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."