Question For Norm Re The Carter Sisters

[Norm]

For a long time Willie Nelson signed away the rights to his songs for cheap because he was so broke. I disrmember who it was, but some artist finally said "no" to him and helped him get connected with an honest publisher so he could get his proper revenue.

Another trick some less than scrupulous people would do would be to alter a song just a bit, maybe change a line or a word and in so doing claim half of the writers royalties. I think this got to be so common it was just accepted as part of the trade.

Record buyers and fans have a fantasy about what the music business is and isn't. It isn't a free or easy ride, not by a long shot. And no matter how high you get you're always on the edge and you could become yesterday's news freezingly fast. We have all read stories where an artist seemed unbeatable who suddenly was broke and destitute due to lack of fan base, substance abuse or irresponsible financial management.

Chet apparently put all of his early guitar royalties from Gretsch in a separate account which was then used to build the house he owned until he died. He rented until he could pay cash for the house because he knew his career could vanish overnight and if it did at least he would have full title to his home. He also invested a lot in Nashville real estate, a practice that made him a rich man over and above his musical career.

He was known to be frugal, a nice word meaning "cheap", in many ways. Allegedly a bad tipper and loath to spend money on some things but on the other hand looking for the best recording equipment because those were his tools. He drove a fancy Glassic auto (the one featured on one of the album covers he did with Jerry Reed) for a while but loved the idea of buying a case of paper towels to save a buck or two and splitting the cost with one of his friends. Eddy Arnold comes to mind.

He admitted it, I think, and it came from being really painfully poor. It's something you never really get over, something you dread going back to.

Re: the Nashville Sound.
A lot of steel players still harbor hard feelings for Chet because the sound he and Bradley made used far less steel guitar in it. Drums, I think, were just part of the evolution of the genre just like the increased use of electric guitar was.

Chet liked string sections. Violins and such, and the Anita Kerr touch in vocal backups and arranging. Your solitary fiddlers and steel players saw such things as job killers.
After a while, of course, everyone was doing it and because of that the so-called Nashville Sound collapsed on itself and the evolution kept changing. Now it appears that the musicians that made Fusion back in the seventies and eighties are changing the face of country as the "old guys" remember it.

That's how history goes. The "good old days" tend to be our favorite memories from our teens through our thirties.

We thought it would last forever.

[bill_h]

Anytime Chet ever changed the instrumentation in Country music you can bet he had a musical reason for doing so. I doubt he ever did just to be doing it or to justify his position.

Besides the "tweaking" of songs that you mentioned there's also ways that third parties who are in the know can end up with the publishing rights to a song. ( Publishing rights for all practical purposes translate to half the songwriter's royalties for a particular song.) A friend of mine for example got beat out of half his royalties by the great Harlan Howard on one of his songs. It's too long a story to elaborate on but in a nutshell, Harlan secured the publishing rights to the song because he was able to pitch it to Collin Ray. Collin didn't end up recording the song but Cheli Wright did later on. Harlan Howard still got half my friend's royalties even though he had nothing to do with Cheli Wright recording the song. ( My friend, by his own admission, didn't have a very good lawyer.)

I've heard that one reason Chet got out of A&R and producing is because he didn't like greed tactics like those mentioned above. At the same time I've heard that Chet often tweaked song lyrics in the studio as Producer but never tried to get any writer's royalties for doing so.

As for Chet being a bad tipper I'd take that with a grain of salt. In the 90's I worked as a waiter at now defuct Steal And Ale ( better known as Steak And Fail) in Nashville but quit abruptly after surviving an armed robbery. Several months later I went back to work there and one of my coworkers told me that he waited on Chet after I quit. He went on and on about how nice Chet was and what a pleasure he was to deal with. I don't remember him saying anything about the tip but if it had been a bad one I'm sure he would have mentioned it. ( Especially this particular coworker who whined about anything anf everything!)

I've also heard that het would always pick up the Chet at the infamous guitar players breakfast at Cracker Barrell on Saturday mornings but may deliberate on whether to spend $10 on himself.

[Norm]

Anytime Chet ever changed the instrumentation in Country music you can bet he had a musical reason for doing so. I doubt he ever did just to be doing it or to justify his position.
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I've heard that one reason Chet got out of A&R and producing is because he didn't like greed tactics like those mentioned above. At the same time I've heard that Chet often tweaked song lyrics in the studio as Producer but never tried to get any writer's royalties for doing so.
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As for Chet being a bad tipper I'd take that with a grain of salt.

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Firstly:
I never made any implication that Chet's change of instrumentation was wrong or negative. He said himself that what the press called "The Nashville Sound" was just him and producers of the day like him (Harold Bradley for one) were "just trying to save our jobs" during the onslaught of rock and roll.
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As for Chet altering song lyrics, I suppose that's possible and I know he wasn't the kind of guy to nick someone's royalties for doing that if, in fact he did change someone's lyrics. I know he had no problem telling the band in the session what to do since he, in his own words, "was bossy" from his early days, instinctively knowing how to get the most out of musicians.

He never struck me as someone who would make suggestions about song lyrics. You would think once a song made it into the studio the lyrics flowed pretty well. But then one "hears" all kinds of things about Nashville people. Most of what I report on forums I have read somewhere.

I had a guy look me in the eye and swore that Chet always used Fender guitars and never used Gretsch guitars on his recordings because he had "heard" it from someone. I didn't bother arguing the point with him and am certainly not going to pass around what he had "heard" as fact.

