Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain

by Grand Ole Opry

  Bill studied journalism at the University of Georgia and became a newspaper reporter and radio broadcaster. He was writing songs all along. Throughout his youth, he also attended every country concert he could.

  “Roger Miller and I met each other when he was stationed at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, and I was working as a disc jockey in Commerce, Georgia. We used to hang out at all the local Grand Ole Opry shows that came to Atlanta. We got to know one another before either of us had had any success. He wanted to be a songwriter. I wanted to be a songwriter. We had many conversations in those days about our dreams.”

  Bill Anderson’s began to come true when he wrote “City Lights” in Commerce at age nineteen. Superstar Ray Price found the song, recorded it, and took it to number one in 1958. Coincidentally, the record’s flip side was Price singing Roger Miller’s “Invitation to the Blues.”

  “I got two royalty checks,” Bill recalls. “The first one was for $2.52, and then I got about a $400 check. I didn’t think there was that much money in the world!”

  Signed as a singer by Decca Records, Bill Anderson issued “That’s What It’s Like to Be Lonesome” in late 1958. He performed it at his first Grand Ole Opry appearance that October. He graduated from college, married his first wife Bette, and moved to Music City in 1959. Daughter Terri was born in 1961, and Jenni followed in 1965.

  In 1960–1961, “The Tip of My Fingers,” “Walk Out Backwards,” and “Po’ Folks” became his first top-ten hits. They led to an invitation for Bill Anderson to become a member of the cast of the Grand Ole Opry. He was inducted on July 15, 1961.

  “Me? A member of the Opry? That was like asking me if I wanted to go to heaven when I die!”

  “Mama Sang a Song” became his first number-one record, in 1962. Then in 1963 came the blockbuster “Still.”

  “I got up out of bed about three o’clock in the morning and wrote ‘Still,’” says the songwriter. “I had been to Atlanta and run into an old girlfriend. I didn’t write the song for her, but I wrote it because of the feelings I experienced when I did see her.”

  Bill didn’t think all that much of “Still,” but producer Owen Bradley did. He slowed the tempo, encouraged the singer to recite the lyrics, added bell-like harmonies by The Anita Kerr Singers on the title word, and created a sophisticated musical arrangement. “Still” flew up the country charts to number one and crossed over to the pop hit parade as well. Bill’s soft-spoken delivery of “Still” and his other early hits led to his nickname “Whispering” Bill Anderson.

  By the mid-1960s, Bill was a country superstar. He launched his own syndicated television show in 1965 and put together a top-notch road show. Singer Jan Howard became part of the troupe, and she and Bill scored a series of hit duets in 1966–1972. Jan joined the Opry cast on March 27, 1971.

  Few women have had as tumultuous a life as Jan Howard. She told her remarkable saga in her extraordinary 1987 autobiography Sunshine and Shadow.

  Comments Jan, “When I started, I wrote all the hate and bitterness. That was therapeutic, because later I threw it away. It was better than going to a psychiatrist and a lot cheaper. Once I started again, it was just like rolling back time. One thing brought on another. . . . It was horrible reliving some of the bad parts. . . . Sometimes I would literally pray for the strength to do it.”

  Jan’s story is a testament to the survival of the human spirit. She was born Lula Grace Johnson on March 13, 1930, and raised one of eleven children in desperate poverty in rural Missouri. At age eight she was raped by one of her father’s friends. She married at fifteen, bore three sons, and became a victim of domestic violence. When her husband tried to kill her, she fled with her sons and $10 in her pocket.

  Her second husband turned out to be a bigamist. Both of her children with him died. Her third husband became the celebrated country songwriter Harlan Howard (1927–2002). They moved to Nashville in 1960, the same year he cowrote Jan’s debut hit “The One You Slip Around With.” When Jan Howard first sang on the Opry stage, it was the first time she had sung on any stage or in front of any audience.

  She was recovering from her bitter 1967 divorce from Harlan when her son Jimmy was killed in Vietnam in 1968. Four years later, son David committed suicide. Jan Howard’s book grew out of her subsequent depression and psychological anguish.

  “One thing I want to make really clear is that I’m not a martyr,” says Jan. “I can’t stand self-pity. I don’t deserve and don’t want any kind of pity. Because I have a lot to be thankful for. There are a lot of people worse off than me.”

