Producer: Frank Rogers

Brad Paisley visits Europe in March 2024 to showcase his singing, writing and playing. He has also co-produced his albums since 2013’s Wheelhouse and is set to return this year with Son of the Mountains. He has also become a noted philanthropist, as he moves into the ‘legacy artist’ stage of an enormously successful career.

The man at the production desk for the first decade of his work was Frank Rogers, who won his only CMA Award for producing Time Well Wasted, Paisley’s 2006 Album of the Year which featured the songs Alcohol, The World and She’s Everything. Along with Chris DuBois and Paisley, Rogers founded Sea Gayle, the publishing company which helped develop Chris Stapleton; he has a writing credit on the track Blow, recorded by Stapleton, Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars. Sea Gayle also holds the rights to the modern country standards It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere and In Color.

Like Scott Hendricks, Rogers has been a prolific producer of music for Trace Adkins, Josh Turner, Keith Urban and Granger Smith. He co-wrote Alright and This with Darius Rucker, and he has been the mastermind behind the renaissance of Scotty McCreery with contributions to Five More Minutes, Feelin’ It, This Is It and In Between.

Rogers is currently the Chief Creative Officer of Spirit Music. He also funds a scholarship at Belmont’s Mike Curb College, which is apt as he met Paisley at Belmont.

Player: Mark O’Connor

At the moment Jenee Fleenor is the hot musician who will win Musician of the Year at the CMA Awards until she either asks not to be nominated or someone even better gets the votes. Incredibly but unsurprisingly, no woman had won the award before Fleenor, although plenty of fiddlers had.

Mark O’Connor was one of them. A protégé of Stéphane Grappelli, the great jazz violinist, O’Connor put out his first album Markology as a teenager, playing his second instrument, the guitar. In 1991, the year he won his first of six consecutive Musician of the Year awards, he put out The New Nashville Cats in the company of 50 fellow musicians from Music City including many backroom boys: Bela Fleck was on banjo, Jerry Douglas on dobro, Sam Bush on mandolin, Paul Franklin on pedal steel, and guitarists included Vince Gill, Brent Mason, Randy Scruggs, Marty Stuart and Steve Wariner.

Born in Washington state, O’Connor was one of those teenage prodigies that country music often throws up. Like Yo-Yo Ma, with whom he has recorded, he synthesises all sorts of music and opens up the instrument to the masses. His O’Connor Method is used to teach violin, and he wrote his beloved Fiddle Concerto in 1992. He also brought together other violinists including fellow Musician of the Year Johnny Gimble on his aptly titled album Heroes.

Today O’Connor tours with his wife Maggie, his son and his daughter-in-law, and in April he will launch the album Life After Life at the Country Music Hall of Fame with Maggie.

Songwriter: Jim Ed Brown

Had Jim Ed Brown not died in 2015, he would have turned 90 in 2024. Born in Arkansas, he formed a group with sisters Bonnie and Maxine that sang first on the radio and then on TV. Their take on Edith Piaf’s weepie Les Trois Cloches, titled The Three Bells, hit number one on the Hot 100 in 1959 and was, interestingly, a hit on both the country and R&B charts.

The Browns were invited to become members of the Grand Ole Opry in 1963, thanks to their burgeoning catalogue of hits including The Old Lamplighter and Looking Back To See. When the sisters started their families, Jim Ed went solo and had hits both on his own and in tandem with Helen Cornelius. He was an Opry regular as MC and hosted TV shows including Nashville on the Road and the talent show You Can Be A Star, which gave Trisha Yearwood her start.

Jim Ed died of cancer in 2015, a week after he and his sisters was awarded membership of the Country Music Hall of Fame; Bonnie died in 2016, Maxine three years later.

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