Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings by Michael Jarrett (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings by Michael Jarrett Ted Olson PRODUCING COUNTRY: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings. By Michael Jarrett. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 2014. In the world of country music, past or present, attention has been directed toward the “stars”—the main performers. Relatively few country music fans have ever been able to recount the names and abilities of studio musicians, arrangers, and songwriters, despite the fact that all the latter are essential ingredients in the creation of country music recordings. Even more overlooked have been the producers—those people whose exact contributions to the sound of country recordings are, from the public’s perspective, hard to gauge. Of course, producers have been central to the realization of country music recordings (though their precise roles have changed over the decades). In recent years, producers have not only served as intermediaries between record companies and musicians but have also worked to ensure the financial and aesthetic success of recording endeavors. Yet, unlike in pop music where certain producers are household names (George Martin, Jerry Wexler, Rick Hall, Rick Rubin, among others), few producers in country music have been widely acknowledged for their success in that role (Owen Bradley and Billy Sherrill, for instance, have never gotten broad public recognition for revolutionizing the sound of country music in the 1960s and 1970s, while Chet Atkins is primarily remembered today not for his production leadership, but for his own studio work on guitar). Michael Jarrett’s book Producing Country goes a long way toward correcting such oversight. Taking a fascinating approach to illustrating the thinking and actions undertaken by people assigned to produce country music recordings, the author presents transcribed texts of numerous interviews he conducted with various producers. These producers’ reflections—the interviews as presented in this book are too fragmentary to be considered oral histories—are generally insightful and are occasionally revelatory (such as producer William McEuen’s setting the record straight about the process of recording the groundbreaking 1972 multi-artist album Will The Circle Be Unbroken). Jarrett clearly knows how to talk with (and listen to) people who are at the same time powerful within their industry and yet misunderstood. (While Jarrett earned the cooperation of many of the bigger names in country music production, perhaps inevitably some significant still-living country music producers, such as the elusive Sherrill, were not interviewed for the book.) Unfortunately, despite being an engaging read, Jarrett’s book does not provide sufficient context or analysis to fully encompass this rich, rarely explored terrain. To be sure, the author provided a few short “interludes” that attempt to define and outline the complexities of production work, but the reader longs for a broader, more balanced perspective. Confusingly, Producing Country includes interviews of talented producers whose work is hardly central to understanding country music as that genre has been defined historically (for instance, the text discusses the making of recordings by bluesman Robert Johnson, soulmen Joe Tex, Otis Redding, and Al Green, pop crooner Jennifer Warnes, and alternative rockers Blue Mountain). In another problematical editorial decision the book features—adjacent to discussions about specific recordings—thumbnail images of album covers where readers can locate the recordings under discussion. However, in several cases those albums do not represent the definitive source of the recordings discussed in the book (as one example from Chapter 1, Jarrett illustrates interview snippets about producer Ralph Peer’s 1927 recording sessions in Bristol, Tennessee, with an image of a cherry-picked single CD overview of those sessions, ignoring the definitive scholarly edition from Bear Family Records that contains the complete Bristol sessions). For its part, Jarrett’s book features an inspired, subtly striking cover image based on a 1978 black-and-white photograph of Tompall Glaser (in which the “outlaw country” [End Page 161] artist and producer is reaching across a studio mixing board to adjust a sound knob). As if to dramatize the producer’s role as a mysterious crafter of sound, the book’s designer has colorized Glaser’s body, which is thrusting forward out from the gray-toned background. Despite some shortcomings, Jarrett’s book is valuable because it...