Billy Sherrill, Producer Who Brought New Sound to Country Music, Dies at 78

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Billy Sherrill, Producer Who Brought New Sound to Country Music, Dies at 78

By JON CARAMANICAAUG. 10, 2015

Billy Sherrill, who as a songwriter, record producer and executive helped kick-start the career of Tammy Wynette, breathed new life into a declining George Jones and was an architect of the so-called countrypolitan sound, which applied the tenets of 1960s pop maximalism to country music, died on Aug. 4 at his home in Nashville. He was 78.

His daughter, Catherine Lale, confirmed his death, saying it came after a short illness.

Mr. Sherrill was one of Nashville’s driving forces throughout the 1960s and ’70s; an advertisement in Billboard during those decades read, “Four of the biggest words in the recording industry: Produced by Billy Sherrill.” Surprisingly, however, he came from the outside.

Billy Norris Sherrill was born on Nov. 5, 1936, in Phil Campbell, Ala. His father was an itinerant Baptist preacher, and as the family traveled, the young Billy would play piano at prayer meetings. He later learned saxophone, toured the South with rock and R&B bands, and released a smattering of records under his own name that attracted little notice.

In 1959, he was a founder of Fame, the Alabama studio and publishing company that would eventually shape the Muscle Shoals sound of brawny Southern soul. But within a couple of years, he had split with the other founders and made his way to Nashville.

There he got a job in a studio run by Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, and learned about recording and producing. Soon after that, he landed a job as an in-house producer for Epic Records.

Coming from outside the Nashville studio system, with its entrenched approaches, Mr. Sherrill took influence from pop producers like Phil Spector, as well as from earlier country producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, who specialized in smoothing out the rough edges of the honky-tonk sound. In Mr. Sherrill’s hands, the pedal steel guitar and the fiddle were buried, replaced with lush string sections and overdubs that thickened the music and gave it a dignified veneer. That collision of aesthetics became known as countrypolitan.

Mr. Sherrill’s first huge hit with this sound was David Houston’s “Almost Persuaded,” a song he wrote with Glenn Sutton. It won a Grammy for best country and western song in 1967. Early in his Nashville career, Mr. Sherrill was drawn to songs about loyalty, like “Almost Persuaded,” Charlie Rich’s “Life’s Little Ups and Downs” and “I Take It on Home,” and Tammy Wynette’s breakthrough 1968 hit, “Stand by Your Man.”

When Ms. Wynette walked into Mr. Sherrill’s Epic office and sang for him in 1966, she was jobless and full of pluck. She had just moved to Nashville with her three children, having left a no-good ex-husband behind in Alabama, by her account. Mr. Sherrill caught what he later described as “a little teardrop” in her voice, and soon he began writing and producing songs for her.

He and Ms. Wynette wrote “Stand by Your Man” in either 15 or 30 minutes, depending on whose version of the story is believed. The song, which was a pop as well as a country hit, preached fidelity and, some felt, subservience at the dawn of the women’s movement. Just as often, though, Ms. Wynette was singing about the struggles of women in bad relationships, on songs like “I Don’t Wanna Play House” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

Mr. Sherrill worked with Ms. Wynette for more than a decade, on more than a dozen albums. In 1969, she married the country star George Jones, whose struggles with alcohol were well known. By 1971, Mr. Jones had signed with Epic to work with Mr. Sherrill. From the beginning, they seemed like ill-fated opposites — Jones was loose, and Sherrill was detail oriented; Jones was beloved for his country ballads, and Sherrill had broader ambitions. But they found common ground.

The Jones-Wynette marriage ended in divorce in 1975, though Mr. Sherrill continued writing and producing for both artists. Eventually, his work with Mr. Jones began to eclipse his work with Ms. Wynette, beginning around 1974 with the elegiac hits “The Grand Tour” and “The Door.” Mr. Sherrill captained Mr. Jones’s career for many more years, and led him through the famously difficult recording process of “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” an achingly sad song that is one of country music’s finest moments.

Mr. Jones was just out of rehab and had already relapsed, and his voice was not at its peak. Mr. Sherrill was patient. “Once he got the real melody, then we had to wait till his voice was able to sing it,” he told Jack Isenhour, the author of a book about that song. “And so he’d come in on a good day — most of them bad days — and try it. No good, no good. So finally one day he came in and he sounded real good. He had a glass of honey and some lemons and did the verses.”

By that time, Mr. Sherrill had been producing long enough to understand that different artists needed different amounts of hand-holding. Though he had signature gestures as a producer, he worked with singers representing a range of styles, from the sassy teen firebrand Tanya Tucker to the tough outlaw Johnny Paycheck, and adjusted for each one.

“The song is so much more important than the artist, the producer, the studio or the record company,” he told Time magazine in 1973.

He eventually rose to become the head of CBS Records’ country division. For pleasure, though, he preferred listening to classical music.

In the mid-1970s, country was moving away from Mr. Sherrill’s full-bodied sound and the types of storytelling that came with it, and he found himself tilting against the prevailing winds. As a label executive, he was initially not enthusiastic about Willie Nelson’s first Columbia release, “Red Headed Stranger” (1975), one of the foundational albums of the country outlaw movement; its ragged, sparse production by Mr. Nelson was far from anything Mr. Sherrill did in the studio himself.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Sherrill is survived by his wife, Charlene, and two grandchildren.

In the 1980s, Mr. Sherrill worked with less frequency and further from country music’s center. He produced “Almost Blue,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ album of country songs, and “Friendship,” Ray Charles’s album of duets with various country singers, including Mr. Jones. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010.