She started creating the song as soon as they hung up. “I wrote him a couple of days later. I told him it was his song, that he inspired it, and how he’d been so inspirational to me in so many ways over the years, in my guitar-playing and in my songwriting and in my music, ever since I was a little girl. I told him everything I’d always wanted to tell him.”
That connection, that powerful and personal tie to a legendary figure, is something which runs throughout Lynne’s career, and has helped to sustain her during her darkest periods. Whenever she considered giving up music — the notion occurred to her regularly in the 1990s — she’d think of her friends and supporters, people such as George Jones, Willie Nelson, Brenda Lee, Billy Sherrill, Randy Travis, Vince Gill, Faith Hill and all the others who sought her out to tell her she was special. She’d remember them, and she’d go on.
“I love that, and I can’t believe it sometimes,” she says. “I was watching that television show based on Willie and his 70th birthday, and I told Betty, my manager, that I couldn’t believe I knew all of these people, and they knew me. One time I was on Willie’s bus — it was Willie, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Ray Price, all at once, smoking a joint. That’s about as good as it gets. So I’m pretty lucky, man.”
What she doesn’t say is that she took part in that birthday concert. She toasted Nelson with a version of “Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground” that was as good as anything performed that night. There’s a reason all those people want to know her, and it’s the same reason she wants to know them.
The talent was there from the start. At age 18, a year after her parents’ death forced her and her younger sister to move in with their maternal grandmother Laura Smith, Lynne went to an audition in Mobile for the Opryland USA theme park. She didn’t get hired, but a songwriter in the crowd noticed her and asked her to sing on some of his demos.
The songwriter sent the tapes to Nashville, where longtime Music Row jack-of-many-trades Bob Tubert heard them. Tubert recognized the quality of Lynne’s voice and offered to represent her. Lynne immediately moved to Nashville with her new husband. They both were 18.
Within weeks of arriving, Tubert helped Lynne, still unsigned, secure an invitation to perform on “Nashville Now”, the nightly music and interview program hosted by Ralph Emery. Obviously nervous, and looking even younger than her age, she stilled the crowd as soon as she began to sing. Producer Billy Sherrill was among those watching at home. He tracked her down the next day, as did several other record-label representatives. She got four contract offers within a week.
Because Sherrill had produced classic sides on George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Charlie Rich and Tanya Tucker, and because he was a former Alabama resident who spoke as directly as she did, she signed with Epic Records (an affiliate of CBS, with whom Sherrill was aligned). Roy Acuff introduced her on her first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, and her first single was a duet with Jones, who became a friend and aggressive supporter. Later, during difficult times, Jones was among those who told her, “You’re not going to be happy until you do what you want to do.”
Sherrill signed on to work with her on her first album, Sunrise. But when the Jones duet didn’t become a hit, Epic forced Lynne to cut songs with veteran producer Bob Montgomery, at the time hot with hits by Vern Gosdin and Janie Fricke. It wasn’t a good match.
Sherrill, already semi-retired, was upset enough to quit and give up his CBS Records suite for good. “Billy has said over and over that Shelby was the best singer he’s ever worked with,” says Evelyn Shriver, who got to know future client George Jones through her friendship and work with Lynne. “It killed him that they took her away from him.”
Sherrill, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times after the release of I Am Shelby Lynne, repeated his assertion about Lynne being “the best singer I’d heard in my life.” He went on to say, “I couldn’t get that across to the people who ran the company. People are wrong when they say Shelby would never listen to reason. What she wouldn’t listen to were the idiots.”
Montgomery produced Lynne’s second album, 1990’s Tough All Over. But the young singer hated the experience of recording it and fought with Montgomery and her label throughout. By the time the company released her bio, her reputation already was forming, and it described her as “the antithesis of the polite female country singer.”
In interviews, she spoke of how she disliked working with Montgomery and how she fought with her record-label executives. “It’s hard for me to talk about this album,” she told me shortly after her second album’s release. “I’m not going to tell you what I think of this album. I’m not really happy with the way it turned out.”
Her dissatisfaction concerned more than just music, too. “People always want to tell me what to wear and what to say, and that’s hard for me,” she told me in the same interview. “I like to dress how I feel that day, but for some reason people have a problem with that. I don’t see how it matters. I refuse to play the part of ‘the country music girl singer.'”