  When Sunshine and Shadow debuted, she stated, “I hope this comes across as a hopeful book. . . . It’s the story of a hard, real life. It isn’t sugar coated. It’s not a fairy tale.

  “It’s the story of a girl/wife/mother who happens to be an entertainer. . . . It almost seems like an accident that I became a singer. And I’m so thankful for it.”

  Although she was married to songwriting dynamo Harlan Howard, many of Jan Howard’s hits were written by Bill Anderson. In addition to their hit duet “If It’s All the Same to You” (1969), Bill wrote her solo singles “Bad Seed” (1966), “Count Your Blessings Woman” (1968), and “I Still Believe in Love” (1968).

  She wasn’t alone. Dozens of country stars had hits with Bill Anderson songs in the 1960s and 1970s. Jim Reeves (1960’s “I Missed Me”), Porter Wagoner (1967’s “The Cold Hard Facts of Life”), Faron Young (1959’s “Riverboat”), Hank Locklin (1961’s “Happy Birthday to Me”), George Hamilton IV (1961’s “To You and Yours”), The Louvin Brothers (1962’s “Must You Throw Dirt in My Face”), Lefty Frizzell (1964’s “Saginaw, Michigan”), Cal Smith (1973’s “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking”), and Conway Twitty (1979’s “I May Never Get to Heaven”) are just a few of the stars who sang hits from Bill’s pen. Two of his fellow Opry stars have sung so many of his tunes that each has devoted an entire LP to Bill Anderson songs: Jean Shepard and Connie Smith.

  “When I was a disc jockey, the first star I ever interviewed was Jean Shepard,” Bill recalls. “Jean was traveling with Hawkshaw Hawkins. So I took my little tape recorder to the show to talk to them [in 1956]. I was so green. I had no idea how to end the interview. I was going to sit there and talk forever. . . . I was new at radio and so enthralled talking to a big star that I didn’t know when to quit.

  “Finally Hawkshaw ended it. This is the nicest I’ve ever been cut off in my life. He leaned in and said, ‘Bill, we’ve taken up enough of your time. We know you’ve got other things that you’ve got to do. Thanks for letting us be on and good night.’ He was just wanting to get the heck out of there.”

  Years later, Bill wrote Jean’s 1973 comeback hit “Slippin’ Away,” as well as such follow-up singles as “At the Time,” “Poor Sweet Baby,” “The Tip of My Fingers,” and “Mercy.” She expressed her gratitude with the 1975 LP Poor Sweet Baby and Ten More Bill Anderson Songs.

  Connie Smith’s tribute album was 1967’s Connie Smith Sings Bill Anderson. By then, the prolific songwriter had provided her with such hits as “Once a Day,” “Then and Only Then,” “Nobody But a Fool,” and “Cincinnati, Ohio.” Not only that, Bill discovered Connie.

  “I was at a little place called Frontier Ranch [just east of Columbus, Ohio], a country-music park, in August of 1963,” he recalls. “When they booked the show, they asked, ‘Would you mind, between the matinee performance and the night performance, taking a little bit of your time and helping us judge a talent contest?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’d be glad to do that.’ This little girl came out onstage. Just a tiny, tiny young lady with a guitar that was probably as big or bigger than she was, wearing a little homemade cowgirl outfit. When she opened her mouth, I honestly thought she was pantomiming to a record!

  “I said, ‘There is no way that big voice could be coming out of that little, tiny lady.’ She was singing an old Jean Shepard song, ‘I Thought of You.’ I was totally blown away. When the contest was over, I went backstage and congratulated her.
I asked her if she had any desire to come to Nashville. She said, ‘No, I’ve got this little baby boy here. I’m a housewife, and I’m pretty happy. I don’t think I want to be in the music business.’

