Joe Gibson

Producer, Sales & Promotion

Ok. I come from a little town called Georgiana, AL. That’s the same place Hank Williams was from. I had been playing locally with bands and what not. Then I hooked on with a band called Cousin Wilber and his Tennessee Mountaineers about 1946. They came through there and played a theater. I jumped straight from No-Wheresville to Nashville, TN.

I worked for him about 6 months and quite frankly, I had been making more money where I was than I could make with him, so I quit and went back to where I was.

Yeah, back to playing in local bands. The war years were still hanging over and people were going out and what not. But about six months later it was down to nothing.

Yeah, it sorta dried up. They just didn’t have the money to spend. We went through about 2 or 3 years like that. It was tough stuff. I remember going out several times and only making 2 or 3 dollars a night.

I used to run into Shot Jackson a lot and we’d sit and talk about those "Hamburger Days". Man, there were a lot of them. But I’m getting off track.

In later years I worked with the Georgia Peach Pickers. I was with them probably longer than I was with anybody. Curley, the head of the band, had tuberculosis and he had a nightclub there in Montgomery, AL. I carried a band in there and played while Curley was in the hospital so he could keep the place open.

About that time was I got interested in songwriting and Slim Williamson was the first one to give me a real chance with my songs. A guy named Bill Goodwin introduced us. Bill came by to visit me and asked me to get in contact with Slim. I went on up there primarily to be a songwriter and ended up doing everything else too! That’s one thing I can say though. I was able to do everything there is to do in the music business. There’s not many places where you can go and do that.

Well, actually Slim had started the company and had a hit record with Jim Nesbitt before I ever moved to Nashville and I still moved my family up there before he did. I used to go in at work at night for him because he couldn’t afford to pay me. (laughs)

I worked a day job, and then at night I worked for him until he could afford to pay me, then I started working full time for Slim. That’s basically what happened.

I moved up there in the summer of 1965. Slim and his family and Ott Stephens were still in Louisville, GA, but Slim had rented an office in the RCA Building (806 17^th Ave So.) then moved over to the Hubert Long Building (806 16^th Ave So.)

How long was Chart in the RCA Building?

I don’t remember. There was a boy & girl who made records for him, I think they were brother & sister the best I recall. I can’t remember their names. They had kept that office over there (RCA Building) open part of the time. There was nothing ever really official about the office until Slim and his family moved there! They (the brother & sister) gave it some time, but they had to finally quit and go make some money. Then for a while Slim would come up about once a week and I would go in some at night and that was about it!

I listened to tapes, typed stuff up, this that and the other. You know.

Yes, that’s right. Mostly for the publishing company. That was taking more time than anything else. Neither Slim nor I were good typists. Back in the early days over at the RCA Building there was just he and I. We would go in at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning just to try and get our typing done before 9:30 in the morning when the traffic started coming though! We were both one finger typists!

I haven’t seen that rascal in a long time. I used to go down to the River Festival in San Antonio every once in a while where I would run into him. Usually if I missed everybody else, I’d see him and Darryl Royal. He was a coach for Texas. They’d be there just about every year.

I don’t think I had a title. I was supposed to be working primarily with the publishing company. Handling the paperwork, pitching songs, and what-not. But pretty soon it spread into a little of everything.

We all had our hands full then. It was all we could do just to keep up with it. Quite frankly, when we went with RCA, they wanted too much of a release schedule out of us. I think we would have been better off promoting half the amount of artists, but that wasn’t my decision to make.

I don’t know whether Slim wanted to have that many or if they (RCA) did. It wasn’t any of my business so I didn’t ask anybody!

Another thing that got us started off on the wrong foot was right after we got started, Steve Shoals, who had been the head of RCA’s Country Division, was supposed to be our contact with RCA. New York had shuffled him off into a nothing job - and you don’t do a man with that kind of intelligence and talent that way. At any rate, he had a heart attack and died on his way to Nashville, coming in from the airport.

Obviously it put us in a bad position. We never quite got it all straightened out. Not that people weren’t nice to us, but we were kind of like second hand citizens.

In a way you can’t blame their people. I mean, like their Regional man in Atlanta. He would walk in there to WPLO or whatever station and say " I brought you a new Eddie Arnold and a so & so" and then say "Oh by the way, here’s a new Lynn Anderson on Chart". That was the attitude. I really don’t think they tried to do anything against us, they just didn’t wind up doing anything for us.

From what I gather, they just wanted Lynn Anderson.

They wanted Lynn Anderson from about her 2^nd or 3^rd record. She had one single, then a duet with Jerry, and then "Ride, Ride, Ride" which was covered by a half dozen other people. We didn’t sell a lot of records on it, but we established her as an airplay artist with that one. Then we came up with "If I Kiss You Will You Go Away". We got to number 3 in the country with that one. This was all before we ever did the RCA deal. At the same time we had the Junior Samples thing going and a pretty good Jim Nesbitt thing going, so people started paying a little attention to us. But that’s what they (RCA) wanted, just to milk it for all it was worth.

A friend of mine from a radio station in Montgomery came up from Alabama and I produced the session on him. Lloyd Green and some of the other session men were impressed that I had arranged the music and did everything. They didn’t have to do anything except follow direction. It made everything go a lot quicker. Lloyd suggested to Slim that I should start doing some other producing. So I started producing, mostly independent stuff. At that time Slim was the producer for most of the Chart records, but there was more than one man could do in the studio, too. Later on we handed off some of the artists to Cliff.

He sure did.

What did you think of the sound Cliff was getting from his artists at that time?

I think the boy was very smart! I felt his wife at the time, Connie Eaton, was doing stuff that was maybe 5 years ahead of her time. She was a little "pop" for the country music market back then. 5 years later what she was doing happened in a big way.

Yep, we were there in the beginning with it, just a little early is all. I was under a lot of pressure to make her a star right then! I tried everything I knew. I had her on TV with the Arthur Godfrey Show; I got her on a soap opera, and a couple other shows. She got more attention than anyone we had, but I couldn’t make it happen for her.

I don’t recall the exact dates when Audio Fidelity took over Chart, but yeah, it was a busy time. I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about for the distribution because from the time Audio Fidelity took it over me, my son, and Cliff did just about everything. My son was doing all the mailing, with a little help sometimes. I was doing sales & promotion and I had to let the girl up front take some of the orders. Cliff had to make some of the promotion calls because we were so busy one man couldn’t do it! I was working 10 or 11 hours a day already and one man just physically couldn’t do all the work.

I had to go to New York about once a month and report to them what I was doing. They kept trying to tell me how to do my job, but I went my own way and went about my job because we were more financially successful at that time than they were! If the teams winning, you don’t tell the team how to do it!

That’s right. There was a couple two or three years there I was head of sales and promotion. We didn’t have separate departments. We couldn’t afford to have them! After the label got pretty sizable, Cliff Williamson came in and started doing some of the promotion. I still had to handle sales, though. Well, I didn’t have to, but I felt like I should.

Right.

Yeah. I moved up there to be a songwriter. I didn’t have any intention of being anything else. Then, you know, things just evolved. The couple of records I made were, frankly, paid for by someone else. I don’t remember who. I was doing it just to record some of their songs.

Kenny Vernon! Where in the world did you find him? In Albuquerque?

What about LaWanda?

You know she married Billy Smith. Billy’s Daddy owned that nightclub down there where Kenny & LaWanda used to appear sometime. He owned it and another one. They’ve made a pretty good bit of money over the years. There’s no telling what circles they run in now.

I wasn’t in on that deal. I know nothing at all about it. I left there at the end of ’70 or ’71. It must have been ’70. Right after that was when Slim sold it to Bill Walker and Cliff. That was the only sale I knew about.

Slim had bought it back from Audio Fidelity, turned right around and sold it to Bill Walker & Cliff. They weren’t having a lot of luck with it so Slim took it back over and sold it again to this Bill Worden, as I understand it. I had lost track of what was going on over there by then. I didn’t really know any of the details about any of that.

Now this isn’t gospel, but I heard the family was from Louisville, Ky. Something happened, maybe he died or something or there was a death in the family. I don’t know what happened after that. No one else seems to know very well either.

There was some crook there in Nashville ended up with our old logo. He had the logo from out in the front hall and was representing himself as Chart Records.

Well, that was the name he was going under at that time. I don’t know what his real name was.

I don’t know how he ever got a hold of that old plaque! It’s beyond me how he came by it. It was a mystery to me, but it didn’t concern me enough to go out and do any detective work on it.

On thing you have to understand is things were a lot different back then

We went into a distribution deal with RCA was the first thing. They weren’t really "cooking" it. They only wanted to sell our Lynn Anderson records and only paid lip service to the others. Obviously, we were going to wind up owing her more money than the company was taking in. So they wound up selling it to Audio Fidelity in New York. That’s when I really took over as Sales & Promotion.

We just got out there and started working! One big difference in what we were doing and what other people were doing was, we were working smaller stations as well as larger ones. If I was on my way to see a distributor or something and if a station was sitting out there in the middle of a cornfield, I’d go to it! I’d be the only person from Nashville they had ever seen! We got a lot of support from places that way, sometimes over and above the bigger labels, because we treated them like human beings. Eventually, we got to where we were being accepted at some of the larger stations. And that was through a constant calling campaign. We’d call them up every week and ask them if they’re playing our records! Next thing you knew, some of them were. We got to be more than a "one artist" label that way!

Then we lucked into the Junior Samples phenomena. Did anyone tell you how we invented his first record?

Yeah. It was a public service program here in Georgia. Bill Powell from WMAZ in Macon sent it up to Nashville to us. Lynn Anderson & I listened to that tape and copied it down, word for word, from beginning to end. Lynn typed that thing up and we began crossing out lines and she & I edited the thing. Then we took it over next door to CBS and had the tape edited. We ended up with a 5 minute record out of a 20 minute program.

I’m sure there is, but I don’t know at this point in time. There were several people who had copies of it back then. It wasn’t funny all the way through. That’s why we edited it!

Then Jim Nesbitt had a few hits for us over the years.

Oh yeah! We had what would have been his biggest record in ’68. One of those songs where he was talking about the presidential candidates. Bobby Kennedy went and got himself shot and messed us up!

We had sold about 20,000 copies that first week!

Yep. It took off like no record of his had done before. It was going to be gangbusters! Like I said, Bobby went and got himself killed and fouled us up but good!

I moved my family to Nashville in July 1965, Slim moved his down in the autumn of that year. It was another year or year and a half before I started working as a salaried employ, though.

Well, Slim always had an office in Nashville. Even though he & Ott Stephens were still in Georgia, Slim had an office in Nashville. The company was located in Nashville.

Right. We moved into the RCA Building.

He had bought Great & Chart at the same time from Gary Walker.

He had been putting some people on Chart and some on Great and I don’t know what his idea was. After we got the RCA deal for Chart, we decided I would take a whirl with Great Records and see if we could get another thing going. We were about to do it, too! I was outdoing them on a few things! It was creating a lot of confusion, really. The distributors were afraid I would get to going with another label over there and then take it away from them, so I was having a hard time selling records. That’s one reason we came up with the Musictown deal. Maybe the distributors wouldn’t associate it, you know, with Chart.

No, I don’t remember any albums being released.

I don’t think they ever put it together. I know them boys pretty good. They had a record shop up in Kingsport, TN.

I have no idea . . . (note: yep! They’re still around!)

You said you were with Chart until 1970. Why did you leave?

Ah…. two things. A guy came along and made an offer that sounded real good to me. I could go into business for my self. Also, at that point it was obvious that Lynn Anderson was going to leave us for CBS because she had married Glenn Sutton. They didn’t give him much choice. Bring her "over here" or else, you know! There were a couple other little things too. My wife had a nervous breakdown the year before. Her doctor suggested to me that I put her to work with me so I could watch her all the time. So that’s what I did. I put her to work and was around her day and night. It made a world of difference.

Oh yes! It helped her greatly!

Oh yes. She was a writer.

No. What she did do though was . . .it was funny. When she went to work for me and I was out sick one time for 2 or 3 weeks. So she had to take over the promotion and stuff. She became, well not the first, but about the second female promoter in the business. She was so much better than I was, it wasn’t even funny! Everybody called her "Momma Hype".

Oh! It was a lot of fun! Right across the hall from us was the SESAC offices, The Willis Bros were doing jingles and had a small office….we were like one big happy, scrappy family! You don’t find that in the music business anymore.

The whole business is different now. We did something back then that hadn’t been done before. We took a bunch of kids and started raising our own.

LaWanda Lindsey was 14, Connie Eaton was 15, Anthony Armstrong Jones was 16, and Lynn was 18. Just imagine taking a stable like that, man!

Dianne was a Canadian artist. She recorded for RCA up there. Carl Smith had a TV show on up there in Canada and she was on that show. She was the number one country artist up there. That was before they invented Anne Murray. Anne kinda knocked us out of the saddle! A funny thing about that, if you want to hear it.

When they (Capitol) released the record, they released it with the other song, I don’t remember the title now, ("Just Bidin’ My Time") as a "AA". (same song on both sides) to all the radio stations. One or two stations got hold of the commercial copy and started playing "Snowbird". So they released it again with the other song as the A side and couldn’t beat it to death with a stick! The B side, "Snowbird" was the hit! They eventually had to re-service the whole country with a copy with "Snowbird" as the A side!

Capitol had 3 or 4 instances back during that time like that, but they never would admit that they were wrong!

She was from up around Indianapolis. Last I knew of her, she came down to see me; some years after they had done anything. They were talking about doing something, then she dropped out of sight and I never heard anymore from her. Period!

Well, the stuff she and Ott did sold fairly well, but not well enough to support an album. It was selling well enough so that you didn’t want to quit. You say, "Well, maybe the next one will be it", you know, but then never get quite to where you wanted it to.

He was Conway Twitty’s protégé. The first record he did with us, Conway & I did it over in the RCA Studios, I believe. We were doing pretty well with him. He was getting up around 20 or 30 in the national charts. Of course he eventually left, too. He went over to Epic Records. He had some back problems and became addicted to some kind of medicine he was taking. Some pain killers.

I don’t know what ever went on with that. Later on he was in Nashville selling cars for a Lincoln Dealer. He used to come by and see me every now and then.

I don’t know if he was a professional, but he was a darn good one!

Yeah, I thought he had an awful good chance at it. He had a lot of breaks a lot of people would have liked to have had.

Ah… He’s probably the only one in the whole bunch I can tell you very little about. He’s still my favorite of all the people who were on that label. We put a record out on him in later years on another little label that Slim started up – "Phone Call From The Devil" on Scorpion Records. And had fun with that thing!

I think that one record I handled for them. Maybe one or two more. Other than that we helped him set up his own thing again with Allen Whitcomb who later became Randy Travis’s manager.

No, we were promoting and selling it. At that time I had a little company called Nationwide Sound Distributors that was handling national sales for a lot of the independent labels. We could do a better job for them than they could do for themselves individually by putting a bunch of them together.

Well, I think Slim has it confused a little bit because when Audio Fidelity bought it is when we set up Sales & Distribution. When we released Jim Nesbitt’s "Running Bear", I shipped more records than I ever had.

Yeah, we asked to get out of the deal. This was after it was sold to Audio Fidelity. We wanted out of the deal because it was a trap for us. Pretty soon we would owe Lynn Anderson more money than we were getting.

Simple. We had to pay her for what records on her were sold and if they (RCA) were taking out all this stuff for all these other records over there, it wouldn’t leave us enough money to pay her! Do you understand what I’m saying?

