Billy
Sherrill

One of country’s most influential producers, Billy Sherrill helped to shape the music’s evolution in the 1970s and beyond.

A Broad Musical Background

Billy Norris Sherrill came to country music with an expansive musical background that informed his production approach. Born in Phil Campbell, Alabama, the young Billy often accompanied his evangelist father on piano at revivals. Sherrill played in Alabama R&B and rock bands and made his own records, including the 1967 album Classic Country for Epic Records. Sherrill gained studio experience in the early 1960s as a producer-engineer for Sam Phillips’s Nashville studio and blossomed as a producer after Epic hired him for a staff position in 1963. Initially, he handled acts others preferred not to produce, including the R&B group The Staple Singers and the rock band Barry & the Remains. However, he soon began making his mark with country artists such as David Houston, whose #1 hit “Almost Persuaded” Sherrill wrote with Glenn Sutton. The recording won Houston two 1966 Grammy awards—Best Country & Western Recording and Best Country & Western Vocal Performance, Male. Sherrill and Sutton received Grammy honors for Best Country & Western Song.

Moving the Nashville Sound Forward

Other producers, including Decca’s Owen Bradley, had already introduced strings and background vocals to country records. Still, Sherrill pushed further and created lush, layered productions that sometimes approximated the “wall of sound” approach of rock producer Phil Spector, which he admired. Purists criticized Sherrill’s efforts, but the independent-minded producer let record sales speak for themselves. “His productions were always first class,” said producer Jerry Kennedy, “and as the charts indicated, he had a pretty good idea about what record buyers wanted.”

George and Tammy

Sherrill’s genius lay primarily in applying his upmarket approach to many singers, including those unmistakably country. Tammy Wynette, whose career he guided more closely than any other artist, first charted at #44 with “Apartment #9” in 1966 (Epic Records), but it was 1967’s #3 record “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” (another Sherrill-Sutton composition) that launched her long string of Sherrill-produced hits. Thirty-nine made the country Top Ten, with twenty reaching #1. Sherrill penned many of Wynette’s best-known songs on his own or with Wynette and other writers, and intensified her emotional delivery with stirring studio arrangements. Songs such as “I Don’t Wanna Play House” (for which Wynette won a Grammy), “Stand By Your Man” (another Grammy winner), “Singing My Song,” and “‘Til I Can Make It on My Own,” molded her persona as the “Queen of Heartbreak.” Sherrill also produced the classic duets “We’re Gonna Hold On,” “Golden Ring,” and “Two Story House,” by Wynette and her third husband, George Jones.

By 1972, Sherrill was producing Jones’s solo records as well. Jones, already a seasoned artist, still made some of his best recordings with Sherrill, including the hits “We Can Make It” (another Sherrill-Sutton co-write), “A Picture of Me (Without You),” and “The Grand Tour,” all of which embodied traditional sensibilities. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (1980) took some persuasion on Sherrill’s part. “Mark my words,” Jones told him, “nobody’s going to buy that morbid [thing].” After the song topped the charts and reinvigorated Jones’s career, the singer changed his mind and decided Sherrill was “a genius.” The recording was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007.

Success for the Silver Fox

Charlie Rich, an artist who had tried jazz, R&B, and pop all without sustained success, changed his trajectory by following Sherrill’s guidance. 1970s crossover smashes such as “Behind Closed Doors” (a double Grammy winner), “The Most Beautiful Girl” (penned by Sherrill, Rory Bourke, and Norro Wilson), and “A Very Special Love Song,” which won a Grammy for Sherrill and Wilson as 1974’s Best Country Song, secured Rich’s country-pop stardom and Sherrill’s place as Vice President–Executive Producer for Columbia-Epic’s Nashville office.

An Enormous and Everlasting Contribution 

Sherrill produced hits with some of country music’s most free-spirited personalities, such as David Allan Coe (“Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile”), Johnny Paycheck (“Take This Job and Shove It”), and Tanya Tucker (“Delta Dawn”). He occasionally recorded artists from other genres—R&B icon Ray Charles and British rocker Elvis Costello to name a few.

Sherrill joined the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984. He left Columbia in 1985 to become an independent producer, but his influence remained. He continued to work with George Jones and other artists and developed new acts such as Shelby Lynne. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010.

Billy Sherrill died in Nashville on August 4, 2015.

–Bob Allen

-Adapted from the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum’s Encyclopedia of Country Music, published by Oxford University Press.