The Legendary Merle Haggard!
One Of Americas' Greatest Songwriters!
It didn't take me long after arriving on the Nashville Tennessee music scene in the late 70's and trudging it's gritty streets looking for music publishing for my ever growing catalog of gospel and country songs to find out that most major publishing houses in Nashville where all but impossible to get thru their big locked and guarded glass doors so I decided to pick up my oars and row my writers boat in a different direction like a couple of writers that I ran into on music row who were known around town as "for cash songwriters!"
My somewhat unusual success as a part time songwriter in the late 70's and early 80's grew out of my willingness to sell my song ideas to small music publishing houses, independent record labels and others for a one time cash payment rather than seek the normal route which was of course getting major music publishers to publish, professionally demo and pitch the songs to major recording artists in hopes of getting future royalties if the songs ever got cut.
So, I became one of a small handful of very prolific songwriters hanging around Nashville at that time who made it their business to churn out great country, bluegrass and gospel song ideas and then make the rounds and sell the songs for cash money with no future royalties and those that bought them could if need be use them for their own staff writers to rewrite or touch up the lyrics or melody to fit the style of a specific vocal artist.
I learned early on that a good song idea with good lyrics and a great melody could be sold on the open music market for cash money! I had no problem moving mine nor did the other "for cash songwriters" that I knew and worked with and often we would get together and write. We all had the same goals and we became the best of friends with great respect for the talent of each other and we co-wrote with each other at least three times a week as we would pair off in two's and each would become co-writers on just a fist full of new commercial grade country songs every week and when the songs were sold we shared equally in the cash payments.There was also enough great musicianship and vocal artistry within the group that a good demo could be turned out on a little 4 track Tascam cassette tape recorder that was sufficient to get the vocal , lyrics, music and melody ideas right and produce a great little song demo that would help us to sell the songs we wrote! I sometimes did some of the guitar work and sang on the songs I had written or co-written as well as other songs written within the group and we all sang or played and helped each other and would end up with drums, bass, lead guitar, piano and vocals which is more than enough music for any good song demo.
The age, personalities, life experiences, backgrounds, rough roads, hardships, broken relationships and other human factors in this little group of songwriters I believe also played an important role in our success. Three were from Kentucky, one was from Tennessee, two were from Texas, one from West Virginia and one from the great state of North Carolina, all were Christians and all of us had been at one time or the other members of the Baptist Church. Our backgrounds were very similar in many ways as all came from broken homes and dirt poor blue collar hard working families. To a man all of our fathers had been hard drinking men and had either left our mothers or divorced them. Everyone in the group had left school in their teen years and never finished high school. All had been married at least once before and some as many as two, three and four times and without exception love ballads came easy for all to write!
We as a group of songwriters always looked at what we wrote as being good enough to generate cash dollars and that was always my goal as well as the others in that little group of great songwriters all of which wanted some money now for their talent rather than live on the dreams of future royalties and maybe some "hoped for".... yet distant possible fame! .....or fortune! ...we were not dreamers but we were doers and that also was the rock solid bedrock of our success. It's one thing to be a dreamer and a far different thing to be a doer.....success in anything comes about by first having a dream and then doing the hard and often sacrificial heartbreaking work to make that dream a reality! "Success IS Achieved By Those Who TRY!!! ....And KEEP TRYING!!!" ~W. Clement Stone
Perhaps the tons of songs I wrote or that were written collectively in that little group of songwriters at the time were not all hits in themselves but they all had an element of great lyric writing in them that if re-written or touched up a bit to fit a specific vocal artist could evolve into a hit or the great ideas within their lyrical content and framework of the song could produce one or two additional, good or even great hit songs!
We all took a practical approach to songwriting and wrote them as just a commodity for sale and we always made plenty of money because we were all good songwriters and that in itself was the key to our success! Yes! We could have landed a job with several music publishers that we came across as we made the rounds selling our songs but most of them only wanted to pay about $150.00 to $250.00 a week draw against future royalties and that did not make much sense to any of us as we were getting on the average of five to eight hundred dollars per song as ...."for cash writers!"
I can say for sure that one of the reasons I was so successful in this way...was that those I dealt with knew that I was not driven as a songwriter for fame and fortune or that I had such an ego that I just had to see my name on publishing contracts or a song title as it's writer, but they saw me as a talented writer that was on a mission for the cause of Christ and therefore they were very generous to me and wanted to help! I or no one in that little group really could give a hoot who's name eventfully got on the songs... we had written and sold our rights to them, so the songs were theirs to do what ever they wanted with the material, they bought them and they owned them 100%. We all had the joy of just writing them and we got paid now for something that may never get cut anyway.... so to us a bird in the hand was always worth two in the bush!
