Podcast appearances and mentions of Norbert Putnam

Pianist and big band arranger talks about the regional music scene of Tuscaloosa and playing with legends like Cleveland Eaton and Norbert Putnam. Highly Recommended.

This week on License to Chill, Ryan and Patrick welcome legendary producer, Norbert Putnam to the show to chat about his career working with legends like Elvis, Ray Charles, Roy Orbison and of course, Jimmy Buffett.

In this episode of Talkin'', we delve deep into the world of music with the legendary Norbert Putnam, renowned bassist, producer, and a true icon in the industry. With a career spanning over six decades, Norbert has left an indelible mark on the landscape of popular music, having worked with some of the biggest names in the business such as ELVIS, George Harrison, Jimmy Buffet and so many more!Beyond his musical contributions, Putnam also witnessed firsthand the enigmatic presence of Elvis in the studio, capturing the essence of his unparalleled charisma and passion for music. These numerous recording sessions with Presley not only showcased Putnam's exceptional musicianship but also cemented his status as a key figure in the annals of music history.

Justin and Bec explore Elvis' "marathon" sessions from June 1970, starting with laying the groundwork for the return to Nashville's RCA Studio B, pondering why Elvis may not have chosen to return to Chips Moman's American Sound in Memphis. Instead Elvis is joined this time by a new band led by his live guitarist James Burton but otherwise comprised largely of country-soul players who had worked alongside producer Felton Jarvis in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, including Chip Young, Jerry Carrigan, David Briggs, Norbert Putnam and Charlie McCoy, and rather than a meticulous planned session with Chips' guiding vision... they tear through dozens of songs across four nights, with a follow-up session later that September. Part 1 focuses on the establishing information and the first two nights, June 4-5 and June 5-6, 1970.  For Song of the Week, Bec highlights "I Met Her Today," the understated Don Robertson ballad that was cut in 1961's Pot Luck sessions but held until the hodgepodge Elvis For Everyone album four years later. Meanwhile, Justin goes way back to the Sun era, selecting the middle child single "Milkcow Blues Boogie" - couched between Good Rockin' Tonight and Baby Let's Play House, yet containing that same genius melding of blues (it was written and originated by Kokomo Arnold) and country (also highly popularized by western swing artists like Bob and Johnnie Lee Wills) in a new rockabilly style as anything else he did at Sun. If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy. 

Profound southern musician producer and arranger talks about working with Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and all the great studio cats in Nashville and beyond.

Welcome to another episode of The Jay Franze Show! On this show, we have an extraordinary guest, Chris Leuzinger, a renowned Nashville studio guitarist and the guitarist for country superstar Garth Brooks.Chris takes us on a musical journey, starting from his early days in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he first picked up the guitar at 9. He shares his early influences, including guitar legends like Steve Cropper, Mike Bloomfield, and Eric Clapton, and his love for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.At 21, Chris decided to move to Nashville and pursue his passion for music. Through a chance encounter with publisher Juan Contreras and producer Norbert Putnam, he found himself on the road with Dobie Gray and later became part of Cowboy Jack Clement's Ragtime Band. During this time, Chris made his mark in the recording studio, contributing to several #1 hits with Eddie Rabbitt.But his meeting with producer Allen Reynolds truly transformed his career. Chris shares how Allen became his mentor and introduced him to Crystal Gayle, leading to an incredible 11-year stint in her touring band. They headlined major shows, traveled the world, and appeared on esteemed TV shows such as The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson and Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve.However, Chris's studio work continued to grow, and he eventually focused solely on his session career. Little did he know that another life-changing call from Allen Reynolds would come his way, this time about a promising new artist named Garth Brooks. Together, they recorded the initial tracks, including hits like "If Tomorrow Never Comes" and "Much Too Young," setting the stage for Garth's monumental career.Chris reflects on his incredible journey with Garth Brooks, spanning over 25 years. Even after Allen's retirement, Chris remains vital to Garth's recording sessions, forging an unbreakable musical bond. He also expresses gratitude for the opportunity to collaborate with numerous other great artists and highlights the rich musical community in Nashville.Join us for an inspiring and insightful conversation with Chris Leuzinger as he shares the stories behind the iconic songs, his experiences as a studio guitarist, and the magic behind the scenes in the music industry. It's an episode you won't want to miss!Show InformationHost: Jay FranzeGuest: Chris LeuzingerRecorded: June 19, 2023LinksJay Franze: https://JayFranze.comChris Leuzinger: https://chrisleuzinger.com Support the show

Steve Goodman, Kris Kristofferson, Norbert Putnam, and me.

