in the recording industry were, "Produced by Billy Sherrill."

As head of Epic records, Sherrill discovered an Alabama hairdresser named Tammy Wynette who had already been rejected by numerous other label pros, and he developed her into one of country's top acts. Her ascent was aided by the songs Sherrill co-wrote, including "Stand By Your Man" and "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad."

He took a brilliant but hard-to-classify (and thus hard-to-market) singer named Charlie Rich and produced hits including "Behind Closed Doors" and "The Most Beautiful Girl."

He suffered the slings and arrows of those who criticized him for veering from traditional country and made music that is now a celebrated part of the country tradition.

"I heard the guff, mostly from disc jockeys and wannabe types," he said, leaning back in his desk chair as a corner of his mouth arched into a half-smile. "Apparently, the fans liked it. They bought it."

Sherrill was raised in rural Alabama, the son of a Southern Baptist preacher. Throughout his career, he retained an innate sense of what kinds of songs and sounds would appeal to country fans.

"I used to play him songs all the time," said Joe Chambers, who wrote for Sherrill's publishing company and who worked under Sherrill at Epic Records. "He'd listen to a song I'd written and say, 'Would you really use the word dismayed in a relationship? Would you say, "I'm dismayed with you?" Really?' With him, it has to be real. He wanted you to write something with the words you'd hear if you were eavesdropping on a conversation."

A producer's first job, Sherrill figured, was to marry the right song to the right singer. Sherrill arranged hundreds of those marriages, often writing the song and thus serving as father of the bride, and he planned and performed the wedding as well.

Sherrill ran the label for which he produced the music, and so in each session he was betting company money — and his job security — that he would be able to create records that earned more money than was spent in the making. By employing 11-piece string sections (eight violins, two violas and a cello, and he'd record the parts twice and layer them together to create a lusher soundscape), he effectively increased his own bet. He ushered in the era of big-budget recording in Nashville, and so he had to sell more just to break even. And Billy Sherrill did much better than break even.

Turning attention toward Nashville

Sherrill credits Nashville musicians with much of his success.

"If you go into a studio like the one at Columbia, with the musicians that were available at the time and the artists available at the time and the songs available at the time, you'd have to be some kind of real idiot not to come out of there with a hit," he said.

The thing is, he was often the one handpicking the musicians, the artists and the songs. And he guided the arrangements. One of the signature, Sherrill-inspired musical parts was the piano lick on David Houston's 1966 nine-week No. 1 smash "Almost Persuaded," a song Sherrill co-wrote with close friend Glenn Sutton. Though Sherrill was a good piano player, he devised the part and showed it to session man Hargus "Pig" Robbins, who expertly played the piano figure and gave the single an instantly identifiable sound.

"Pig's fingers, my brain," Sherrill said. "Pig was probably the best musician I ever worked with. Anyway, up until then most hit country records sold 20,000 or 30,000, so the New York record people didn't pay much attention to us down in Nashville. We put 'Almost Persuaded' out as the B-side to a single called 'We Got Love.' One day, I got a call from a distributor saying, 'We need 100,000 of the David Houston single.' I said, 'You want 100,000 of "We Got Love?" He said, 'What's "We Got Love"? Naw, we want the one with that crazy little piano lick in it.' They had flipped the record and were playing the B-side. The next day, he called back and wanted another 100,000. And the New York men started paying attention."

They kept on paying attention, for years, to Wynette and Jones and Paycheck and Rich and Tucker and Sherrill's brain and Pig's fingers, through "Stand By Your Man," "Take This Job and Shove It," "The Grand Tour," "Behind Closed Doors," "Too Far Gone" and, of course, "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

"I could hear the whole record in my head before we got to the studio," Sherrill said. "Getting it out of my head was sometimes kind of hard."

And then, in the early 1990s, Sherrill got out of the game. His hearing was fine, his instincts were sharp, and he decided that all in all he'd rather watch soap operas than make records.

"When you're a record producer and you've got a George Jones session in a couple of days and you're dreading it, then it's time to quit," he said.

And so he quit.

"I'm gone, and I've been gone, and I don't know exactly what goes on these days, but I think we might have had a lot more fun back then," Sherrill said. "But that was a long time ago. You asked how I wanted people to think about me. I don't think anybody really thinks about me."

Every now and again, a genius gets something wrong.