Being totally independently minded as a songwriter yet very easy for professional independent music people to deal with I developed friendships with them and I never asked them for contracts or anything else I just said; "Hey guys here are some song demos with voice and guitar that I have written and recorded on a little store bought tape recorder and I want to sell them for "cash" so that I can continue my work for the cause of Christ!" a good handshake, a little paperwork and some cash closed the deals and it always worked for me and the results of the success of it for the cause of Christ was always first in my heart and mind....that and nothing more!... and God, as always truly blessed me for my willingness to let go so HE could bless me with much more! LISTEN!... You can't get a harvest if you don't plant seed into the garden of your faith and leave it up to God to give you the increase in your seed so you can plant more in the gardens of Heaven!
Yes! Writing and selling songs while only looking at them as a commodity for sale as I began to develop the professional craft of songwriting and it was a way for me to generate money for the work of the cross and to help with the humanitarian work of our founder in this beloved outreach missions church and unlike most songwriters that I met in Nashville who were struggling just to keep their heads above the water and getting nowhere fast I was never in need of any good thing and God always provided for me and my family.
Most songwriters it seemed to me at that time were not willing to let go of their songs without publishing contracts and up front advances on future royalties but as a prolific songwriter to me my songs were just a product of a God given talent and I was always willing to let them go and sell them outright as I knew my talent was such that the best of my songwriting was always yet to come ...so I kept looking toward the future rather than what I had in my hand at the time! I was always willing to let go of what I had for something better and God blessed me for my willingness to let go and get blessed with a steady income for the talent HE had given me as I did!...Thank You Lord!The wonderful experiences of working with a neat independent group of guys who were all great songwriters and finding success as a writer under my songwriters pen name (Sax Buttons) and having gained a lot of knowledge about the music business and the craft of professional songwriting it soon led me to establish my own BMI publishing company in the 80's under Blue Buttons Music Publishing/ BMI...along with that I acquired and established a couple of independent record labels and had some additional limited success as a record producer! I soon felt that I had accomplished all that I wanted to do in music at least for a time and about that time I was called by our founder to take over the work of this glorious outreach church and very special Jesus Ministry as it's Bishop and world missions director. In the late 90's I reorganized the music publishing company under MidwayOz Music Publishing/ BMI and worked on the record labels and began the building of both a Broadcast Production Studio and a professional Music Production studio to help with the ministries broadcasting and music production outreach and it's humanitarian work on the mission fields of the world.....Thank You Lord Jesus!
As I look back now I can see that my songwriting grew out of my childhood as I was left alone as a boy
to fend for myself and I felt terribly alone and rejected and out of that grew my writing of poems that were mostly dark and lonely verses and filled with the desire to be loved, wanted and needed and for quite sometime as a child I not only fully saw myself as the servant of the Lord Jesus; but, I also began to see myself as a poet and I spent time at the public library reading or checking out books on poetry and I was instantly attracted to the works of Edgar Allen Poe, his dark and foreboding work struck a note in me as I was alone and felt rejected and without love. So, Poe appealed to me and I read and re-read all of Poe's great works.
My daily reading outloud and study of the Bible as a young boy along with my many trips to the Library I soon found other poets whose works were far more heartwarming and beautiful and I soon began to write in a fashion that for the most part was happy and filled with hope and the wonderful feelings of internal peace within my being that only comes in this life when we are truly surrendered and saved at the foot of the cross and become born again!... Because in that new birth we become the glory of God and he brings to our hearts a joyful peace and all the love of Christ that now lives in us begins to change us for the good as day by day Christ makes us more like him and less like what our circumstances have made us or the cruelty and the rejection of the world that often gets on our backs and destroys the very good thing that God wants us all to be in HIS Image!As a boy I also had the love of one of my brothers, Franklin Delano Kendrick, who would read my poems and encouraged me to write more. He later went to college on the GI Bill and earned a degree in journalism. But, an auto accident in 1957 took his life at just 25 years of age and as I stood at his bedside and saw the last breath come out of his torn and mangled body I knew then that the most important goal in my life was to be a minister of the Gospel of our Lord and from that day until this very hour the ministry of our Lord has always taken first place in my life even though I have traveled along with the Gospel down many other roads of interest including the craft of songwriting and along the way like most of us my roads were often filled with heartbreak, trial and error, trial and success and like so many of us do who want and need love, I made my fair share of mistakes in my choice of women and personal relationships. But, I never for one moment lost my faith in my calling to the ministry of Christ Jesus as HIS Bondservant!
