Jim McBride Interview
Doug Burke:
Welcome to Back Story Song, I'm your host Doug Burke. And today we're here with Jim McBride. Nashville songwriter Hall of Famer, Jim McBride, grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, obsessively listening to the radio, which his parents kept on throughout the day, and singing in church. He was supporting his family working for the US Postal Service in his young 30s when his first chart topping song, A Bridge That Just Won't Burn by Conway Twitty reached number two on the charts.
On the day after Christmas 1980 he gambled on his songwriting career, and quit the post office and moved to Nashville. In Nashville, he met a young singer, Alan Jackson, who was looking for a record deal and the two paired up and the rest is history. 100 albums cuts, 10 Top 10 singles and six number ones later, Jim McBride has been showered with industry awards and his songs are on over 60 million albums sold. Tell me about the backstory and the inspiration for Bridge Just Won't Burn.
Jim McBride:
Roger, around the early 1970s had moved to Nashville. He was single and I was married and had a couple of kids. And so Roger made the move up here from Alabama for Bobby Berry who's writing for Bobby Bare. I had gotten discouraged and then put my guitar in the closet for like three years, but I couldn't take it any longer. I was still getting all these ideas. So about the time I got the guitar out, Roger had left Nashville. And now he was back in Nashville after three or four years and he's writing for Foster and Ross. We had written something together, there was a little studio in Huntsville, Alabama, and Rogers from about 20 miles away in Athens. And we had met there and he said, "Do you want to write some again?" And I said, "Yeah, I just started." So Roger would come down to see his girlfriend in Alabama on Sunday. And then he would come by my house on Sunday night, and we would write. And we got the song started at my house. And I believe I went to Nashville the next week or later that week, and we finished it. By this time, I was way into it. I had heard good old boys like me, and it's like, "You know what? I don't know if I can ever write anything like that. But I'm 33 years old, I'm going to have to do it soon or it'll be too late." Bobby Bare had offered me a deal for $50 a week. And I said, "Bobby, man, I really appreciate that because I really respect you, but I've got a wife and family, and I've got a government job. I make pretty good money carrying mail." And I said, "I can't live on $50 a week." Fast forward that's when I got discouraged. I tried to transfer to Nashville with the post office, so then I would be here at least, then the postmaster turned me down. And I said, "Well, someday I'll leave and you won't have anything to say about it. I'll just leave." Fast forward a few years and Conway Twitty heard A Bridge That Just Won't Burn and he recorded it. I made myself a promise. I said, if this song goes to number one, if it's a big hit like all the Conway songs, then I'm going to quit the post office and move to Nashville, to try and get a deal. So Roger called me and he said, "Hey, pack your bags. It's going to be his next single." So it only went to number two. And I thought I'll never get another Conway cut. But I got at least three more over the years. Conway would listen to 2,000 songs sometimes, around 2,000 songs, and he would pick 10. So if you got on a Conway Twitty album, that was a big deal. And he personally listened to those songs. He didn't have someone ... I mean, I've gone out to Twitty City before which I love to do and go out and sit with him and play songs for him. But yeah, he says he would personally listen to maybe 2,000 songs, out of which he would pick 10 so just to get the Conway cut was a pretty big deal. And I thought, "Oh my God."
Doug Burke:
That didn't quite make it, but you moved anyway.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, I moved anyway. I quit the post office, I moved to Nashville, started to work for Foster and Ross on the first day of January 1981. And had little office, it was about four by four. I could get my guitar in there and that was about it. But hey, I was on Music Row and I had one year guaranteed at I believe $18,000, and I had made $27,000k in mail the year before. And so it's quite a gamble. But luckily, while I was still in Alabama, I'd written a song called Bet Your Heart on Me and Johnny Lee cut it after I'd been in town three, four months. And before the year was out, I think about November, it went number one so that bought me a couple more years at a slightly higher pay raise. So that was my first hit and Rogers first hit.
Doug Burke:
So on A Bridge That Just Won't Burn, did Bobby Bare pass on the song?
Jim McBride:
No. This was the second time Roger came to town. Now Bobby, he did not pass on the song.
Doug Burke:
So he went straight to Conway Twitty.
Jim McBride:
I think Bill-
Doug Burke:
And he's the first want to hear it and-
Jim McBride:
What they would do: Bill Ross and Jerry Foster had an office in the UA Tower on 17th and Conway and Mickey Gilley and folks like that, they would go out to dinner and come back to the office late at night and listen to songs. Foster and Ross would play him songs out of the catalog. So Conway heard it and recorded it. So all of this time while in 1981 when I moved to Nashville, my mom her cancer had come back the latter part of 1980, and so the day we buried her was the night of the BMI Awards, and that's a big deal if you're a songwriter, and you're getting an award, and it was my first performance award. I had not given any thought, I didn't rent a tux or anything. My mother was dying and passed away. And we had a funeral and taking care of everything, and so it was just totally out of my mind at the time. So after the ceremony, we were still at the cemetery and my dad said, "I want you to go to Nashville and get that award tonight." And I said, "Dad I don't have a tux. I haven't made any plans to go." And he said, "No, if you can do it." So I got a couple of cousins to drive me up. I managed to find a tuxedo, ill fitting tuxedo at the last minute in Huntsville, and they drove me up and I went to the award show. You talk about bittersweet, we had just buried my mom and now I'm getting an award that songwriters that cherish and desire to get and-
Doug Burke:
But she had known that you'd gotten the award?
