A country way of life, Episode 35 (Corenflos, Paul Overstreet and Jamie O’Hara)
Author: Jonny Brick.
Player: JT Corenflos
When Jerry Troy ‘JT’ Corenflos died in October 2020, succumbing to cancer at 56 years old, country music lost one of its prime session guitar players.
Luke Bryan called him ‘a soft-spoken genius that let his fingers do all the talking’. You can hear Corenflos’ Telecaster guitar across Bryan’s work, including on Country Girl (Shake It For Me), All My Friends Say and the none more country Huntin’ Fishin’ and Lovin’ Every Day.
Among the dozens of acts whose music features Corenflos on guitar are Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, Tanya Tucker, Trace Adkins, Martina McBride and Sara Evans. He also plays the nagging riff of Play Something Country by Brooks & Dunn.
Born in Indiana, Corenflos moved to Nashville to play behind Jean Shepard, then fell in with David Lee Murphy and was part of his band The Blue Tick Hounds. Then, as Corenflos wrote on his website, he became a studio cat, ‘playing every jam night, writer night, showcase club, casual gig, beer joint and dive bar I could find’.
Songwriters: Paul Overstreet and Jamie O’Hara
Paul Overstreet has been writing country hits for four decades, starting with Same Ole Me, a duet for George Strait and the Oak Ridge Boys. He co-wrote several early hits for Randy Travis which are still enjoyed four decades on: Diggin’ Up Bones, On the Other Hand, No Place Like Home, Deeper Than the Holler and, the biggest of all, Forever and Ever Amen.
This was in the mid-1980s when Overstreet was the O in the trio S-K-O, who topped the country chart with Baby’s Got a New Baby; the ‘S’ was Overstreet’s fellow backroom figure Thom Schuyler. He has also released several solo albums, scoring a number one in 1991 with Daddy’s Come Around, but Overstreet is far better known as a songwriter.
His copyrights include Love Can Build a Bridge, She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy and Some Beach, a kiss-off sung by Blake Shelton. When You Say Nothing at All, meanwhile, was a hit for both Keith Whitley and Alison Krauss, and was later sung by Ronan Keating for the soundtrack of the movie Notting Hill.
Paul’s son Nash has gone into the family business; he was a member of the pop band Hot Chelle Rae, who have recently reformed after Nash had continued his work as a pop songwriter for other artists. His brother Chord was in the TV show Glee.
Jamie O’Hara died in early 2021, a few months after JT Corenflos. Born in Toledo, Ohio, like Overstreet he had a career at the front of the stage alongside Kieran Kane in the excellently named duo The O’Kanes. Their sole chart-topper was 1987’s Can’t Stop My Heart from Loving You, which had been rejected by labels for, incredibly, being too simple a song.
O’Hara moved to the backroom and has sole credits on Man to Man, a number one hit for Gary Allan and the evergreen Judds hit Grandpa (Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Old Days). Ironically, O’Hara never knew his grandparents and called the song ‘a gift that songwriters get every once in a while, if you’re putting in the work’.
Rather than sit in an office and write songs during the day, O’Hara would drop his tunes off overnight. His songs were also cut by Sara Evans (Shame About That) and Lee Ann Womack (You’ve Got to Talk to Me), while Emmylou Harris, who admired O’Hara’s ‘way of looking at life with such a beautiful sensibility’, recorded two O’Hara copyrights.
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).