A country way of life, Episode 49 (John Willis, Adam Sanders & Shawn Camp)
Author: Jonny Brick.
Player: John Willis
According to John Willis’s website Willisoundz, he boasts of being ‘one of the most in-demand session guitar players in country music’. Born in Louisiana, Willis went to study guitar in LA before moving down to Alabama to join the band who laid down track after track in Muscle Shoals. He spent eight years there, playing on country songs by Shenandoah, Alabama and The Forester Sisters, before heading to Nashville to play on hundreds more.
Willis has the sort of deeply impressive CV shared by many backroom figures: you can hear his work on albums by Toby Keith, Lonestar, Terri Clark, Shania Twain, Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Luke Bryan and Gretchen Wilson. Willis also played mandolin and banjo on Taylor Swift’s self-titled debut album, and he contributed banjo parts to The Underdog by Aaron Watson.
Songwriters: Adam Sanders and Shawn Camp
Adam Sanders was born in Florida, where from a young age he used to dress up and imitate Alan Jackson. After moving to Nashville, he bumped into Cole Swindell and the pair wrote Ain’t Worth the Whiskey, which Swindell took to number one after it sat on a shelf for six years.
Luke Bryan (Out Like That) and Dustin Lynch (Hell of a Night, another chart-topper) also cut his copyrights, while Shenandoah and Blake Shelton recorded Then a Girl Walks In, which was a real coup for the songwriter, who was a huge admirer of the band. Sanders included his two number ones on a live album, and in 2024 he released his second studio album Right in the Middle of It, proving that some songwriters are frustrated performers.
‘Songwriting just happened to be my way of getting my foot in the door,’ he told one interviewer. It cannot have hurt that his uncle Scotty played steel guitar on sessions in town, including for Sam Hunt’s album Montevallo. Recently, Scotty has played on records by Jelly Roll, Cody Johnson, Luke Combs and, in another full-circle moment, Cole Swindell.
Darrell DeShawn Camp was born in Arkansas and started out playing behind or beside Alan Jackson and Trisha Yearwood. He had a couple of minor hits in his own right and has released a number of albums independently before he joined Jerry Douglas in the bluegrass band the Earls of Leicester. Camp calls this ‘a departure from the same old, same old that I’ve had to do in Nashville’.
You can watch a performance Camp gave for the Country Music Hall of Fame on their website; there, he performs Two Piña Coladas, which Garth Brooks took to number one by. His songs have been cut by Blake Shelton (Nobody But Me), George Strait (River of Love) and Brooks & Dunn (How Long Gone). Josh Turner recorded Would You Go With Me and co-wrote Firecracker with Camp.
Even more impressively, he has worked with three legendary figures: Loretta Lynn, Guy Clark and Willie Nelson. Camp wrote the title track of Nelson’s album A Beautiful Time.
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).