  “I said, ‘If you do ever want to get in the music business, please give me a call.’ In January of ’64, she came to see me in Canton, Ohio, at a concert. She told me she was thinking it over pretty seriously. I brought her to Nashville, I think in March, and we recorded some songs. I first took her tape to Owen Bradley at Decca, because I was recording for Decca. Owen listened to her tape and said, ‘Boy she sings great, and I know she’s probably going to be a big star, but we really don’t have room for Connie Smith on Decca right now. We’ve got this new girl named Loretta Lynn that we’re going to put a lot of our promotion behind.’ So we took her to Chet Atkins at RCA. He fell instantly in love with her. But he asked me, ‘We’ve got all these girl singers—Norma Jean, Skeeter Davis, Dottie West, this one and that one—where are her songs going to come from?’ I said, ‘I’ll write them.’”

  Songs poured out of Bill Anderson in those days. George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ernest Tubb, Roy Drusky, Kitty Wells, Roy Clark, Brenda Lee, Waylon Jennings, Eddy Arnold, and others were recording them. In addition, between 1960 and 1970, Bill Anderson wrote twenty top-ten hits for himself, including “8x10,” “I Love You Drops,” “I Get the Fever,” “Wild Week-End,” and “My Life.”

  He was a workaholic, writing nonstop, recording disc after disc, touring relentlessly and taping his popular weekly TV show. This took a toll on his private life. He and Bette separated in 1968 and divorced the following year. He married his second wife, Becky, in 1970, and their son Jamey was born in 1978.

  Bill’s weekly syndicated television show ended in 1974, but almost immediately, new small-screen opportunities presented themselves. He was tapped to host a syndicated show called Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. In 1976–1977, Bill Anderson was the host of the ABC network game show The Better Sex. In 1979–1981, he had a recurring role on the TV soap opera One Life to Live, also on ABC.

  His musical career continued to boom as well. In the 1970s, Bill Anderson scored such top-ten hits as “Quits,” “World of Make Believe,” “Head to Toe,” and “I Can’t Wait Any Longer.” In 1975, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

  Then came the setbacks of the 1980s. He was no longer topping the record popularity charts. Even so, Bill remained a highly visible television personality. In 1983, The Nashville Network (TNN) cable channel was launched. Bill Anderson was chosen to host its quiz show Fandango in 1983–1989 and was the producer of its talent competition You Can Be a Star during the same period. He also hosted Yesteryear on the channel’s radio outlet, TNNR. When the Opry became a weekly TNN program in 1985, Bill became one of the hosts of its companion show Opry Backstage. In 1987, he was featured on the TV soap opera General Hospital.

  The stresses of the decade occasionally surfaced. When Bill was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1985, he uncharacteristically lost control and burst into tears. His 1989 autobiography Whisperin’ Bill recounted some of the difficulties he’d been going through.

  He generally remained upbeat and optimistic in public. But something was missing—his heart.

  “I am a songwriter—I came to Nashville as a songwriter,” Bill states. “I wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs for years. And then I got away from songwriting.

  “I was still jotting down ideas. I’d sit on an airplane and write three or four lines, or five or six lines. What I was doing was just taking those ideas home and stuffing them in a drawer somewhere.

  “Then Steve Wariner had a hit in 1992 with ‘The Tip of My Fingers.’ I started thinking, ‘Golly, I wrote that song thirty-two years ago. Surely I can still contribute something.’ But I didn’t know all the new people who had come in the ten or twelve years I had been away from it. I was just plain intimidated. . . . I didn’t quite know how to get back into it, and I didn’t know if I could.

  “I had to learn how they do it today. Because it was a whole different thing from what we used to do. Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard and I never wrote together, but we all wrote the same way—at midnight with the shades pulled down.

  “Vince Gill got wind of the fact that I wanted to write, and through a mutual friend, we got together [in 1994]. We didn’t really know each other well at the time, but we instantly struck up a friendship and realized that we had a lot in common. He loves sports. I love sports. He loves bluegrass music. I love bluegrass music. He loves heartfelt country songs. I love heartfelt country songs.

  “I was very, very nervous. He was a superstar at the height of his game. But he made me feel so welcome and so able to contribute. I went in there with the idea for a song called ‘The Cold Gray Light of Gone,’ and that drew us together. He liked it, and I thought, ‘Wow!’ The best thing was at the end of the day when we had finished the song, he said, ‘This was fun. Let’s do it again. Would you like to do it again?’ He had some time the following Monday, and that’s when we wrote ‘Which Bridge to Cross (Which Bridge to Burn).’

  “What a thrill that was. I can’t tell you what that did for me. It not only helped my confidence, it kind of legitimized me, especially when Vince recorded the song. It was like, ‘Hey, if he’s good enough to write with Vince Gill . . .’ After that, I just kind of eased back into it.”

  “Which Bridge to Cross” became a major Vince Gill hit in 1995. “The Cold Gray Light of Gone” eventually appeared on Vince’s acclaimed 2006 CD These Days. Working with a variety of collaborators and making songwriting appointments the “modern” way on Music Row, Bill Anderson was soon back among the top tunesmiths in Music City. He cowrote the 1997 Bryan White hit “One Small Miracle” with Steve Wariner, and the pair also collaborated on Steve’s Grammy-nominated “Two Teardrops” of 1999. Mark Wills had a number-one hit with Bill’s cowritten “Wish You Were Here” in 1999 as well.

  The new millennium smiled even brighter on Bill Anderson. In 2001, his touching “Too Country” was recorded by Brad Paisley, who asked Bill to be his guest vocalist on the CD, alongside George Jones and Buck Owens. The result won the Country Music Association (CMA) Award for Vocal Event of the Year. To top it off, Bill was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame that same night. The following year, superstar Kenny Chesney topped the charts with Bill’s “A Lot of Things Different.” In 2005, Bill returned to the CMA winner’s circle as the cowriter of the organization’s Song of the Year, “Whiskey Lullaby,” as recorded by his fellow Opry stars Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss. In 2006, George Strait hit number one with Bill’s cowritten “Give It Away,” which won the CMA Song of the Year award the following year. Bill won his first Gospel Music Association award in 2007 for “Jonah, Job and Moses,” as recorded by the Oak Ridge Boys. New country sensation Joe Nichols hit number one in 2007 with Bill’s “I’ll Wait for You.”

  “To be able to write songs that these young acts will record today, I can’t tell you what that does for me inside. After all this time, to get that is just incredible.

  “When I write a song, I don’t know where it comes from. Sometimes you sit there and look at a blank piece of paper, and thirty minutes later, there’s something on that piece of paper. I really think it is a gift. I think it was a shame what I did for ten years and not use this gift. I feel now that I treasure this gift more than I ever did before, and I don’t intend to stop using it this time.

  “I am very blessed,” says Bill Anderson today, “because my life is happier and better and more together right now than it has ever been. I feel like I have so much to be thankful for.”

  The Opry star’s “cursed” decade has had some residual effects on his life. Bill’s back agony of the 1980s was eventually eased by an anti-inflammatory drug, but he sometimes wears a support brace to this day. His marriage to Becky had been rocky before her accident. In fact, they had separated. After her long recuperation, the couple finally divorced in 1997. Hi
s emphasis on broadcasting during the 1980s led to Bill Anderson Visits with the Legends, a radio program on the XM Satellite Radio service that launched in 2001. One thing that never changed, one thing that remained a constant in his life, has been the Grand Ole Opry.

  “Let me emphasize that throughout that whole long thing, I never quit going to the Opry,” says Bill Anderson. “The Opry was the constant thread in there. I could still go out to the Opry and sing and be with friends.

  “I can’t imagine my life without country music. My whole life is and has been country music. It’s like the blood that flows through my veins.”

  6

  It’s All Relative

  The relationship between Mel Tillis and his daughter Pam Tillis has been fraught with trauma, tears, and tensions, but it found a happy resolution on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

  Both father and daughter are strong-willed survivors. As a teenager, Pam rebelled against her parents’ strict rules. As a young adult, she turned her back on her country-music birthright. She survived a gruesome car accident and eventually became one of Nashville’s most gifted singer-songwriters. Meanwhile, Mel was roaring his way through Music City, wrecking his marriage along the way. He survived his escapades and prevailed to stardom despite a speech impediment that would have crushed a man with less drive and determination.

  “Dad always said the reason we butted heads so often is that we’re so much alike,” Pam observes. “For some reason, it wasn’t enough for me to just be his little girl. I wanted his respect, too.

  “Family is so important for everybody, but it’s so challenging. If we’re a success, people like that. It’s the same reason why people are interested in celebrity marriages. If you’re working it out and pulling it off, they gravitate toward that.