April 10th birthday girl Beth Riley has a deep track from The Beach Boys in her Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break! Producer/musician Norbert Putnam talks about producing Jimmy Buffett's biggest hit (and one of the most popular songs of all time).  We play a track from our buddy Bruce Johnston from an album celebrating it's 60th anniversary this year in the Good Time Segment and we drop a coin in the Jammin' James Jukebox to hear our selection of the week (with a tie to another member of The Beach Boys too).  Plus, we've got rockers from Sys Malakian, The Tourmaliners, Perry Dear & The Deerstalkers, Susanna Hoffs, The Desolate Coast, Shoreline Dreamers, Dick Dale, Into The Soup, Trabants, The Foreign Films, Pollo Del Mar and Spooky Boys!   Intro music bed: "Catch A Wave"- The Beach Boys   Sys Malakian- "Surf 190" Shoreline Dreamers- "Liberty Bell" The Tourmaliners- "Starshine" Trabants- "Leaving Town" Susanna Hoffs- "Under My Thumb"   "Good Time" segment: Bruce Johnston 60th Anniversary of Surfin' 'Round The World (1963) Bruce Johnston- "Malibu"   Into The Soup- "Surfin' With Winkle" Spooky Boys- "Past Tense"   Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break: The Beach Boys- "I Just Got My Pay" Follow "Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break" HERE   The Foreign Films- "A Perfect Future" Pollo Del Mar- "Inner Sunset" Dick Dale & His Del-Tones- "Flashing Eyes" The Desolate Coast- "Dracutela"   Green Room segment: Norbert Putnam on working with Jimmy Buffett Jimmy Buffett- "Margaritaville"   Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week: Chicago- "Baby, What A Big Surprise" (Carl Wilson on BGV's)   Perry Dear & The Deerstalkers- "Motorkonvoien '64"   Outro music bed: Eddie Angel- "Deuces Wild"      

Genius double bassist and producer talks about creating parts for hit records first in Muscle Shoals and later in Nashville with David Briggs and Jerry Carrigan among others.

On Episode SIX of Through These Doors: A FAME Studios Podcast, Rodney Hall is thrilled to welcome Muscle Shoals music legend, Norbert Putnam, for a memorable trip down music memory lane. From his days recording in FAME's first dozen hits to recording with Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and Jimmy Buffet,  to being inducted into the Musicians and Alabama Music Hall of Fames, you'll want to listen to every second of this enlightening and fascinating conversation.

En un corto plazo de tiempo hemos perdido a dos de los grandes representantes del llamado movimiento outlaw, aunque sus nombres no han gozado de la popularidad de otros. Hablamos de Jerry Jeff Walker y Billy Joe Shaver, a quienes hoy vamos a recordar en el tiempo de TOMA UNO. Jerry Jeff Walker es considerado uno de los más relevantes cantautores norteamericanos, siguiendo sus propias formas al margen de las modas y de sus cambios. Hasta su muerte, siempre mantuvo la frescura y las directrices de los mejores años del que podríamos llamar redneck rock. Su carrera la inició con una banda psicodélica llamada Circus Maximus, la primera que se acercó al country. Tocó por todos los bares de Estados Unidos y tuvo a su mujer, Susan, como manager y responsable de su propio sello discográfico, Tried & True Music. Fue en junio del 1968 cuando se lanzó al mercado en single una canción llamada “Mr. Bojangles”, como anticipo del álbum que Jerry Jeff Walker publicaría en octubre con ese título que contó con la producción de Tom Dowd. Es una canción inspirada en un encuentro tres años antes con un artista callejero en la cárcel del First Precinct de Nueva Orleans, donde Walker había ingresado por embriaguez. Aquel bailarín, apodado Mr. Bojangles, contó historias de su vida hasta que todo se entristeció cuando recordó el atropello de su perro. Cuando alguien pidió levantar el ánimo, aquel hombre empezó a bailar claqué. La versión que la Nitty Gritty Dirt Band realizó dos años después y que se publicó también en single consiguió alcanzar el Top 10 de las listas y llamó de la atención hacia su compositor, Un mocetón llamado en realidad Ronald Clyde Crosby y nacido en e Oneonta, del estado de Nueva York. Fue entonces cuando Jerry Jeff Walker se mudó a Austin y todo cambió. La llegada a Austin de Jerry Jeff Walker, que moría el pasado día 23, le asoció con el movimiento outlaw tejano que tenía a Willie Nelson y Michael Martin Murphey como cabezas visibles. Allí encontró el ambiente que necesitaba y una cierta consideración a nivel popular, gracias a discos como Ridin ’High y, sobre todo, un álbum memorable con el nombre de Viva Terlingua!, grabado en vivo en ese dancehall de la tejana Luckenbach. En aquel registro de 1973 encontramos “Sangria Wine”, otra de sus canciones emblemáticas, que daba cuenta de cómo aquellas primitivas tonalidades folkies propias de la escena neoyorquina habían cambiado. Aquel disco nos enseñó lo que el artista llamaba el "gonzo country", con una base campera mezclada con blues y tonalidades de la tradición del norte de México. Durante este tiempo le acompañaba Lost Gonzo Band, un grupo informal de músicos de Austin entre los que se encontraban Michael Martin Murphey, Mickey Raphael y Ray Wylie Hubbard, por el que Jerry Jeff Walker sentía un gran respeto. En aquel concierto incluyó una versión divertida versión de "Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother", una canción bien arraigada en la zona y un excelente ejemplo del fenómeno "outlaw". Veinte años después de la grabación en directo de aquel antológico ¡Viva Terlingua!, el neoyorquino se trasladó de nuevo a aquel lugar y despachó en ¡Viva Luckenbach! otro puñado de grandes canciones entre las que encontramos “I’ll Be Here In The Morning” de Townes Van Zandt, uno de sus referentes y otro de los pilares de la música tejana. “London Homesick Blues” fue la canción que cerró en 1973 aquel Viva Terlingua! siempre recordado. Lo grabó con la Lost Gonzo Band en la que militaba Gary P Nunn, un bajista y teclista de Oklahoma emigrado a Texas para convertirse en otro revolucionario de la música más enraizada de aquellas tierras. Aquella canción fue durante dos décadas el tema del mítico Austin City Limits de la televisión pública estadounidense, cuyo piloto fue grabado el 17 de Octubre de 1974 con Willie Nelson de protagonista. Hace 13 años, Cowboy Town se convirtió en el último álbum de Brooks & Dunn antes de anunciar su separación en 2009 tras una larga gira. En aquel disco encontramos “The Ballad Of Jerry Jeff Walker”, una canción que Kix Brooks y Bob DiPiero compusieron juntos para rendir homenaje al hoy desaparecido artista, al que invitaron a participar vocalmente en un tema. Las canciones de Jerry Jeff Walker dejan siempre una sensación de melancolía confortable, tanto en sus grabaciones como en sus apariciones en vivo. Son una introspección sobre las cosas sencillas que ocurren todos los días y que se encuentran en tu propia casa o en el béisbol. Son temas que, por encima de todo, tenían mucho sentido para él. Siempre pareció que era un proscrito diferente. En septiembre de 2017 supimos que tenía cáncer de garganta. A pesar de ello, al año siguiente lanzó el que fue su último álbum, It’s About Time. Hace una semana moría con 78 años debido a una fatal recaída en el cáncer que sufría. Billy Joe Shaver era más conocido por sus canciones que como cantante. Era nativo de Corsicana y creció en Waco, siempre dentro de los límites del estado de Texas. Escribió canciones desde muy pequeño, animado por su profesora de inglés y tras su paso obligado por el ejército, se marchó a Houston para relacionarse con los círculos de poetas y cantantes de folk. Por entonces conoció a Willie Nelson, cuya influencia le ayudó a convertirse en compositor. Billy Joe Shaver y Willie Nelson son dos de los personajes a los que mejor les cuadra el calificativo de outlaws. Ambos músicos tejanos han convergido en la escena musical y han tenido también desencuentros con la ley. Amigos desde hace tiempo, regresaron juntos con "Hard to Be an Outlaw", el anticipo de Long in the Tooth, editado en el verano de 2014 y convertido en el primer álbum de Billy Joe Shaver que entraba en las listas de country. Sin embargo, en "Hard to Be an Outlaw" hablaba sobre estrellas que nunca han pisado carreteras secundarias, en una mirada resuelta al estado de la country music, suficiente como para ser un renegado. Billy Joe Shaver decidió trasladarse a Nashville en busca de un reconocimiento que no tenía. La suerte no le acompañó hasta que contactó con Bobby Bare y firmó para su editora por una cantidad cercana a los 50 dólares semanales. Desde entonces han sido muchos quienes grabaron sus canciones, especialmente Waylon Jennings, que fue uno de sus grandes apoyos, llegando a grabar un nombre completo con sus composiciones. Desde entonces han sido muchos quienes han interpretado sus canciones y sería otro tejano como Kris Kristofferson quien en aquel 1973 produjera su disco de debut, Old Five And Dimers Like Me, donde encontramos una de las más dinámicas canciones de trenes: “I Been To Georgia On A Fast Train”. Kris Kristofferson dio el impulso inicial a Billy Joe Shaver produciendo su primer álbum para Monument Records, al que daba nombre “Old Five And Dimers Like Me”, demostrando que sin gozar de una voz tan perfecta como la de otros colegas, su forma de expresarse era tan conmovedora como la de ellos. Tom T. Hall, además, escribió el comentario de la contraportada. Desde el primero de sus trabajos discográficos, Billy Joe Shaver mantuvo una dignidad apabullante y una elegancia innata. Siempre poseyó un sentido de dignidad que convirtió muchos de sus discos en obras maestras de la composición y en ejemplos indispensables del outlaw country. Old Five And Dimers Like Me y Gypsy Boy han sido dos álbumes favoritos para TOMA UNO desde siempre. El primero llegó a la vez que inauguramos el programa, y el segundo, de 1977, fue una manifestación de poderío por parte Phil Walden, de Capricorn Records, que le había fichado, y del propio Billy Joe Shaver. La producción corrió a cargo de Brian Ahern, por entonces marido de Emmylou Harris, y reunieron a los mejores músicos del momento, desde la artista de Alabama, pasando por algunos de los miembros de su Hot Band, como Rodney Crowell y Ricky Skaggs; hizo coros Nicolette Larson, aparecieron Willie Nelson, James Burton, Mickey Raphael y Randy Scruggs. Para rematarlo contaron con David Briggs y Ben Keith, además de una base de ritmo formada por Karl Himmel y Norbert Putnam. En aquel disco escuchamos su propia versión de uno de sus himnos, "Honky Tonk Heroes", que Waylon había estrenado cuatro años antes. Uno de los momentos mágicos de aquel Gypsy Boy de 1977 fue “Silver Wings Of Time”, una canción acogedora que destapa la profundidad emocional de un contador de historias de su nivel, algo que parece contrastar con el aspecto rudo de Billy Joe Shaver, que no se implicó en la música hasta hasta casi los 30 años. Tiene que ver con un accidente que sufrió en un aserradero en los años 60 en el que se cortó prácticamente dos dedos y partes de otros dos de su mano derecha. Una infección tras el accidente finalmente lo empeoró aún más, de tal forma que quedó inhabilitado para realizar trabajos manuales y decidió dedicarse a la música para ganarse la vida. Otras de las canciones fundamentales de la discografía de Billy Joe Shaver es “Live Forever”, con referencias a su fe religiosa. La música era de su hijo, el guitarrista Eddy Shaver, que murió a consecuencia de una sobredosis de drogas en 2000. Se la enseñó a su padre cuando actuaban juntos con el simple nombre de Shaver y él puso la letra. La grabaron dos veces, en el álbum Tramp On Your Street de 1993 y cinco años después en Victory. En los últimos tiempos, Billy Joe Shaver se concentró en la composición e incluso pudimos verle en la película The Apostle con Robert Duvall. El actor haría casi 20 años después de aquello una interpretación a cappella de parte de aquel “Live Forever” en Crazy Heart. Además de Waylon y Willie, Bobby Bare, Jessi Colter, David Allan Coe, Guy Clark o Townes Van Zandt, también fueron pioneros de aquel movimiento outlaw que ahora se recuerda con veneración Jerry Jeff Walker y Billy Joe Shaver. Ambos han muerto con muy pocos días de diferencia y hoy han sido protagonistas de TOMA UNO. Escuchar audio

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Better Move On", and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Mother-In-Law" by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it's been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander's Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger's biography of Alexander. It's unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we're going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we're going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties -- studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it's also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians -- there were jobs that weren't open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist -- many were very vocally opposed to racism -- but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we've looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we're going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we're going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we're going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You'd Better Move On"] Arthur Alexander's is one of the most tragic stories we'll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander's hit single "You Better Move On". He said to Harrison, "Did you know I played bass on that?" and Harrison replied, "If I phoned Paul up now, he'd come over and kiss your feet". That's how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it's hard to escape the fact that Alexander's music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself -- in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films -- people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry -- and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would "play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn't make no distinction. That's the way it was until much later". The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold's 1946 country hit "That's How Much I Love You": [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, "That's How Much I Love You"] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place -- by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn't even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it's almost always the latter, so from this point on, I'll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander's music, but as we've seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander's father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as "June", for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it -- he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he'd never made a nickel as a player, and didn't want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said -- he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn't stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat "King" Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes -- though he wasn't satisfied by McPhatter's answer that "It's just there", thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song "One Mint Julep": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "One Mint Julep"] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like "Sixty Minute Man", and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn't need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening -- there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it -- W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they'd all done truly great things, but they'd done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big -- making records of people's weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. "A Fallen Star" was done as cheaply as humanly possible -- it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time -- he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn't a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I've not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people -- Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn't understand his type of music -- but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton's recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison's first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Sweet and Innocent"] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I've been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a "reality-hacking poet", and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way -- and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I'm not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn't count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don't even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm's length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford's fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley's studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, "She Wanna Rock"] That record wasn't a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun's Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote "Stand By Your Man" with Tammy Wynette, and produced "He Stopped Loving Her Today" for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford's studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford's partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton's record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, "Sally Sue Brown"] It's a good record, but it didn't have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events -- his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he'd found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, "You Better Move On", to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn't produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King -- he would later say, "It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to 'Stand By Me', which was a big record at the time. But I didn't want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You Better Move On"] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues", which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues"] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on "You Better Move On", and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said "If it wasn't for Arthur Alexander, we'd all be at Reynolds" -- the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn't record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out -- allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine -- and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander's talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander's heart wasn't in it -- his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley's studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, "Where Have You Been?" was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Where Have You Been?"] While the B-side, "Soldiers of Love" (and yes, it was called "Soldiers of Love" on the original label, rather than "Soldier"), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee's backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Soldiers of Love"] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn't having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur's songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He'd started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he'd better write one himself, and he'd make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann -- though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Anna (Go To Him)"] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry's country classic "I Hang My Head and Cry" as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, "Go Home Girl", another attempt at a "You Better Move On" soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn't want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, "Every Day I Have To Cry"] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He'd often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox's old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with "Snap Your Fingers": [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, "Snap Your Fingers"] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other's addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn't been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison's classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with "Raunchy" on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, "Baby For You": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Baby For You"] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life -- he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, "Johnny's Heartbreak": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Johnny's Heartbreak"] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur's plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him -- and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur's version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song "Every Day I Have To Cry", as "Every Day I Have To Cry Some", in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen's "Hungry Heart" a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Every Day I Have To Cry Some"] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn't chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland -- construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it’s been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander’s Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger’s biography of Alexander. It’s unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we’re going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we’re going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties — studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it’s also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians — there were jobs that weren’t open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist — many were very vocally opposed to racism — but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we’ve looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we’re going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we’re going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we’re going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You’d Better Move On”] Arthur Alexander’s is one of the most tragic stories we’ll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander’s hit single “You Better Move On”. He said to Harrison, “Did you know I played bass on that?” and Harrison replied, “If I phoned Paul up now, he’d come over and kiss your feet”. That’s how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it’s hard to escape the fact that Alexander’s music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself — in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films — people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would “play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn’t make no distinction. That’s the way it was until much later”. The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold’s 1946 country hit “That’s How Much I Love You”: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “That’s How Much I Love You”] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place — by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn’t even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it’s almost always the latter, so from this point on, I’ll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander’s music, but as we’ve seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander’s father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as “June”, for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it — he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he’d never made a nickel as a player, and didn’t want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said — he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn’t stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat “King” Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes — though he wasn’t satisfied by McPhatter’s answer that “It’s just there”, thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song “One Mint Julep”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “One Mint Julep”] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like “Sixty Minute Man”, and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn’t need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening — there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it — W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they’d all done truly great things, but they’d done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big — making records of people’s weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. “A Fallen Star” was done as cheaply as humanly possible — it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time — he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn’t a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I’ve not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people — Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn’t understand his type of music — but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton’s recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison’s first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Sweet and Innocent”] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I’ve been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a “reality-hacking poet”, and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way — and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I’m not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn’t count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don’t even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm’s length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford’s fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley’s studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, “She Wanna Rock”] That record wasn’t a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun’s Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote “Stand By Your Man” with Tammy Wynette, and produced “He Stopped Loving Her Today” for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford’s studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford’s partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton’s record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, “Sally Sue Brown”] It’s a good record, but it didn’t have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events — his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he’d found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, “You Better Move On”, to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn’t produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King — he would later say, “It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to ‘Stand By Me’, which was a big record at the time. But I didn’t want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You Better Move On”] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”, which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on “You Better Move On”, and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said “If it wasn’t for Arthur Alexander, we’d all be at Reynolds” — the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn’t record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out — allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine — and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander’s talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander’s heart wasn’t in it — his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley’s studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, “Where Have You Been?” was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Where Have You Been?”] While the B-side, “Soldiers of Love” (and yes, it was called “Soldiers of Love” on the original label, rather than “Soldier”), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee’s backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Soldiers of Love”] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn’t having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur’s songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He’d started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he’d better write one himself, and he’d make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann — though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Anna (Go To Him)”] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry’s country classic “I Hang My Head and Cry” as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, “Go Home Girl”, another attempt at a “You Better Move On” soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn’t want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, “Every Day I Have To Cry”] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He’d often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox’s old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with “Snap Your Fingers”: [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, “Snap Your Fingers”] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other’s addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn’t been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison’s classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with “Raunchy” on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, “Baby For You”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Baby For You”] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life — he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur’s plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him — and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur’s version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song “Every Day I Have To Cry”, as “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”, in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn’t chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland — construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

The Ditty team took a trip down to Florence, AL to interview producer and session-man Norbert Putnam. While down there, Mark Edgar Stuart asks Norbert more about his book and his roles as a sideman for huge names in the industry like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, and more! You don't want to miss this one.    Recorded July 2018 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greg Morrow is an American touring and recording drummer based in Nashville. Morrow was born in Ripley, Tennessee and raised in Memphis. At age 11, Morrow and his band performed on a local TV show, and he participated in his first recording session.    ****Listen to this episode and subscribe! www.richredmond.com/listen   The Rich Redmond Show is sponsored by The School of Rock Nashville and Franklin! https://locations.schoolofrock.com/nashville https://locations.schoolofrock.com/franklin   In the 1980s, Morrow toured and recorded with the Christian rock ensemble DeGarmo and Key, as well as Amy Grant.    Morrow moved from Memphis in 1996 after encouragement from Norbert Putnam and fellow drummer Chad Cromwell. Since then, Morrow has recorded with the “Who’s Who” of the music business: Deana Carter, The Dixie Chicks, Blake Shelton, Joe Bonamassa, Billy Gibbons, Bob Seger, Luke Bryan, Steve Earle and many others.    In 2008 and 2015, Morrow won the Academy of Country Music Studio Recording Award for “Drummer of the Year”. Morrow recently finished a tour with American rock icon Bob Seger.    A few things that came up: -Cutting Little Richard records -Old time radio shows -"Right now" records -The feel of Deanna Carter's "Strawberry Wine" -Finding what's right for a drumhead -Working with Amy Grant and Trisha Yearwood -Playing with Bob Segar -Using tracks and laptops -It's amazing how much you're not really hearing -Frugality -Greg's holy grail of snare drums -Vintage drums -Pictures of Lilly Keith Moon kit would be Greg's dream kit -Dream kits -The virtue of "Great Day to be Alive" -If you're on a Nashville studio floor, you deserve to be there and have to work to stay there.   The Rich Redmond Show is about all things music, motivation and success. Candid conversations with musicians, actors, comedians, authors and thought leaders about their lives and the stories that shaped them. Rich Redmond is the longtime drummer with Jason Aldean and many other veteran musicians and artists. Rich is also an actor, speaker, author, producer and educator. Rich has been heard on thousands of songs, over 25 of which have been #1 hits!   Rich can also be seen in several films and TV shows and has also written an Amazon Best-Selling book, "CRASH! Course for Success: 5 Ways to Supercharge Your Personal and Professional Life" currently available at:   https://www.amazon.com/CRASH-Course-Success-Supercharge-Professional/dp/B07YTCG5DS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=crash+redmond&qid=1576602865&sr=8-1   One Book: Three Ways to consume....Physical (delivered to your front door, Digital (download to your kindle, ipad or e-reader), or Audio (read to you by me on your device...on the go)!   Follow Rich: @richredmond www.richredmond.com   Jim McCarthy is the quintessential Blue Collar Voice Guy. Honing his craft since 1996 with radio stations in Illinois, South Carolina, Connecticut, New York, Las Vegas and Nashville, Jim has voiced well over 10,000 pieces since and garnered an ear for audio production which he now uses for various podcasts, commercials and promos. Jim is also an accomplished video producer, content creator, writer and overall entrepreneur.   Follow Jim: @jimmccarthy www.jimmccarthyvoiceovers.com  