Jim McBride:
Yes, she knew I was getting one, and the other thing is Conway came to town while the singer was at. She had lost her hair but she was wearing a wig and she stayed dressed up just as long as she could. So she got to go see Conway and meet Conway-
Doug Burke:
And sing your song.
Jim McBride:
... went to the show ... Yeah, she got saved singing my song. So that was cool.
Doug Burke:
That is a nice story.You want to talk about Dixie Boy?
Jim McBride:
Yeah, I'd love to. People say what's your favorite song you've ever written? And when I started back writing in 1978, I wanted to write a song from my mom and dad and about my life growing up. Boy, it should have been real easy, but some of it just I wanted it to be perfect or near perfect. So it took me a long time. I had a demo session scheduled in Nashville with Foster and Ross before I moved here. I wanted to get it on that session. So I gave Bill Ross the list of songs and I said, "There's one more called Dixie Boy that I want to play and I still liked one line." And I spent the night in the hotel and I finally got that line that night and I showed it to him the next morning and he said, "Yeah, we've got to do that."
Doug Burke:
That was when you knew the lyrics were done and you weren't going to have to edit them any longer? And prior to that you'd been picking it up and putting it down or you had started it and picked it up again? How did the prior to that?
Jim McBride:
I'd pick it up and there were two or three lines that I just couldn't get. And finally, I got a couple of them. But I was down to that last line and I thought it's going to break my heart if I don't get that line. And I got it and I was happy with it. I wouldn't have just chosen-
Doug Burke:
And what was that line?
Jim McBride:
... anything. I don't remember which one it was anymore as much as I worried about it. The odd thing about that was Darwin's a type of ghetto boy like me and I guess that was one thing that inspired me to write that song. But back in the day, I smoked a lot and had a real deep voice. And everybody thought I was trying to get a Don Williams cut. So it just kind of went on shift. Obviously, Don wasn't going to do it after doing that great song. It went on the shelf and then a lady at the publishing company played it for Randy Owen, and they recorded it. And of course that was the same album that had Dixie Landy Light on it. I didn't get a single but it sold five million copies. And it was the album of the year, the CMA Album of the Year. So it's like having a single.
Doug Burke:
A lot of people listen to that song.
Jim McBride:
Yeah. I've gotten a lot of people who have mentioned that song to me. But it was nice. My mom got to hear me sing it but she didn't get to hear Alabama.
Doug Burke:
So it went straight to Alabama and didn't get shopped to anyone else?
Jim McBride:
No, I think that the-
Doug Burke:
Randy heard it and said, "This is our material-
Jim McBride:
Yes.
Doug Burke:
... this is where we came from."
Jim McBride:
They associated enough with it. They were raised up on Lookout Mountain about 60 miles from where I was born and raised.
Doug Burke:
Where you're talking about this?
Jim McBride:
Yeah. National Geographic was doing a hardcover book called Valleys of America, and they did one on Wheels Valley. It's down from the mountain where Teddy and Randy lived and they actually quoted some of those lyrics in that hardcover book. The thing about it is I made $25 and I spent like $200 buying books for my friends and family. It's like, "This is probably not going to happen again." Yeah, I went in the hole on that, but it was cool in there. When I play out, I usually do that song. A lot of times, I'll do it first, just to say this is where I came from. Oh, one other thing, a lot of the younger kids. I did a show at Opryland hotel the other day and I've gotten where I can judge the crowd, and I said, "How many of you guys know who say hey, Willie is?" And every guy in the room raised their hand and I said, "Okay, these are my people." Because Randy asked me about that. I said, "People think I'm talking about Willie Nelson." He said, "I knew who you were talking about is Willie Mays." A lot of these younger kids don't know who Willie Mays is.
Doug Burke:
Who do they think say hey Willie is?
Jim McBride:
Willie Nelson.
Doug Burke:
Willie Nelson, okay.
Jim McBride:
Yes, yes. And it's like, "I don't want to have to explain that before I play it every time."
Doug Burke:
Yeah, no, it's a generational thing.
Jim McBride:
It's a generational thing, yep.
Doug Burke:
Now so where does Dixie Boy play in the Alabama performance? It's pretty much the standard, right?
Jim McBride:
They used to play it some when the album was out, but because it wasn't a single they didn't play it that much, no. But that's okay.
Doug Burke:
We've got to get them to play it more.
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Chasing That Neon Rainbow.
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
That's like when you come from Alabama to go to the big city, huh?
Jim McBride:
Yeah, that's kind of a composite. It's mostly about the life Alan was living at the time. But there's a lot of mine in there too. I mean, we didn't have a television until I was eight years old. And so I still have that old Philco table model radio and I still listen to the Grand Ole Opry on it sometime. Of course, there's no FM, it's just AM and broadcast, but it's an old tune and it sounds great. But that's what I grew up listening to the first seven or eight years. I was coming back from Georgia, it was two or three years before I even had ever heard of Alan Jackson or knew who he was or anybody else. But I got this idea and I pulled over to the side of the road and I wrote down chasing that neon rainbow, living that honky tonk dream. Well, I had never played in a band, and I never did a solo act at the coffee house or anywhere else. As a matter of fact, I didn't do a writers night for nine years after I moved to Nashville, until Kix Brooks talked me into it one night.
Doug Burke:
Were you nervous or?
Jim McBride:
Oh, yeah, I said, "Kix, it scares me to death to think about it, man." I said, "I've never played like that." And he said, "Hey, I'm the MC." He said, "I'll get you the sympathy thing going, and say this is Jim's first time you all be nice." And I dropped about three picks I think during the time, but that's when I started getting over it. Thank you Kix for helping me do that because I've gotten to go a lot of cool places because I was willing to play them. But I'd had that idea in a notebook for about two years. All writers keep notebooks with ideas in there. And I knew what it was about, but I'd never done that. So I get a phone call from this guy named Alan Jackson. And I've seen him at the office a couple of times, and just kind of nodded. And I thought, "Dang, he looks like Hank Williams or something." And he said, "Would you be willing to get with me and see if maybe we could write something?" And I said, "Yeah, I would do that." So we were writing in the old Combine building up on the third floor. It was a little room that you could barely stand up in. It got hot up there. As a matter of fact, the fire marshal said, "Don't be up there, it's a fire hazard. No one needs to be up there." But I mean, we couldn't stay away it's where Kristofferson used to write when he wrote at the office, he wrote in this little room. But you can't keep us out of there. We're trying to channel-
Doug Burke:
Kristofferson?
Jim McBride:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I wrote about 80 practice songs before I ever did anything trying to write like Kristofferson, finally figured it out I couldn't. So I remember the first day we got together, it was hot up there. So we open the window, and to try to get a little air stir, we opened the door and the door wouldn't stay open. But there was a box of trophies there. And we got one of those ACM trophies, if you remember what they looked like with the cowboy hat on and whatever. It was one of Kris's trophies. So we propped the door up with one of Kris's trophies.
Doug Burke:
That's fun.
Jim McBride:
Yeah. And so we started talking, Alan's from Georgia, I'm from Alabama. We liked Hank Williams, Vargas, and George Jones. We loved the same music. And so we hit it off immediately and he's telling me about driving down to Florida with the band and to Arkansas on the weekends and places, and not making any money. But he said, "By the time I buy gas for the van and pay the band, I'm not making any money." And he said, "I've been in town for four or five years and nobody will give me a record deal." I think everybody had turned him down at that point. So I said, "I've got an idea I want to show you. I haven't known what to do with it but you're talking about it right now I think." And so that's how we wrote Chasing That Neon Rainbow.
Doug Burke:
So you laid out that title?
Jim McBride:
He said somebody's daddy won a radio. And so that's just how we started this first line of the song, it's like, "Well, let's just tell your story." And in doing so, there's a little bit of mine in there too, moving to Music Row and all that. So yeah, that's how that started. The Country Music Hall of Fame wanted to put Alan's radio that he sings about in the song.
Doug Burke:
The actual radio from-
Jim McBride:
The actual radio. So he called me and he said, "Man, he said, they're putting daddy's radio in the Country Music Hall of Fame. And it's going to be a ceremony which of course you're invited to, but they want the original lyrics and I don't have them." He said, "Do you have the original lyrics on it?" And I said, "Yeah, I do." And he said, "Well, bring them or call them and tell them that you've got them." So I called and I said, "Look, this is kind of embarrassing." I said, I'll write with a large legal pad. And I said, "The lyrics to that song are on four different sheets of paper." And I said, "There's basically verses on a separate sheet and then the chorus." And they said, "If you change one thing, we don't want it. If you do anything different to it, we don't want it." And I said, "Okay, I won't touch it." So I don't know if the lyrics are still in there. But for a long time, Alan's radio is in a glass thing and the lyrics are on four big yellow pieces of paper in there with it. It might not be there anymore. But Doug, you see these things where it's where they wrote, God bless America or some big song. And there's like no scratch out. It's just written straight through where there's one -
Doug Burke:
Yeah.
Jim McBride:
It's like they're apparently a lot smarter than me.
Doug Burke:
Yours is on four different sheets.
Jim McBride:
By the time I finish the song, you write down all the pertinent things, if you're singing about cars you might know all the pertinent things about cars I could think of, just over in the margin and then hopefully you get a line or something out of it. But yeah, some of those things are just a little bit too perfect or they'll have one little scratch up, it's like, yeah, right.
Doug Burke:
That's not how that song was written. No one writes a song that way.
