WHISPERIN’ BILL ANDERSON

Nonfiction

Heart and soul and guts

WHISPERIN’ BILL ANDERSON:
An Unprecedented Life in Country Music

By Bill Anderson and Peter Cooper

298 pp. The University of Georgia Press

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

Bill Anderson, 79, is the only songwriter in history who has written songs that charted in seven consecutive decades. From “City Lights” by Ray Price in 1958 to “Country” by Mo Pitney in 2015, his music continues to thrive. With the help of renowned country music historian Peter Cooper. he tells the story of his music and its place in his life.

Anderson was 19 and beginning his music career at a small radio station when a stifling hot August night drove him out of his hotel room and up to the roof with his guitar. “This particular night there wasn’t a cloud in the sky,” he writes. 

I began looking up at what seemed like a million stars above and down on what few lights there were in Commerce, Georgia, and I wrote: 

‘The bright array of city lights, as far as I can see / The great white way shines through the night for lonely guys like me.’ 

My dad said later that he knew I had the imagination it took to become a great songwriter if I could look at Commerce and write about a ‘great white way.’ It was more like two or three traffic lights and even they didn’t work all the time.

The song most people still associate with him, he believes, is “Still”—his 1963 hit that gave him the winning combination of singing and “whispering” the lyrics. After running into a former girlfriend who had jilted him, he went home but could not sleep. “I climbed out of bed, walked into my little pine-paneled den,” he writes, “and in almost less time than it takes to tell it I sat down at my old manual Underwood typewriter and wrote the words and music to a song called ‘Still.’ “

Over the years, Anderson placed 36 top-ten songs on Billboard’s Country Singles charts, with seven of those reaching number one. That doesn’t include songs recorded by Ray Price, Faron Young, Connie Smith, Jan Howard, Jim Reeves, and many others. Anderson appeared in movies, hosted several television game shows, and was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. Forty of his 500-plus songs have won songwriting awards. He still appears regularly on the Grand Ole Opry, maintains a busy touring schedule, and continues to turn out new songs.

He believes empathy is what makes his songs successful. “To me,” he writes, “the greatest asset a songwriter can have is empathy, the ability to put himself in another person’s place, to think like another person thinks, to feel what that other person feels.” To an often-asked question about one of his songs, he answers, “I did not grow up as poor as the lyrics of ‘Po’ Folks’ might suggest. But I know people who did, and I called on that feeling again—empathy—and I tried to write those lyrics with the same feelings and sensitivity I would have felt myself had I grown up that way.”

Following his stardom in the 1970s, Anderson faced downturns in the 1980s in his marriage, his musical career, and his financial investments. He concluded his 1989 autobiography, Whisperin’ Bill: An Autobiography, with, “. . . I don’t have the foggiest idea where it is that I’m headed or what in the world I’m going to do if and when I get there.”

The book summarizes events covered in his autobiography and expands the song stories. It describes how his life began to improve in the 1990s, starting with royalty checks when a young singer named Steve Warriner brought his previous hit, “The Tips of My Fingers,” back to the top in 1992. “I still felt bruised and bloodied, depressed about my marriage and my finances and my lack of viable new material,” Anderson writes. He felt “like a relic. Yesterday’s success does not obscure today’s failure. What had I proven, other than that I used to be a songwriter?” 

Then along came Vince Gill, the hottest singer/songwriter at the time. In early 1994, they co-wrote Gill’s next number one hit, “Which Bridge to Cross (Which Bridge to Burn).” Anderson was welcomed into Nashville’s new generation of songwriters, who collaborate instead of writing solo, and he continues to turn out new songs. It was a tough adjustment to “share my very heart and soul and guts,” he writes. “That’s exactly what you do when you compose a song. You pour it all out. . .. You’ve got to have a special relationship with someone to open yourself up that far. And they’ve got to trust you as well.”

Anderson opens himself to readers as he shares his hurts and hopes and fears. Long before his insecurities in 1990 about being a relic and whether anyone still wanted him around, he worried in 1960 about fitting in with other musicians: “I was afraid my college degree might keep me from being accepted by others in the music business. . .. I was also very sensitive to the fact that I had not grown up on a farm. Or even in the country . . .. How honest would they think it was in Nashville for a kid from the city to be trying to write and sing country music?”

Reading the stories of how familiar songs came about heightens the experience of the songs themselves.  “Whiskey Lullaby” is one example. A smash hit for Brad Paisley and Allison Krause in 2004, the song originated in a parking lot when Anderson asked a fellow writer how he was doing. Jon Randall (the husband of Lorrie Morgan) replied, “So far today, I’ve lost my wife, my publishing deal, and my recording contract.” He said that for their upcoming writing appointment, “I should have a whole lot of good new ideas by then. We’ll write the saddest song in history.” An entire chapter is devoted to writing the song about a double suicide, and how it came to be recorded.

The many engrossing and delightful stories in Whisperin' Bill Anderson: An Unprecedented Life in Country Music will captivate Bill Anderson fans, of course. But all country music fans, and anyone interested in song writing, will find much to enjoy.

--Diane Diekman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who grew up in South Dakota and currently lives in Sioux Falls. Her biographies are Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story and Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins.