Ray Stevens: A Memoir Turns 10...

Well, hello all of you fans of Ray Stevens and welcome to 2024. We're seven days into the New Year and so I decided that I'd start off this year of blog entries by spotlighting Ray's 2014 memoir. A 10 year anniversary later this summer for Ray Stevens' Nashville, a memoir, that Ray authored with the help/assistance of Buddy Kalb. The book's editor is Don Cusic and there's 27 chapters in the book plus an Epilogue and index. It was a self published book. In the opening pages of the softcover copy, which is what I have, there's a credit for Clyde Publishing. However, if you search for the book online you'll see a credit for Father and Son Publishing and whenever I see that credit it's associated with the hardcover copy. It may be a situation where they published the hardcover and Ray published the softcover...if so that would be something unique. The same publisher is usually for both formats (hardcover and softcover). There are photographs from practically every era in Ray's career featured in the book. A lot of the photos had appeared online and come from photo sessions for album covers but there are several photos that could be classified as private/personal that had never been publicly viewed until being published in the memoir. When the news broke back in 2013 and into 2014 that a memoir from Ray was going to be published I immediately thought to myself 'what took him so long?'. He had made Nashville, Tennessee his home since 1962 and had experienced a lot of things...seen the technology in the recording studios and the overall music industry itself grow and become an enormous empire. 

He was there when Music Row was a small, somewhat serene area in downtown Nashville where major recording studios were actually inside buildings that resembled houses and in one case, a Quonset hut, rather than multi-story, tinted window skyscrapers. It was a Music Row where songwriters, personally, pitched songs to music publishers or to the artist themselves or where songwriters slipped their songs to people who had contacts within the music industry...and from there the song made it's way up and down Music Row with the hopes from it's writer(s) that a publisher would take it and pitch it to a recording artist or to an artist's record label, record producer, or agent. The most common way for a writer to potentially get their song to a recording artist is to become employed by any number of music publishing companies. If you're a writer for a music publisher then chances are whatever you write will make it's way to the recording studios.    

Ray, at various moments in the memoir, reminds us that when he was coming up in the music industry Nashville had the reputation of being a 'country music town' but he offers plenty of first hand experience from his years as a session musician and music arranger that a lot of pop music was being recorded in Nashville, too. Ray also tells the reader that a microphone or a music instrument doesn't know that it's country, pop, soul, or whatever...it's all based on the music arranging. A piano can be played soft or loud...can accompany a country singer or a pop singer. A recording studio's walls doesn't dictate what type of music can be created there. Although the sentiments I just mentioned come up a few times throughout the book most of that kind of Nashville reputation reflection from Ray comes from the chapter in the book titled 'A Piano Man in a Guitar Town'. 

When the memoir was published in the summer of 2014 there was a lot of print publicity surrounding the release. Ray went on a book signing tour...traveled to various local book stores and signed copies and took photos with those that stopped by. One of the publicity efforts occurred on June 22, 2014 at the Nashville Public Library. It was there that Ralph Emery conducted an interview with Ray about the memoir. The event was titled 'That Nashville Sound'. Billboard magazine did a spotlight on the memoir a few months after it was released. The promo appeared in the October 17, 2014 issue. Rolling Stone also did a promo for Ray's memoir. Their promo appeared online in June of 2014. I've posted this collage before but I'm posting it again given that the blog entry centers around Ray's memoir and that his production/session work behind the scenes plays a vital role in his career. Ray Stevens, over the decades, at the recording console in his recording studio. Since Ray arranges his own recordings the music you hear on each of his albums is all under his supervision. He decides the instrumentation for every track. You can purchase Ray's memoir when you click HERE. The link will take you to Ray's official website store...the product page for the memoir.