Visit our new Podcast/Audio portal at http://dittytvradio.com for 24/7 audio music entertainment and our complete catalog of on demand podcasts. Famed bassist Norbert Putnam discusses his career as a session musician, recording music with Elvis, and opening his own studio.

Episode 61: Craig H. and sometime producer companion Gina Frary Bacon sit down with iconic Nashville Cat Wayne Moss. Raised in Charleston WV, Moss was obsessed with music and recording and made his way to Music City in 1959. He put his guitar to work with The Casuals, Nashville's first rock and roll band. And his web of relationships - Buzz Cason, Charlie McCoy, Norbert Putnam, Mac Gayden and others - put him at the center of the recording scene. He played famous licks and solos for Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Charlie Daniels and others. He formed the bands Area Code 615 and Barefoot Jerry for an extra dash of creative freedom. He built his studio Cinderella Sound in 1961 and it's still in business, the oldest surviving indie studio in the region. Moss talked about his extensive career and his new anthology CD called Collaborations With My Guitar Heroes. 

Famed music producer and musician Norbert Putnam talks to Steve about the incredible music he was a part of during his career. You'll head stories about Elvis, Jimmy Buffett, Kris Kristofferson and many more.

In Part 2 of Steve's interview with music producer Norbert Putnam, you'll hear the incredible story of how the song "Margaritaville" became such a smash hit and what Putnam is doing for the next generation of music producers.

Norbert Putnam is a record producer and bassist and is considered one of music's absolute treasures. One of the Muscle Shoals session musicians, as a bass player he recorded with Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Henry Mancini, Linda Ronstadt and Al Hirt just to name a few. As a record producer he produced some of the most beloved albums of artists like Joan Baez, Dan Fogelberg, Jimmy Buffett, Brewer & Shipley, Donovan, John Hiatt, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Jesse Winchester just to list a few. Norbert Putnam has so many stories and he's excellent at telling them. This episode of The Paul Leslie Hour is not one to miss!Support The Paul Leslie Hour by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/the-paul-leslie-hour

In celebration of what would have been his 83rd birthday, The Music History Project team dives deep into what made Elvis Presley the King of Rock & Roll. In part one of a two part series, we discuss the early days of Elvis, his instruments, and his recordings. Interview segments include Ron Tutt, Mike Ladd, Herb Brochstein, Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana, James Burton, Chip Young, Fred Foster, Boots Randolph, and Norbert Putnam.

Dan Fogelberg passed away 10 years ago this month.  His memory has been kept alive this year by a number of events, including the release of two new albums, ‘Live At Carnegie Hall’ (a previously unheard performance from 1979) and a tribute album that features a long list of musicians that loved Fogelberg’s music.   This episode of Documenting Popular Music takes a look at the tribute album and artist such as Garth Brooks, who performs “Phoenix” with Trisha Yearwood providing background vocals; the late Donna Summer, who sings an inspiring version of “Nether Lands” using the same backing track that Fogelberg used for the 1977 classic; Amy Grant and Vince Gill, who provide a duet on “Longer” that gives new life to Fogelberg’s biggest hit; Randy Owen, the legendary voice of the group Alabama – the best-selling country group of all time – sings “Sutter’s Mill,” originally from Fogelberg’s progressive bluegrass album ‘High Country Snows;’ Zac Brown and his band deliver a live version of “Leader of the Band;” and Fogelberg’s good friend Joe Walsh of the Eagles sings “Part of the Plan,” a song he originally produced for Fogelberg for the 1974 album Souvenirs. Fellow Eagles Don Henley and Timothy B. Schmit sing backing harmonies for the new version of the song.   Other artists on the album include Michael McDonald, Jimmy Buffett, Boz Scaggs, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Richie Furay, the late Dobie Gray, Train, Fool’s Gold (originally Fogelberg’s backing band) and Casey James.   Included in this presentation is inside, background information from Fogelberg’s former record producer, Norbert Putnam, one of the tribute album’s co-producers.  Putnam explains how Brooks and Summer got involved in the project, which is a true labor of love from Fogelberg’s widow, Jean Fogelberg, also a producer on the album.  She has worked hard to create a celebrated year for her late husband, and the tribute album is the final, very satisfying piece to an eventful year.   You can hear more from Putnam about his relationship with Dan Fogelberg in the Documenting Popular Music episode ‘Leader of the Band -- Remembering Dan Fogelberg with Stories and Insights from His Record Producer’ released earlier this year. Read the Show Notes at http://oandfstudios.com/documenting-popular-music/ --- Coming soon from Documenting Popular Music, a look at Gordon Lightfoot’s career with author Nicholas Jennings; a conversation with Merrilee Rush (“Angle of the Morning”), a look at TV theme songs from the 1970s that became Top 40 hits; and a biographical sketch of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2018.

We have more Christmas tunes sprinkled in the mix including a NEW track from Joel Paterson!  We also have interview snippets with Billy Burnette talking about his "Hey Daddy" release when he was 7 years old (backed by Ricky Nelson's band) and with Norbert Putnam talking about recording "Merry Christmas Baby" with Elvis and him famously saying "wake up, Put" toward the end of the recording.  Plus, we spin "Pretty Paper" by the recently released project by Roy Orbison & The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.  And...we hear John Fogerty pay tribute to his late friend Tom Petty, Road Kings cover John Fogerty, Jerry Lee Lewis (with John Fogerty) cover Creedence, new tracks from the Highjivers, Los High Tops with Chantilly Lace Vincent, Elvis covers from Jake Calypso, Dean Z and Carl Bradychok and more!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   John Lindberg Trio- "Stuck With The Sleigh" Straight Eights- "Merry, Merry Christmas" The Highjivers- "Knee High & Risin'" Scotty Baker- "Last Hurrah" Los High Tops with Chantilly Lace Vincent- "Hot Rod Mama" Billy Burnette on "Hey Daddy" Billy Burnette- "Hey Daddy (I'm Gonna Tell Santa On You)" Joel Paterson- "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" Road Kings- "Travelin' Band" John Fogerty- "I Won't Back Down" (live in Las Vegas) Jerry Lee Lewis with John Fogerty- "Bad Moon Rising" Brian Setzer Orchestra- "Here Comes Santa Claus" Roy Orbison with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra- "Pretty Paper" Jake Calypso- "Flaming Star" Carl Bradychok- "I'm Coming Home" Dean Z- "Just Because" Norbert Putnam on playing on "Merry Christmas Baby" with Elvis in the studio Elvis Presley- "Merry Christmas Baby"   Outro Music Bed: Los Straitjackets- "Let It Snow"

Interviews on this episode with the Jean Fogelberg (widow of Dan Fogelberg) and Norbert Putnam, longtime producer and friend of Dan. YA author Erika Sanchez - her latest book was nominated for a National Book Award, "I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter." Then it's Omaha based rapper J. Crum with his new release "Flawed." Finally, singer-songwriter Daniel Christian with his latest 2 part EP release, "Coffee & Toast."

It's hard to over-state the importance of Norbert Putnam to Southern music. As a teenager he was one of a handful of guys who built the legendary recording scene in Muscle Shoals from scratch. Working with a young Rick Hall and Tom Stafford, plus some fellow musicians, they figured out how to make records and then how to make hit records. And they made history. Then Putnam and several of his studio musician colleagues moved to Nashville and ushered in a new era when a swirl of genres from soul to rock and roll mingled with and drew from the country recording scene that was already well established. Putnam produced important music for Joan Baez, Dan Fogelberg, Jimmy Buffett - and he played for years in studio and on the road for Elvis Presley. He's a figurehead and a great storyteller. Jon Langford meanwhile grew up in Wales but made his name as a founding member of The Mekons, an influential underground band that laid the groundwork for the country punk and alt-country movements. Besides songwriting, which he's done prolifically as a solo artist and collaborator in many bands including the Waco brothers and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Langford's been an admired painter. He's most famous for his graphic visions of the conflicts inherent in and around country music. His work has been shown widely around the US and the UK and a couple years ago, he was asked to do the feature art for the Country Music Hall of Fame's Nashville Cats exhibit. There, he met Norbert Putnam, who invited him to come to Muscle Shoals to make a record. It's title: Four Lost Souls. With guest interviewer/producer Gina Frary Bacon.