Jim McBride:
No, that didn't happen. Boy, Alan, anytime I ever took an idea to him or something I had started, if he liked it, he can certainly hold up his writing part. So that song ended up on his first album.
Doug Burke:
It went to number two?
Jim McBride:
Yeah, it didn't go to number one, it went to number two I think. Back in those days there was Billboard, there was R&R, and there was Cashbox. And I believe that song went number one in R&R, I'm not sure.
Doug Burke:
Okay. Do you get a number one party for an R&R number one or only a number one party if it's a Billboard number one?
Jim McBride:
Oh, listen. Yes. They love to have number one party it's how music grew. And yes, if it was R&R, absolutely. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Did you have a number one party for Chasing That-
Jim McBride:
I think we did. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
... Neon Rainbow? That would tell me if it was a number one, if someone threw you in number one party.
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
So Alan Jackson had a pretty good career after that album and that song?
Jim McBride:
Yeah, plus we became friends and he gave me a copy. And I heard the song on there called Here In The Real World. And I thought, "Oh man, Randy Travis had already kicked the door down, traditional music." And I thought, "Wow, that song is awesome." So his first single didn't do so well, but then they put out here in the real world and that got it going and each subsequent single kicked it up.
Doug Burke:
Alan went on to record a bunch of your material someday-
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
... You Can't Have It All, Tropical Depression?
Jim McBride:
Sometimes it just really works, and all of those songs are co-written, he cut his Christmas song of mine, I'll tell you this story. He cut a Christmas song that I had written by myself and he calls me one morning about 7:00 and he said, "Hey, you got a copy that Christmas song I liked that you wrote?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "Bring it down to the studio." He said, "I'm doing a Holly Jolly Christmas for Home Alone 2."
Doug Burke:
What's that called?
Jim McBride:
There's Just Something About Christmas. It never got out. It's still in-
Doug Burke:
Okay, yeah.
Jim McBride:
... a can somewhere on Music Row.
Doug Burke:
We've got to get that out there, don't you think?
Jim McBride:
Oh, yeah, we've got some other things in the can-
Doug Burke:
Like every year that should come out. What's all that stuff doing in the can?
Jim McBride:
Oh gosh, you wouldn't believe all I've got, I've got cuts in the can by in one month period so I lost two Travis Tritt cuts, one Brooks and Dunn, and one Alan Jackson cut in the period of a month.
Doug Burke:
There's an album, if someone could release that there's an entire album.
Jim McBride:
Anne Marie I mean you name it. I have a George Jones, Brenda Lee duet that's still in the can. I have a Jerry Lee Lewis cut that I got my first year in town that's still in the can. I mean that will just kill you. So what I did, I had a tape of it. Like I said, a while back, I took it to this guy and he put it on a CD, and I took it to the disc jockey down home that played my first record on radio. I gave it to him. I said, "No other disc jockey anywhere has this song. You're the only one who has it." He just plays it to death. So I get a little something out of it. But oh yeah, any writer that's had success will have these same stories. You get excited because they had a Mary Kutcher song, and then you find that she's changing direction in the middle of the album.
Doug Burke:
Out of all your on the shelf songs and some of your on the shelf stuff is obviously been cut by major voices. Out of all the ones you've written, if you could pick a voice today to record one, what would it be and who would the voice be?
Jim McBride:
Well, I almost got a George strike at one time. He took 13 songs into the studio. He cut 12 songs, he cut 11 songs, he threw one out and took the 12 song and put it in its place and I was good on number 13. So that's as close I ever came to getting the straight cut. I would love to have a straight cut but even more than that, I wish I had gotten ... I would have loved to have had a Vargas on cut. I would love that. Today, I guess I'd say George.
Doug Burke:
Would you like him to do that song that you had? What was the song? The number 13 cut?
Jim McBride:
I don't remember. I think I've intentionally blacked that.
Doug Burke:
You blacked that one out.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, I think I've just blocked that in my memory. Yes.
Doug Burke:
So, Someday with Alan Jackson goes to number one in 1991. Who Says You Can't Have It All goes to number four. You co-wrote both of them with him.
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
You guys must have had a real chemistry going?
Jim McBride:
We did, we had-
Doug Burke:
Tell me what that was like?
Jim McBride:
I had two notebooks done. I had one that I kept ideas in, and then I had an Alan Jackson notebook. If I got an idea, I thought Alan would like, then that went in this notebook so that I didn't pull it out if I happen to be writing with someone else.
Doug Burke:
So you're constantly writing songs with two notebooks. What's the criteria in this time period that puts it in the Alan Jackson notebook? Like, okay, that song is an Alan song, that's not a George Gray or someone else, Bobby Bare whoever else you were trying to fetch, Conway Twitty?
Jim McBride:
I don't know. I would just have a feeling, I just knew, man. I just knew if it was an idea or whatever, that he would like it. I never took him one idea that he didn't like that we didn't finish. I think we finished every single song and most of them ended up on the albums at least.
Doug Burke:
Probably the biggest song you wrote together was Chattahoochee?
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Tell us about that.
Jim McBride:
Oh boy, Bobby Bare had told me years before he said, "You can't sit down and say I'm going to write a standard today. I'm going to write a song that's going to be around for 50 years." You may or you might not, chances are you won't. But he said, once you do, and it's out there, you can't stop it. Once it takes on a life of its own, you can't kill it. You don't want to, but you couldn't if you wanted to. So I'm sitting in my little office at home out in Green Hills one day and a lot of times I would ride out there in the morning, and then come into town and maybe pitch songs or see what was going on on the Music Row. I've gotten a chevron book and had a story on the Chattahoochee River. And I was familiar with the Chattahoochee, Sidney Lanier the poet had written this poem called Song of the Chattahoochee that I remembered from school, and it does indeed form a great deal of the border between Alabama and Georgia. So I was familiar with it. And I started thinking about it and I had an atlas there. All good songwriters have an atlas somewhere. So I got my atlas out and I thought I wonder how close Newnan, Georgia which is where Alan's from, I wonder how close that is to the Chattahoochee? It was pretty dang close. I get the slow thing going and I had the first two lines, way down yonder on the Chattahoochee, it gets hotter than a hoochie coochie. So I was going out on the road with Alan, and I just put it in that notebook and that's where I left it. So when we get out on the road, and I said, "I got this thing started, do what you're thinking." And he said, "Play me those two lines again." Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee it gets hotter than a hoochie coochie. And he said, "We laid rubber on the Georgia asphalt got a little crazy, but we never got caught." And so, I mean, we were off and running then.
Doug Burke:
You got a little crazy, what were you doing that you didn't get caught? Is this speeding on the asphalt?
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
You guys used to race cars?
Jim McBride:
You know what light and rubber is?
Doug Burke:
Yeah.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, that's-
Doug Burke:
Doing drag racing.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I look back some of the places we used to drag race and it's like because the cars back then they were at least six-cylinder if not eight-cylinder. Your daddy's car would probably, his old pontiac could probably do 120 or 30. So I came along during the era of muscle cars, the GTOs, and the super sports, and some people did get killed doing that, but we were drag racing places we really shouldn't have been doing that. But we finished it. It's got a caging feel to it, and we finished it in Thibodaux, Louisiana, he showed it to the band at soundcheck, it was still pretty rough. God bless the band when the singer says "Hey, I just wrote this a little while ago. Let's work it up." Because that's usually where you practice. You do it in soundcheck a few times till you get comfortable with it. He said, "This thing's got a caging feel, we'll just do it tonight." And the band's like, "Oh dear Lord." He did it and the response was like nothing really.
Doug Burke:
Pin drop.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, it was just like, what was it?
Doug Burke:
Where was this?
Jim McBride:
This was in Thibodaux, Louisiana.
Doug Burke:
Thibodaux, Louisiana.
Jim McBride:
Thibodaux, Louisiana.
Doug Burke:
They had never heard this song before.
Jim McBride:
No, it's the first time anybody had heard it. He did it in soundcheck, and about two or three hours later, he worked it into the show, and nobody cared like, "What's that?" So the next time after it comes out, it was a little bit different story. They may love your album cuts, but they want to hear those songs on the radio. Usually the ones they've heard on the radio that they sing along with or whatever. And I always wanted that one song that if they said, "What do you do?" And you say, "I am a songwriter." And they go, "Well, have you written anything I've heard?" That's always the next question. And you go, "Well, do you listen to country music?" They go, "Oh, yeah." And then you give them your biggest hit and they say, "I don't think I know that song." And it used to embarrass me. But I got to where I would say, "You lied to me because that song was number one in the country last week and if you listen to country music, you would know that song. I just got tired of being embarrassed." And I thought, "I'll just embarrass you a little bit because you didn't tell me the truth." But I always wanted that one song that no matter where I was, if they had listened to country music for two hours over the last 30 years, they might know that song, and it turned out to be an upbeat song, it turned out to be Chattahoochee. And that's okay, I'm not going to have a bigger one and Alan's not either, that's his biggest song and mine. I went down to Australia to write with some artist and the lady at customs said, "Why are you here?" And I said, "I'm here to write songs, I'm a song writer." She said, "Oh, have you written anything I might know?" And I said, "If you don't know Chattahoochee, you wouldn't know anything else probably." And she said, "No." I said, "Way down yonder." And she said, "Oh, on the Chattahoochee. Oh yes, I know that song. I love that song." That song is just my biggest earning song, and I guess it always will be, thank God. We finished that song, Doug, and I believe he cut that song. He was going in the studio when we got back. And I'll be honest with you, because Alan and I would rather have said ballad, we were just happy to have an upbeat song like Neon Rainbow. And then we had a couple of other ones but we were pretty happy about that. So he cut it and the album had gone to number two, had it fallen to number 15 with no bullet. When Chattahoochee and the video came out, the timing was just perfect. The album shot up to number one, the single sold half a million, and the album sold another four million. Thank you God, I had three other songs on the album.
Doug Burke:
So Chattahoochee is an Indian word or is that a southern word that's made up?
Jim McBride:
Oh, I'm sure it's an Indian word.
Doug Burke:
Indian word. And can you tell me what a hoochie coochie is, and why it gets hot?
Jim McBride:
Yeah, okay. Actually, the hoochie coochie thing goes back to the blues days. There's an old blues song called Hoochie Coochie Man. We started getting phone calls from all over the country, man. And Alan being Alan said, "Tell him to call Jim, call Jim, he'll tell you." I'm getting phone calls just about every day for a while from somewhere, and they said, "What is a hoochie coochie?" Well, I found out that means a lot more in some places. What I said, I'll tell you what that means to me and what it means to Alan, the fair comes to town every fall, and they always had these dancers, strippers. You had to be 18 to get in the tent, but they did a little dance out on the and they were hoochie coochie girls. They called them hoochie coochie girls and the dance they did was a hoochie coochie. I said the big deal at school was if you could get in before you turned 18 you could go school and brag about it the next day. And I said it's a county fair strip show. That's all I could tell you and dance.
Doug Burke:
A lot about living and a little about love, kind of what being a teenager and growing up is all about?
Jim McBride:
Yeah, people are attracted to water, I found that out a long time ago. If they can't make it to the beach, they'll go to the river or the lake, and they'll fish in a creek if they have to but I think people just associated with that song. It doesn't mean I've seen thousands of women singing along with and a part about where he takes her home early. It's like I said that might make the women mad. Well, no woman has ever said, well, she wouldn't give it up so he took her home. But it's funny, there's so many stories I've heard with that song. This couple, they had a little son, a four year old boy in play school. And the teacher called him and she said, "Could you all come in for a meeting? I want to talk to you about your little boy." So they go in and the parents are like, "What has he done? What's he doing?" And she said, "Well, I don't mean to imply anything. But he goes over at play time every day. There's a little plastic guitar over there. And he grabs that guitar into the top of his voice, he starts singing, talking about cars and dreaming about women, over, and over, and over." She thought he was a little pervert. And they started laughing. They said, "No, no, that's an Alan Jackson song that he loves." The teacher thought the kid was perverted I guess.
Doug Burke:
So Rose in Paradise, this was Waylon Jennings' last number one-
Jim McBride:
Last number one.
Doug Burke:
... song before he passed away?
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Tell me about that song.
Jim McBride:
His version came out in '87. Actually he had the first version it was cut a couple times before that, Randy Howard cut it but never got out and then Toy Cowell cut it. So it had been recorded twice, but never been released. That song just from Waylon's version is now almost 33 years old. And Doug, there's rarely a week that goes by that somebody doesn't mention that song to me. It's just I've never seen anything like it, even more so than Chattahoochee or anything else. Young songwriters they said, "Man, that song was the one that made me want to come to town and be a songwriter." And I said, "Well, I'm going to pray for you because I don't want to be a part of you coming here and starving to death, hope you get a good plan." But Stuart Harrison and I was supposed to write one day and we got together at the April Blackwood office, and we couldn't think of anything to write, which happened sometimes. And so we started telling ghost stories. And I told him about this lady in the early 1800s that had lived in the county where I'm from. She had had five wealthy husbands, and they all died mysteriously. Back in those days, you didn't have CSI and there was no FBI lab, so they tried to pin a couple of murders on her, but it didn't stick. But she had five wealthy husbands and she was supposedly the most beautiful lady in the county, she was just the prettiest woman around. And I've been to those guys graves, they're buried out behind a big house that one of them built for that is burned down. But the graves with the gravestones are still back behind the house, and they say at one time they were five nails in the entryway. And each one of those hat was hanging on a nail. I don't know about that. But it's a great story anyway.
Doug Burke:
That house is haunted.
Jim McBride:
Oh, yes.
Doug Burke:
They burned down the house.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, they did.
Doug Burke:
It was haunted before it burned out.
Jim McBride:
Oh, yeah. I had some friends who moved in there back in the '60s and I went to a New Year's Eve party there one time and it's like this place is spooky. And they told a few stories about things that happened. But then he started telling me some ghost stories from the Lowcountry from South Carolina where he was raised, and we did that for a while and then we went to lunch. And we came back, and neither one of us can remember where ... It's like, "Well, let's write a ghost song or whatever. Let's see what we can do." The story just fell out over a couple of hours. We decided to leave it ambiguous at the end. I'm an O. Henry fan and he was great with irony, the lady of the tiger and the Gift of the Magi. One of us or both those that let's leave it where you don't really know what happened to her. Let's just leave it like that. And so that's what we did. And we took it in and played it for our song plugger Judy Harrison. And she's like, "Henry, where do you boys go to lunch?" She loved it and we demoed it. I actually signed the demo on it. And then one day, Loretta Lynn came in with a guy that worked in MCA for Jimmy Bowen to listen to songs darling there, and she played Loretta some songs for pitching to her. And she said, "Loretta I know this song is not for you, but I want you to hear this song the boys wrote." She played Rose in Paradise, and Loretta went, "Oh my Lord, you've got to get that to Waylon." And I don't know if we just had ever thought about that or not, we really hadn't thought about ... She said, "You've got to get that to Waylon."
Doug Burke:
Why do you think Loretta Lynn thought that was a Waylon song at that point?
Jim McBride:
That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know what made her say Waylon. I would love to ask her that question.
Doug Burke:
But you all were like, "That's a great idea."
Jim McBride:
Yes, what do you think of that? Just a thought of getting to Waylon Jennings cut. We're like, "Yes, we'll hold it for a year." When normally you would not do that. It was like when I wrote songs with Alan Jackson, they would say, "Do you want to do a demo on these?" And I'm like, "No, this guy is going to get a record deal. Don't worry about it. I want him to do them." Because the first time we sat down together, I thought this guy can write and he can sing. So it's played for Waylon and he said, "Man." He said, "I just finished that album." And he said, "I'm done with it." But he said, "If you tell those boys to put that song under a rock, I swear, I will cut that song next year when I do my next album." Do you know how many times they tell us they're going to do something and they don't? If I had every cut I'd been promised.
Doug Burke:
Who is worse? The artists or the label or the publishing-
Jim McBride:
It's a conspiracy, all of them.
Doug Burke:
All of them will tell you, it's the same promise that they're not going to keep.
Jim McBride:
I wrote a song one whole one time for a year and a half, and then they didn't cut it. So what happens in a situation like that is an artist hears your song, or their producer hears your song and says, "Don't play that for anybody else. So I want to cut that, and I want my artist to cut that song." A good analogy would be if you sell bread and somebody or you sell individual ceramics or something, and they took one of your price ceramics and said, "Take that one off the shelf so nobody else can see it and want to buy it." In other words, you take it off the shelf, it's not for sale anymore, or not available if you're talking about a song. And so they hold it for six months, and then they'll go in and cut an album. And you never heard anything. And it's like, "Oh no, we decided to pass on that." Or they wait till the time comes and they go, "No, we're not going to cut that song," after you've taken it off the market. So thanks a lot for that. But that's just the way the music business works. And 1,000 things can happen from the time they hear that song and say, "I love it, I'm going to record it." 1,000 things can happen and it doesn't get recorded. And any writer that's been here while will tell you the same thing, it happens to all of us.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, art sometimes has no timetable. How do you know when a song is done?
Jim McBride:
I just know. There's a seven letter word that I despise, and it's called rewrite. I despise that word. And so even from the beginning, I spent more time with him than anybody. I'm not going to spend two weeks writing a song and play it for somebody who's never had a song recorded. And they tell me, it's got all kinds of mistakes. I don't want to hear that. I would play it for people that I respected their opinion, that I knew that they knew what a good song was or what a great song was. And what a bad song was. Curly Putman was my first mentor and he said, "Man, turn that thing every way you can, and make sure you got it the best you can get it." I tried to do that. I very seldom had a publisher tell me I needed to rewrite a line or something because I'd already spent hours with it. They might not have got a line at first I'm like, "Wait a minute. I've spent two weeks with this song and you just heard it for the first time. Listen to it again. And this time you shouldn't have to explain the song but sometimes people don't get it right off the bat." And it's like, "You listen to that another time or two and then you tell me if I need to change it." I very seldom had to do a rewrite because I edited and edited. Oh, I did it much slower. We wrote it much slower. But when Waylon got in the studio, they picked it up to where it is. We did not originally write it that fast. So now when I play it out I have to try to play it as fast as Waylon did. I guess after Chattahoochee and Neon Rainbow it's probably my biggest big song, I guess.
Doug Burke:
Big song for Waylon, too.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, bless his heart. I'm glad I got to see him do it. And one of the coolest things they wouldn't do a video on it, we were getting phone calls going, "Well, is she dead?" Same thing I had before with hoochie coochie. Now I'm getting phone calls and Stuart is too going, "Well, did he kill her or what?" And we're like, "You know what we don't know. She may be buried in a garden or she might have left with a gardener. He might have killed them both. There's just all kinds of possibilities." He might have had a good looking gardener just to tempt her, we don't know. We just wrote the song. We're getting all these phone calls. And it's like, "Man, we just don't know and people talked about writing a screenplay and nobody ever did." But they didn't do a video, which was disappointing because videos were really big-
Doug Burke:
Yeah, back then. Yeah.
Jim McBride:
Oh yeah, they were huge. And they said, if we do a video, we'll have to give it away. What happened to her? And I said, "Well, if you're creative enough, you won't." But anyway, they did not do it. So the coolest thing that happened after that Chet Atkins did a Cinemax special called certified guitar picker, and Waylon does Rose in Paradise on that show. Michael McDonald is playing piano. Terry McMillan's playing harmonica. Mark Knopfler's playing guitar, David Hungate is playing bass, Emmylou Harris and the Everly Brothers are singing harmony.
Doug Burke:
That's a band from heaven.