People don't realize that "Produced by Chet Atkins" on an album didn't mean Chet got any extra money for producing the thing. He was an "in house, salaried producer" and his paycheck didn't change because he produced a lot of artists. That was his job. I understand that in recognition of that RCA gave him the percentage of rent receipts from one of their buildings as compensation.
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Getting out of A&R business.
There probably wasn't any single reason. Part of it could well have been what you said, that and fighting the New York suits for every dime, but also he said it was a lot of work having to hold the hand of various, sometimes temperamental, artists as an album is put together. His main complaint that I heard him voice was it was taking him away from what he really wanted to do and that was to "just play guitar."
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Re: tipping.
There is a story, perhaps in one of the 3 Dimensions books, told by Mark Knophler where Chet had picked up the check but Mark gave Chet a bit of a nudge about the tip he put out as being too small and Mark put in some money to make it better.

One time incident? Perhaps. Maybe he didn't like the server or maybe he tipped consistently but less than others. The "suggested" rate today is 15%. I tend to go 20% because I don't eat out that much and I worked for a long time in the service industry and I know waitstaff really depend on tips. Some people think 10% is enough.

Chet wasn't cheap about everything not by a long shot. I knew Rick Shubb, a local banjo player and machinist. He had come up with a guitar capo and was at, I believe a NAAM show that was also attended by Chet and Paul. Chet stopped at Rick's booth and liked the capo and bought two, one for him and one for Paul Yandell. Rick tried to just give them to him but Chet wouldn't have it. He paid cash for them on the spot and Rick was thrilled to see Chet use his that very night on TV.

Also in the 3 Dimension books there is a story where he was going around with a ladder to change lightbulbs in buildings he owned and rented out. Something you would think he would hire a maintenance man to do.

Nothing at all wrong with the man being frugal and cutting corners. It's just that some of the examples of his frugality make me smile because he was far from being a poor man once his career got rolling with RCA.

[bill raymond]

Interesting stories about song rights and writer attribution; it's hard to know whether or not they're entirely true, but they do speak to the fiction that writer attribution often is. We know that, though he may have tweaked the song a bit, Elvis Presley didn't really co-write Heartbreak Hotel and A.P. Carter didn't really write the Appalachian folk songs that he took writer's credit for. It's also been written that Hank Williams often bought lyrics, melodies or both from associates, often quite cheaply, then took them to Fred Rose who polished them into real songs. Once, a couple years ago Paul Yandell affirmed that one of Jerry Reed's compositions was attributed to a friend, though for reasons Paul wasn't free to reveal.

It seems to me that it isn't wrong for a composer to cut someone else in on part of the profits in return for a favor or to pay off an old debt, but it would certainly be nicer were they able to find another vehicle for doing so. I would guess that attributing co-writer credits to someone is easier than other legal arrangements that may involve contracts and legal fees, et c., but in my opinion it's misleading. I'd just like to know that the fellow (or woman) whose name is listed as composer really wrote the song.

[David Elliott]

"He was known to be frugal, a nice word meaning "cheap", in many ways. Allegedly a bad tipper and loath to spend money on some things but on the other hand looking for the best recording equipment because those were his tools. He drove a fancy Glassic auto (the one featured on one of the album covers he did with Jerry Reed) for a while but loved the idea of buying a case of paper towels to save a buck or two and splitting the cost with one of his friends. Eddy Arnold comes to mind."

"He admitted it, I think, and it came from being really painfully poor. It's something you never really get over, something you dread going back to."

One of the things I most admired about Chet Atkins, was the fact he never forgot where he came from, and yes, he did actually come from abject poverty! He once said, he actually didn't realize how poor his family was, because everyone else he knew was also!

Another good example of that "frugality" was when he, and a bunch of people were eating at the "Cracker Barrel" restaurant in Nashville (one of his favorite hang-outs) and when Chet found he couldn't eat everything on his plate, he asked the waitress for a "doggy-bag", and proceeded to put his leftovers in it. When he noticed people were watching him, he simply said, "I'm sure "Momma" would enjoy this food!" Now...HOW MANY world famous entertainers (and millionaires) can you name, who would be concerned about wasting food? Probably just the ones who didn't always get enough to eat when they were little children...

David

[bill_h]

{ quote/ I never made any implication that Chet's change of instrumentation was wrong or negative. /quote]

Norm, please accept my apologies if it looked like I was accusing you implying that in any way.

I probably didn't do that good a job of expressing my thoughts in text but I was trying to point out as you said that Chet was just trying to figure out how to stay in competition with the rock/pop market. Compare that to all the times Frick, Frack, or Frock would wonder into Nashville when record sales were fine and convince the powers that be that they could show the dumb ol' hayseeds on music row how to increase record sales by making country music "cool." I don't know of one instance when that strategy worked.

When Chet altered the original Nashville sound he may have saved country music from extinction. He may have started using drums, string pianos, and other things that were previously unheard of in Nashville but in my opinion it was still country music becuase the songs were still about life and it was still the working man's literature. It was still "real." All Frick and Frock ever did was try to fix things that weren't even broke in order to make themselves look good. They weren't trying to save their jobs like like Chet and Owen Bradley, they had already lost their jobs in LA or wherever they came from because they couldn't hack it there.In my opinion it's not crossover country but cornball country when they try to make country music cool and the people responsible for it are a far cry from Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley!