The Sherrill Sound

The drugstore blonde with a guitar under her arm had been rebuffed by every other record company in Nashville. But when she appeared at the Columbia/Epic offices, Producer Billy Sherrill thought he heard something special-a tear in her voice. "Somethin' said, 'Don't turn this chick down,' " Sherrill recalled later. Thus it came about that he signed Tammy Wynette, supervised her first recording session and even wrote the song for it: Apartment Number Nine. The record reached the top 20 on the Billboard country charts. Tammy's next two, Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad and DIVORCE, also Sherrill songs, went all the way to No. 1--followed by some 20 more, all Sherrill-written and produced. One of them, Stand By Your Man, sold 1.5 million copies, became the second-biggest-selling single by any woman in country music.

Billy Sherrill has performed the same kind of wonders for more than 30 country-style singers, including such other stars as Johnny Duncan, Tanya Tucker and Johnny Paycheck. In all, he has more than 50 No. 1 hits to his credit. Nowadays, a week rarely passes without a couple of Sherrill-produced records among the top ten. Last week, for example, there were The Midnight Oil with Barbara Mandrell (7) and We're Gonna Hold On with George Jones and Tammy Wynette (8). Little wonder, then, that many people who once spoke of the Nashville Sound have begun referring instead to the Sherrill Sound.

Sherrill has no formula for that sound, but defines his stock in trade as feeling with a beat. "The song is so much more important than the artist, the producer, the studio or the record company," he says. He is one of the few record producers who tries to listen to every song submitted to him. After selecting the song, he relies on a series of instinctive, spontaneous choices in the studio, as a recent session with Country Star David Houston demonstrated. With Sherrill listening intently, Houston ran through The Lady of the Night:

There's nothing a man can tell her

she ain 't done or seen, She'll hold any stranger tight, for a

drink, She's the lady of the night.

"That's a mighty pretty song to be singing about a whore," Sherrill encouraged gently, "but say 'lady' a little faster, Dave; she's a fast lady." He turned to the band. "Don't get loud there at first when you go into the five chord, because he is whispering something filthy to her." The three guitarists, drummer and bass player nodded, jotting down numbers and symbols on scraps of paper to indicate chords and dynamics.

Cutting a record in Nashville is often a "head session" where musicians unable to read music learn the tune on the spot from the vocalist. "In New York, you start to change something, you tear up a $700,000 arrangement," Sherrill points out. "Here we can make the lead sheet of a song in the time it takes to sing it." Not that Sherrill is easygoing. "All the guys I use are machines," he snaps. "They do exactly what I want 'em to--if the record doesn't hit, I go down in flames."

At the Houston session, when a take went well, Sherrill quoted the Bible: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God." But when the drummer spoiled a quiet ending by descending with a crash, Sherrill swore: "Goddam!" He then signaled a halt and went to his office to telephone his wife. "We'll be dubbing tonight," he told her. "Dave Houston can sing better than that. I'm going to get him a double Scotch and some food, then strip his voice out of there, put some headphones on him and record that song the way it ought to be."

The son of a Baptist evangelist from Alabama, Sherrill grew up touring the South with his parents, playing piano at the "tent meetin's" and other functions where his father preached. He traces the beginning of his career as a professional musician to earning $10 for playing at a funeral at the age of ten. Although he had no formal musical training, by his teens he could play half a dozen instruments. After finishing high school, he took up the life of an itinerant rock musician, playing mostly piano and saxophone with bands in Tennessee and Alabama and sleeping in his car or under bridges. In 1961, he and a musician friend set up their own small recording studio in Nashville. A year later, he joined Columbia/Epic, where he is now a vice president.

A slight man with reddish brown hair, Sherrill at 36 has an old-young face lit with intelligence and sudden flashes of humor, but worn by the anxiety that comes from having to live by one's wits too early. He eschews the blaring cowboy suits and diamond stickpins of Music City, lives quietly with his wife and eleven-year-old daughter in a spacious, antique-furnished $100,000 home overlooking Nashville.

He holds to the fundamentalist faith of his father, but does not attend church because he cannot find one that teaches a literal enough interpretation of the Scriptures. His personal taste in music runs to classical. In fact, one of his early productions was a recording of Brahms' Lullaby that caused his daughter some confusion. When she heard the melody at school, she loyally insisted, despite her teacher's objection: "My Daddy wrote that song, and we've got the record at home to prove it."

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