Jim McBride:
Yeah. Since we didn't have a video that's pretty cool.
Doug Burke:
That is a pretty cool video to have.
Jim McBride:
Yeah, and Mark Knopfler playing chip, I mean, gee whiz.
Doug Burke:
So anything else on Rose in Paradise by Waylon Jennings, you must have had a number one party we can talk about that?
Jim McBride:
Yes, we did. We had this long about the time they started putting banners. I mean, country music exploded when Garth came along. And Clint Black and oh gosh, Vince finally hit and Trisha Yearwood. And every week it was some new artists. And they were all good. Some of them are great, and some of them were good, really good. The Joe Deffie's that maybe didn't reach the highs that Alan and Garth did, but they had a big banner with their names on it on the tree bill and the bus stop benches and stuff, so it was pretty cool. I have to tell you this story. Garth is always so nice to me. I was with ASCAP when I first came to town. I was with BMI and then ASCAP right after I got to town. But Bob Dole became Garth's manager. He was at ASCAP, he signed me. Fast forward about '88 I guess. He becomes Garth's publisher and manager. And so he calls me one day and he says, "Can you come down to the offices?" And I said, "Yeah, I'll be down in a while." So I go down he said, "I want you to listen to this." He played me this new guy named Garth Brooks. And one of the songs was If Tomorrow Never Comes, since you brought Ken up.
Doug Burke:
Yeah.
Jim McBride:
If Tomorrow Never Comes and he played me a couple of other things and he said, "What do you think?" And I said, "Gosh." And I said, "The song is great." And I said, "I really like his voice too." And he said, "Well, that's why I called you. Do you want to write with him?" I said, "Let me get my book. Let me call you back, Bob." I said, "I'm writing a lot right now with this guy named Alan Jackson that I really believe in. We're writing a good bit, but I'll get back to you." I didn't get back to him. I didn't get back to him. And the next thing I know Garth Brooks is the biggest thing.
Doug Burke:
He's never done one of your songs.
Jim McBride:
No. And the same thing happened to Alan. I won't mention any writer's name, but there were some writers that didn't want to write with Alan. And he's never cut one of their songs either. But I got to tell you man, Garth is always he's never been anything. He knows I passed up the chance to write with him and I really wish I had just to have one song with Garth Brooks.
Doug Burke:
He has a special connection with the audience. He literally at the event the other night let everybody who wanted to take a selfie with him-
Jim McBride:
Yeah, my wife ... I got a great picture of her with Garth.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, it was all the wives that wanted the picture with-
Jim McBride:
Oh, yeah. It's like she said, "Don't you want?" I said, "I have a picture of me and Garth. He's got his arm around me, around my shoulder and I got mine around his." I said, "No, I already have that."
Doug Burke:
I did ask you if you have anything on the shelf and what voice you want.
Jim McBride:
There's this new kid and the chances of this happening are probably zero, but you never know. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. There's a guy named Cody Johnson. He's one of the best voices. I remember the day I walked into the tape room at Trade Publishing Company, which is Sony now, and I heard this voice and I stopped in the middle of the room and I said, "Oh my goodness, who is that?" And they said, "It's a guy named Ronnie Dunn, he just won Wrangler contest or something." And I went, "Wow. Well, we know what happened there."
Doug Burke:
You got that same feeling.
Jim McBride:
I got that same feeling. I'd had that feeling just a few times. When I first met Travis Tritt I thought this guy, he's going to be a star. But even before that, I met Randy Travis about 1982, and we wrote a couple of things together. I thought, man, if this guy ever gets a chance. So in '87, he finally got a chance and sold four million albums or whatever, and I opened the door for the rest of the Hillbilly's. And so I had that feeling with him. I had that feeling with Alan, Travis Tritt, and Trisha Yearwood.
Doug Burke:
What song would you record? -
Jim McBride:
There's a song that I had forgotten about in my catalog and it's called How far do I have to go? I was going through my catalog the other night and it's like, "Man, I can't believe I forgot that song." But once it starts moving away from there, these songs that would have worked in the '90s, you can't get those cut now. Well, there's some people like Bob MacNeil, and others just like, "You know what? I'm done." I don't write those types of songs and they don't want what I'm writing.
Doug Burke:
Yeah.
Jim McBride:
But I mean, Bob told me that he said, "Oh-
Doug Burke:
People are willing to take chances.
Jim McBride:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
And I think-
Jim McBride:
And I know it changes.
Doug Burke:
... the internet has no barriers and you don't have to listen to what radio says on the internet. You can listen to whatever podcast you want.
Jim McBride:
And you know what's good about that is you don't have some guy sitting in an office somewhere, figuring out what 50 radio stations are going to be playing that day.
Doug Burke:
You can decide for yourself.
Jim McBride:
I talked to a disc jockey I met him Monday night and he's from Canada and he said, "Man." He said, "It's just not right." He said, "I'm old school." He came up back when they would get the records in, they'd play them and if people called in, they would continue to play them and if they didn't call in saying they liked them, then maybe they didn't play them anymore.