Dan Fogelberg’s talent was apparent from an early age, and by the time he was 19, he had a recording contract with a major record label.  The man who would produce this young talent was Norbert Putnam, who was only about nine years Fogelberg’s senior.  Together, these two worked on three of Fogelberg’s albums, which would turn out to be some of the most important records in his career.   In an exclusive interview for this radio documentary, veteran journalist Robert Neil speaks with Putnam about creating the albums Home Free, Nether Lands and Phoenix. Included are stories about recording some of Fogelberg’s most famous songs, including “Longer,” “Dancing Shoes,” Netherlands,” “Wishing on the Moon” and others.   In this presentation you’ll also learn how the man who wrote musical scores for The Outer Limits, a sci-fi television show, was instrumental in one of Fogelberg’s albums. Just as important – if not more – was a 14-year-old girl, who let her important father know Fogelberg was a rising star.   The late Fogelberg, who died in 2007, was one of the most talented musicians Putnam says he’d ever recorded, and he is currently working to produce a new tribute album that will feature numerous stars singing Fogelberg’s songs.   The tribute album is just one of several projects focusing on Fogelberg this year, and his widow Jean Fogelberg is hoping those efforts, along with a petition of nearly 50,000 signatures, will help get Dan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  (More info on that project can be found on the Facebook page @Induct Dan Fogelberg into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)   Our thanks to Norbert Putnam for the hours and stories he shared, and to the very busy Jean Fogelberg, who put us in touch with Putnam.

Famed musician and producer, Norbert Putnam, joins Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour this week as we continue our Elvis Celebration.  2017 marks 40 years since Elvis' passing and we're celebrating his life and music.  Norbert tells us some great stories of his time in the studio with Elvis.  Plus, we hear NEW tunes from Lara Hope & The Arktones, Jake Calypso, Jake La Botz and The Bama Lamas with Gabrielle Sutton as well as rockers from Carl Perkins, Ricky Nelson, Dave Edmunds and Babe Miller! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   Babe Miller- "Long Gone Daddy" Lara Hope & The Arktones- "Fast, Cheap Or Well Done" Jake Calypso- "Saturday Night To Tease" Carl Perkins with NRBQ- "Sorry Charlie" Dave Edmunds- "Paralyzed" Ricky Nelson- "Cindy"   Norbert Putnam interview: Tony Joe White- "Polk Salad Annie" Segment 1 Elvis Presley- "Mystery Train/ Tiger Man" (studio jam) Segment 2 Elvis Presley- "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" Segment 3 Elvis Presley- "Promised Land" Segment 4 Elvis Presley- "Patch It Up"*   Jake La Botz- "How I Wish She Was Mine" The Bama Lamas (with Gabrielle Sutton)- "Security"   Outro Music Bed: Johnny Ramone, Danny B. Harvey & Slim Jim Phantom- "Viva Las Vegas"

Norbert Putnam dropped by the Music Business Radio studios today to talk about his 50+ years in the music business working with acts like Roy Orbison, Al Hurt, Henry Mancini, Linda Ronstadt, JJ Cale, Tony Joe White, and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.Norbert Putnam produced "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett.He played bass on 122 tracks with Elvis Presley.He has performance credits on over 10,000 tracks.We talked about his start in the music business, working for $5/hour at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, what it's like to be the opening act for the Beatles, meeting Elvis Presley for the first time, his work with Kris Kristofferson, producing Joan Baez, working for Clive Davis, and how he worked to help Jimmy Buffett develop his signature sound.

Norbert Putnam dropped by the Music Business Radio studios today to talk about his 50+ years in the music business working with acts like Roy Orbison, Al Hurt, Henry Mancini, Linda Ronstadt, JJ Cale, Tony Joe White, and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.Norbert Putnam produced "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett.He played bass on 122 tracks with Elvis Presley.He has performance credits on over 10,000 tracks.We talked about his start in the music business, working for $5/hour at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, what it's like to be the opening act for the Beatles, meeting Elvis Presley for the first time, his work with Kris Kristofferson, producing Joan Baez, working for Clive Davis, and how he worked to help Jimmy Buffett develop his signature sound.

New York resident Jon Pousette-Dart formed the Pousette-Dart Band in 1973, mining the same musical territory as the Eagles, James Taylor and Little Feat. Manager Don Law discovered them opening for John Hammond on Nantucket, and in 1975 they signed a multi-album deal with Capitol Records, releasing 4 albums from 1976 to 1980. Although the band worked the rock music arena, three of its Capitol albums were cut in Nashville with veteran producer Norbert Putnam. During this time, the Pousette-Dart Band had Billboard chart action with the hit “For Love,” and substantial airplay with “Amnesia,” and “County Line,” selling hundreds of thousands of records and becoming one of the busiest touring groups in the U.S. working with an outrageous array of talent including The Byrds, Bonnie Raitt, Peter Frampton, Yes, the J.Geils Band, Jonathan Edwards, Charlie Daniels Band, Manfred Mann, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Journey, Father Guido Sarducci, Emmylou Harris and Randy Newman... Jon was kind enough to drop by the WSCA studios on Sept. 24, 2010 for some live performance and chat on Stay Tuned with Shawn Henderson. We talk about his Rock & Roll past and everything else up to the present day and the great music that he continues to make. Songs performed during this instudio 1 - I'm The Man For You 2 - Amazing To Me 3 - Freezing Hot 4 - Yaicha http://staytunedradio.webs.com http://wscafm.org http://www.pousette-dart.com

Bill Cody with Norbert Putnam, recorded November 13, 2009 at WSM radio in Nashville...  Elvis Presley's "Promised Land", Tony Joe White's "Polk Salad Annie", Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville"...Norbert Putman had a hand in all of those hits & many, many more... Norbert & Bill Lloyd from the Country Music Hall of Fame would join us in studio.