Producing Country - Michael Jarrett Music/Interview

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on the Grand Ole Opry. Then, I wrote a few songs out of desperation. It gave me an opportunity. I was doing demos. Tree [Publishing] had just started, and they were paying me ten dollars a night to stand all night long and sing on demos of songs that announcers at WSM wrote. Of course, they gave the songs to Tree, but nothing was happening. The songs weren’t getting cut, but by osmosis I started learning how to produce records.

      I was a musician, and I was a songwriter. So I had sort of an innate understanding about music and songs. When Jack [Stapp, program director] called me down to WSM and asked me if I wanted to go to work for Tree [his company], I said, “I don’t know anything about publishing.”

      “I don’t either,” he said. “We’ll learn together.”

      That’s how it got started. Because I knew that I had to get out there and get the job done, I didn’t even have an office. I got Jack to get me a fifty-dollar tape recorder, and I went around. When I heard about a song or about a songwriter, I’d go see him and sign up a song with Tree. I found that I was capable of doing it all. It came together, just inter-locked without any real effort on my part. I innately knew what I was supposed to do.

      I made a lot of mistakes businesswise because I wasn’t a businessman. They weren’t devastating things, just little decision-making processes that you go through. But I had a feel for the song. I had a feel for the music. I had a feel for if someone was good or not. When you’re a publisher or a producer, the most important thing you can have is an ear for the song. You must recognize a good song. I’m of the opinion that any producer who doesn’t make it, normally, it’s because he doesn’t recognize a great song. It starts with that song, and you know what? It ends with it.

       Cutting demos for Tree Publishing sounds like a crash course in production.

      You learn what you don’t put on a record more than you learn what to put on it, because overproduction kills a record faster than under-production. If you cover up the song, you’ve pretty well done some damage. You’re going by your own gut feeling—that thing that hits your ear. You like it or you don’t like it. All of us are playing twenty questions. No one’s ever perfect in the assumption that they know what a hit record is. Sometimes, you’ll think something is going to be a great smash, and it comes apart on you. But after having produced records for a while, you start getting a feel for where you’re going.

      When you go in to do a demo, you’re trying to give the star the feeling that you think the song should have when he records it. Even without realizing what you were doing, you were producing a record that wasn’t going to come out as a record but, instead, was going to come out cloned by somebody.

      You’ve got to be careful about directing a demo toward one artist. Back in the early days of Tree, I tried to make the demo pretty generic, and yet present the song the best I could. If I did a demo directed toward Ernest Tubb, if he didn’t cut that song, then who was going to cut it? To keep from taking it toward one guy, you’d just give the song what it needed, that special quality, that special feeling. I think finding the feeling that the song should have on the demo is more important than anything else. You can doctor it up. You can add horns, strings, fiddle, or banjo, but when you hear the demo, if the feel of the song doesn’t grab you, then you’ve missed the most important part of it.

      Hollywood may have employed a bunkhouse full of singing cowboys, but until High Noon (1952), film audiences heard country-and-western songs only when singers like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were onscreen. Dimitri Tiomkin’s soundtrack to High Noon altered that convention, announcing a new era in American cinema. It featured a Tiomkin-composed popular song, “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me),” sung by Tex Ritter. It played as opening credits rolled. With that song Hollywood’s orientation toward “the popular” decisively shifted. The relationship between song and score was reconceptualized, as was Hollywood’s relationship to the recording industry. The notion that a soundtrack could be a collection of pre-existing (already recorded) pop tunes began with “High Noon.”

       KEN NELSON

      The first artist on Capitol Records was Tex Ritter [1942]. His first record was produced by Johnny Mercer, one of the founders of Capitol and a great songwriter.

      I hadn’t heard the soundtrack from the movie [High Noon], but I made the record. Lee [Gillette] heard it. He said, “Hey, you darn fool, you forgot the drums!”

      I said, “What drums?” Lee was a drummer, and so we went in and overdubbed the drums on “High Noon.” Overdubbing was pretty difficult at that time. I don’t think there was tape, but I’m not positive. We did it from the acetate. It worked out. Of course, we had great engineers. We had John Palladino and Hugh Davies. Palladino was tops as far as an engineer—a mixer—was concerned.

      I was there to get the best I could out of the artist. I believe that the emotion in a record is the important thing. It was my job to see that everything was under control and to listen to the sound. My main job was to listen for mistakes, listen for the balance. Microphone placement at that time was a lot different than it is today when everybody’s got a microphone. We had microphones on the fiddle and on the steel [guitar] and on the piano, but the engineer would regulate it according to the sound. We didn’t let anything overshadow anything else. We tried to blend them.

      That’s one of the problems with today’s music. Musicians are listening to themselves and not to the artist. They’re not listening as a group. I always said, “I want to hear every damn word.” That was my philosophy. Today, they make musical tracks, and then the singer sings to it. And that’s another thing that’s wrong. There’s no way that you can get the feel and the emotion. Then, of course, we didn’t have charts most of the time. I’d write down where the fill-ins were to come in, like if the steel was to come in. Then I’d have this list of the fills, and I’d sit beside the engineer and tell him what was coming up.

      I’d get with the art department. I had to approve pictures and liner notes. Sometimes I’d write them myself. Then I had to okay the record. I mean, after we recorded it, and it was put on a disc, I’d have to okay it—the sound and whether it was equalized correctly. That was all the job of the producer in the early days.

       HAROLD BRADLEY

      Paul Cohen came down here [to Nashville to supervise sessions for Decca Records] because it was cheaper to send down one man than it was to take Red Foley and his band—to pay for their transportation, their lodging, and their meals—to Cincinnati or to New York. It was cheaper for one man to come down. He’d stay for a month and record everybody in sight [notably, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Ernest Tubb, and Red Foley]. It was kind of like what I call the shotgun approach. You’re going to hit something, if you’ve got a wide enough shotgun. When he left Decca and started Todd Records, he didn’t have the luxury of doing that. That’s why he didn’t have any real success at Todd. He could only do artists one at a time. Your odds weren’t that good. Before, he recorded for a whole month. We [the session players] would be tied up for a whole month. We learned that Paul was really a good song man. He had no real musical talent, but he had a commercial ear for a song. If you sang a song to him and it struck his ear—he liked it—then, usually, he was right.

       ROLAND JANES

      We generally worked on things until we got them pretty much right. That was one of the genius things about Sam

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