Ok, expenses were being taken out on, say, 10 artists and only one was profitable. All the expenses were being taken out on that one account so you’d wind up in the hole! We had raised Lynn’s royalty up to 5%. If we sold 100,000 copies of her records we had to give her 5%. Well, a lot of the other artists couldn’t carry their own sales. The sales on the others didn’t cover the cost of production. We had to pay for that, plus pay Lynn. So after a while, the cost would catch up with us.

Most people would get 3%. If they were proven sellers, like Lynn was, then they would get 4% or 5%. At that time 5% was dog-gone good money!

It was a percentage of the retail sales price of the record, less 10%. So if a record sold for $1.00 and the artist got a 5% royalty, the artist would get about $0.045 (four and ½ cents). 10% was allowed for returns and things of that nature. That was standard for all record companies.

At one time we were using a place called Dixie Record Pressing. I think when we were pressing the largest amounts, we were using Mid-South Record Pressing which later became GRT.

There was an old place called Southern Record Pressing that we did business with for a while. They pressed some good quality records.

So we moved down to Standard Record Pressing, not Southern. We stayed with them for 2 or 3 months and finally moved over to Mid-South, which later became GRT. The lady who was running Mid-South is still my friend and one of my neighbors where I had lived in Tennessee.

Hmmm, I never really thought about it in those terms. Around Nashville, I was considered one of the hotshot promotion men about that time. I’m not sure that was good for my ego! Sometimes they can pat you on the back once too often.

I would say the best thing we got out of that deal with RCA though, we cut an album that wasn’t greatly successful with Junior Samples and Archie Campbell. Well, when Sam Lovello and those people came down to setup the Hee-Haw television show, why we got a taping interview for Junior. Archie was for sure going to be in it and he took Junior under his wing and took care of him. I always will appreciate that! Junior wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with. He had a bad drinking habit and that sort of stuff. It took quite a bit of patience to do what Archie did.

He sure made a star out of him, though!

Yes sir! Junior sure did well didn’t he? His records were pretty dang funny too!

No, not really. I guess I wish I had saved a little more time for myself. I was coming along as a songwriter, but got pushed so much by the business end of it, I didn’t have time to write songs. They just dried up on me. A fellow shouldn’t let that happen to him.

You ought to hear Shelby Singleton tell about his "Lt. Kelly" record. It was one of those spoken word things that was an instant hit, or an instant flop or what ever, back during the Viet Nam war. Shelby said, "I shipped that sucker coal, man. It came back platinum!" He took back about twice as many as he shipped! Somebody was bootlegging them somewhere! He over shipped them to begin with and when they started coming back, they just kept on coming!

I went in with some other people and started another little label called Prize Records, which only lasted about a year. There were three of us in it and no two of us understood it the same. It was just one of those situations that didn’t work out. I just walked away from it and went over and started Nationwide Sound with a borrowed $1000.00 and a borrowed desk chair. It kept me there for 21 years!

At one time I had 12 or 13 people working for me. That’s about as big as it ever got. We handled some things like the group Alabama. I’m the one that named them, designed their logo and had their first couple of hit records.

Then we had "Grandma Got Ran Over By A Reindeer".

Elmo & I hip pocketed that for almost 5 years. We sold a lot of singles on it! They never tried to sell any albums of any quantity until they let it go to Columbia or Epic, or who ever it was got it.

The first little hit we had was a song called "Love Ain’t Love Until You Give It Away". I can’t remember the artist, though.

The next sizable one we had was Narvel Felts’s "Drift Away". From that point on we were in pretty good shape.

We had Cinnamon Records back in the early ‘70s. We had Shannon Records, which belonged to Mary Reeves. A label called Commercial Records and one called Soundwaves, which belonged to my number 2 son. The early Scorpion product, before GRT took it. There were so many I couldn’t think of then all.

I closed it down. I unofficially closed it in 1993 and closed the corporation in 1994. My wife had cancer and I didn’t want to fool with it anymore. I wanted to stay home with her.

Yeah, we did. But when the CD’s came out was when my business started going way down. We didn’t sell too many of them, though.