A country way of life, Episode 12 (Owen Bradley, Lefty Frizzell, John D Loudermilk)

Author: Jonny Brick.

Producer: Owen Bradley

Some figures, mainly performers and backing musicians, loom large over country music. A select few producers can also be said to have changed the course of the genre and one of them is Owen Bradley.

Born in 1915, Bradley played piano and guitar in Nashville, leading a quintet which played instrumental music. He was hired as bandleader at WSM, the station that broadcast the Opry, but became well-known as a producer. Along with Chet Atkins in RCA Studio, Bradley created a sound particular to Nashville (indeed, they called it the Nashville Sound), which made Decca Records one of the primary unit-shifting labels.

Atkins once described the sound by jangling the coins that were in his pocket, but it is more accurate to call it a pop-leaning production which incorporated vocal backing groups and string sections. The pair developed it with several artists of the 1950s and 1960s where Bradley was behind the mixing desk: Bill Monroe, Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn and Brenda Lee. Had he lived to see Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree get to number one, Bradley would have been 108!

Today, after Columbia bought Bradley’s studio and it was then rented by Ben Folds in the 2000s, Dave Cobb took control of it in 2016. This is apt, because terms of critical and commercial acclaim Cobb is Bradley’s current equivalent. A successful pair of albums recorded with Chris Stapleton were given the title From ‘A’ Room.

Player: Lefty Frizzell

William Orville ‘Lefty’ Frizzell was a honky-tonk singer from Corsicana, Texas. According to the Big Book of Country Music, the man who got his nickname from his boxing prowess ‘brought a barroom sensibility into a more mainstream country setting’.

It was his particular vocal style that influenced acts like Merle Haggard, George Jones, Roy Orbison, Randy Travis and George Strait. The last two of those brought back the traditional sound and kept Lefty’s flame burning after he died in 1975 and was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Lefty became a star in the early 1950s, at one time famously having four concurrent top ten country hits including Always Late (With Your Kisses). A series of business and personal troubles stalled his career, although at the end of his life he was back on the charts with songs like I Never Go Around Mirrors.

Songwriter: John D Loudermilk

Born in 1934 exactly six years to the day after Lefty Frizzell, John D Loudermilk was working at a radio station as a teenager, playing bass for the lunchtime band. It was there that George Hamilton IV’s producer heard his song A Rose and a Baby Ruth, and it became the first of many copyrights that made Loudermilk a famous songwriter of the golden age of country music.

These songs include: Indian Reservation, which Paul Revere and The Raiders took to number one on the Hot 100; Break My Mind, which has been covered by acts ranging from Roy Orbison to Crystal Gayle; Sun Glasses, which Tracey Ullman took into the UK charts; Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye, which was cut by Glen Campbell; Tobacco Road, which was recorded by both Jefferson Airplane and David Lee Roth; and Turn Me On, which was on Norah Jones’ blockbuster album Come Away With Me.

Loudermilk, who was a cousin of the Louvin Brothers, had hits of his own name on the pop and country charts in the 1960s, and he also produced an early album by The Allman Brothers. He then became an academic who was involved with the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, and he died in 2016, leaving his papers to the University of North Carolina. They include sheet music, 7” singles and magazine clippings.

All Episodes can be found here

For more country music evangelism, go to countrywol.com where you can read Monday essays, Friday reviews and Sunday Hymn Sheets. Follow Jonny’s Country Music Calendar at the Country Way of Life Facebook page (facebook.com/acountrywayoflife).