IN THE SPOTLIGHT – GORDON MOTE

A month or so ago, I called David Ball to ask about his 1994 Warner Bros. showcase when he sang “Thinkin’ Problem.” During our conversation, he asked, “Do you know who Gordon Mote is? I think people would love to hear about him.” So I contacted Gordon, and the session piano player agreed to talk to me. “You are so sweet to want me to be a part of your newsletter,” he said. “Tell David I appreciate the shoutout. We haven’t worked together in quite a while, but he’s a great talent and a super-duper guy.”

Gordon was born and raised in Attalla, Alabama, a little town near Gadsden. He started playing the piano at age three. They were at his grandmother’s house in 1973 for Thanksgiving. The children all banged occasionally on her old upright piano, but this particular day Gordon sat down and played “Jesus Loves Me” with both hands. “It was a total miracle,” Gordon says. “There’s just no explaining it except that it was a God thing.” He’s been playing ever since.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – JOHN ANDERSON

Patience can be a virtue when trying to schedule an interview. It took more than 16 months before the stars aligned and I got a call from John Anderson to talk about my Randy Travis biography. It’s quite a thrill to hear such a recognizable voice on the other end of the phone line.

John and Randy first met in the late 1970s, when John was singing with house bands because he couldn’t afford his own band. Randy was in one of those house bands. Fifteen years later, when John was honored with the Academy of Country Music’s Career Achievement Award, he was thrilled to have it presented by superstar Randy Travis. “That was a big, big night for me,” he says. “I felt very flattered and honored. That particular award was for inspiring the younger people to move into country music.”

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – WADE LANDRY

The last time I saw Wade Landry was in July at The Troubadour in Nashville, with Mel Tillis Jr. and his Memory Makers band. So imagine my surprise when I called him two weeks ago, and he’s now living in Louisiana. Kayo and I had first met Wade in 2021, at the Music City Bar and Grill in Nashville, where he was playing fiddle and singing Mel Tillis songs. Kayo caught him on a break and asked if he’d been with Mel Tillis at the casino in Flandreau, South Dakota, about 15 years earlier. She remembered Ernie Reed telling her before the show that it was the other twin fiddler’s first night with Mel. “Was it on New Year’s Eve?” Wade asked. Kayo said yes. “That was me,” he said. Kayo introduced me as the author of Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story, and Wade brought his copy several nights later for me to autograph.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – MARK CASSTEVENS

“The very nature of our job is to be invisible,” says Nashville session multi-instrumentalist Mark Casstevens. Specializing in acoustic guitar, Mark accompanied over 250 artists in the recording studio from 1971 through 2010. “If you have an ego, you shouldn’t be in my line of work. You have to be happy to be part of the wallpaper, and I was. I got paid for my hobby.” He is one of Garth Brooks’s G-Men, the group who played on Garth’s first nine studio albums. “I have made it my life’s work not to be in a video,” he told me when I called him last week. “I’d rather be in the shadows. I want to be a supporting cast member; I don’t want the limelight.”

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – ROGER BROWN

Randy Travis’s 1993 album, Wind in the Wire, contained four cuts by one songwriter, Roger Brown. I called Roger to discuss how that astounding number came about. He was in the right place at the right time. He and his friends had been writing cowboy songs, something no one else in Nashville was doing. Word quickly got around that “Brown got four Randy Travis cuts,” and that legitimized him as a songwriter. “Recording those songs was life-altering for me,” Roger tells me. “Because of that little album, which wasn’t a huge commercial success, I got to meet Randy Travis, I got to write with Randy Travis, and more important to me than any of it, I got to be friends with him. And remain so to this day.”

NEWS

Charlie Monk, music industry networker and radio personality, died at home December 19 at age 84. Over fifty years ago, he co-founded the Country Radio Seminar, which is now a weeklong convention that draws more than 2,000 people and has live performances all over Nashville. He and radio promotions man Tom McEntee started Country Radio Seminar as a way for the few all-country stations to battle the pop stations that dominated radio in 1969. The Tennessean says Charlie grew up in Geneva, Alabama, “with a chip on his shoulder. He spent the rest of his life fighting against the ghosts of those few who said he and his family weren’t worth a lick.” In high school, he cleaned at a radio station until hired for a weekend on-air shift. After serving in the U.S. Army, he worked at various radio stations until he and his wife, Royce, moved to Murfreesboro and then Nashville, where he became a song publisher; he helped Randy Travis and Kenny Chesney get writing and record deals. Read the rest of this entry »

TWENTIETH CENTURY DRIFTER AUDIOBOOK AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD

I’m thrilled to announce that Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is now available to the public as an audiobook. It can be downloaded from Audible.com or Amazon.com. Thanks to Frank Gerard for narrating both Marty’s story and Faron’s story. I have a few complimentary copies I can give out for those two books, as well as for Navy Greenshirt. Email me if you would like one, or all three.

NEWS

Country music journalist Peter Cooper, 52, died December 6 in Nashville, Tennessee, after suffering a head injury from a fall. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s take a moment to honor the memories of Faron Young and Marty Robbins. Marty died December 8, 1982, at age 57. Faron died December 10, 1996, at age 64.

NEWS

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the University of Illinois Press have signed an agreement to co-publish and distribute books on country music and roots-based music. They will co-publish new works and reissue significant out-of-print historical works from the Country Music Foundation Press. Read the rest of this entry »

NEWS

Founding member and guitarist of the Country Music Hall of Fame group, Alabama, Jeffrey Cook died peacefully at his beach home in Destin, Florida, on November 7, at age 73. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2012. Born in Fort Payne, Alabama, in 1949, he began playing in bands at age 13 and working as a radio disc jockey at age 14. He graduated from Fort Payne High School and earned a college degree in Electronic Technology. He loved that radio combined two of his favorite things, music and electronics. Over 50 years ago, Jeff Cook, along with cousins Teddy Gentry and Randy Owen, left Fort Payne for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where they formed Alabama. Read the rest of this entry »

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – RANDY TRAVIS

When Kayo Paver and I drove to North Texas in 2016, we included Tioga on our route and an excursion to find the Randy Travis ranch—which we did. No one answered when I punched the call button at the gate, so we headed home to South Dakota. Never could I have imagined that the next time I approached that gate, I would have the code to open it. Or that I’d ever be running along that country road. But that’s exactly what happened 6½ years later.

This visit came as a result of meeting Randy and Mary Travis at the Corn Palace in Mitchell. Read the rest of this entry »