One thing is for sure if you are going to write Country, Gospel or Bluegrass you may need to pack up and move to Nashville and get yourself totally immersed in this Great American Art Form so that you might have any chance at all of getting songs published and cut by major recording artists! Sending tapes,cd's and lyrics to most Nashville music publishers is a total shot in the dark as they get thousands each month and 99.9% of the time there just ain't a "hit " in the bunch. So WHY LISTEN? To write music for this Great American Art Form you have to be in the very heart of that art form and that is the great city of NASHVILLE which is in it's self....COUNTRY MUSIC!I think some of the greatest words ever written by a songwriter on the craft of songwriting came from the pen of the legendary Harlan Howard!... one of the greatest songwriters in the history of music who wrote over 4,000 songs of which more than 100 became number 1 or top 10 hits and all of his work became country classics! I had the honor, privilege and great joy to meet Harlan several times at songwriting workshops in Nashville and a few years before he passed away in 2002 he penned the following words!
"I feel I have done about everything in life but die--at least when it comes to relationships. I don't know if all that is essential for a writer, but it sure helps because you can draw upon all those feelings. You remember the guilt, the regrets, the dreams. But, then, it's like a painter...you embellish on the emotions. If you were rotten and you write a song about it, you make yourself 10 times as rotten. Maybe you did something wrong, say you get drunk and wreck the car, well, you dramatize it in the song. To me, a song is like a three-minute movie."
"I'm a title person. I don't sit around and strum melodies, waiting for inspiration. I look for a title that intrigues me...something that will look good on a title strip in a jukebox...like a book attraction in a bookstore. I think there is a real attraction in titles. Once you have the title, you have to figure out a way to make that into a love song of meaning--a little observation on love that hasn't been beaten to death. That's why love is such a good subject. You never run out of things to say about it. I'm fascinated by how much we'll go through for love...what we'll give up, the mistakes we'll make, how weak we can be."
"It takes a certain amount of inventiveness, but I write stories about people and embellish them. I make them bigger than life or more than they really are, but there's not really an emotion I put in a song that I haven't had. I've been lonesome. I've been rejected. I've been bad. I've been drunk. I've done all those things so I'm not writing about something I don't know about. I know the mistakes I've made and the wrongs that have been done to me--and I have a real good memory." ~Harlan Howard 1929-2002
I fully understand every word that Harlan Howard wrote in the above!.... Because, I have lived it just as he did! As a young man who wore his heart on his sleeve I looked for love in all the wrong places and I paid a heavy price for those mistakes as well, so love songs were always easy for me to write and I know that all of those experiences both good and bad helped God to tune me up for the Gospel and the spreading of it all over the world as the Living, Loving Bondservant Of Jesus and having become all that God would have me be for HIS Glory!..... then songwriting became secondary in my life as have all other things and for over fifteen years until quite recently I never penned another song; but, the few songs I am now writing have much more depth and meaning to them than most of my early works as God has perfected in me a much greater heart with much greater love and a complete understanding and appreciation for all of my mistakes in life and all the wrongs that have been done to me as well, and like Harlan Howard I have a real good memory .... but that memory is cradled in forgiveness and the Love Of Christ!...Thank You Lord JESUS!
I, much like Harlan Howard, am also amazed at what people are willing to give up for the desires of the flesh when it comes to love and relationships! But, what troubles me far more is how much money on foolish things of the world they will spend on themselves; but, will not give a dime to help lift a starving child or a dying little leper out of a stinking ditch in India, Africa or Burma yet will look you right in the eye and have the nerve to call themselves a Christian!.....when ABOVE ALL THINGS they should Honor God in all things and help lift up the very least among us as our Lord Jesus did because Christianity is not a religion; but, it is a living person and HIS name is Jesus and being a Christian is being Christ like!
As we look around the body of Christ today you cannot see Christ in most who call themselves HIS; but, what you will see is a form of Godliness but, having no power in it, no love in it and people not giving one moment of thought to the precious blood that was shed on the cross by our Lord. But, one day all will stand before the throne of God and the book of life will be open.....what then?.....OH what then dear brothers and sisters?OH!.... WHAT THEN?
"He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse!'
~Proverbs 28:27
Yours In Christ,
~Dr. Davy
A Bondservant Of Jesus
~*~*~*~
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