It’s hard to believe that someone with so many number one singles and top ten songs that it took them this long to nominate T. Graham Brown for a Grammy. Graham came to everyone’s attention singing jingles and performing in many commercials for some of the biggest players in the game – everyone from Taco Bell to McDonalds and everyone in between. A true survivor, he survived his own mega-success and found the proper path. In 2014 he released a Gospel album “Forever Changed” that netted the singer a couple of number one singles and his first ever Grammy nomination. And there’s no indication of anything slowing him down anytime soon.
Thank you for putting my name in the paper.
No, thank you. I’m a big fan of yours. I was working at Taco Bell when those commercials for them with you came out back in the day.
(laughs) You know you’re the first person that’s ever told me that.
I actually look you up back then because a name like T. Graham Brown that has Grand Ole Opry written over it. And I’m thinking this guy has to be important. Plus you were very charismatic in the commercials too, and that made me want to see what you were up to.
Oh man, I can’t believe how it’s been. That’s been 20-something years or something.
Yeah, almost 30 years ago.
Good Lord.
I was getting out of college at the time.
Wow. Where did you go to school?
UT Chattanooga.
Yeah, I went to the University of Georgia.
UGA is well represented here in Chattanooga. I’ve got a lot of friends down there.
I really like Chattanooga. It’s probably a great nice place to live.
It’s right in between everything. It has enough of that small town appeal with a progressive outlook on everything. And if you really want to go to the “big city” it’s less than two hours in any direction you go. Plus the scenery here can’t be beat.
Chattanooga’s great, man. We played down there on the river.
Riverbend Festival?
Yeah, yeah we did that a couple of times.
It’s like a big ole high school reunion there. Everybody gets together down there who haven’t seen each other in a while.
We had fun, I remember.
I understand you recently your first Grammy ceremony as you received your first ever nomination.
We sure had fun, too. A buddy of mine named Mike Farris won the category that we were in. I knew he was going to win. He put out a great record. I love Mike. If it wasn’t us I’m glad it was him.
You also had a number of chart-topping songs over the course of your career. Which was the greater accomplishment for you – a number one record or a Grammy nomination?
I guess a Grammy nomination. That’s such a rare thing. We just had a number one gospel song I found out last week. Vince Gill and I did a duet. Sheila [Brown’s wife] sent me this chart that we went number one on. That was really cool. I’ve had two or three number one gospel songs so far. But that Grammy thing was real cool, man. It was totally out of the blue. Have you heard this record that we made?
Yes I have.
How did you like it?
Eloquent is a good word to describe it. By that I mean everything seemed to naturally flow with nothing seemingly forced. It seemed like a REAL collaborative effort by everyone involved with the album. It comes across as if you guys got along really well during the process.
We had a great time making it. We didn’t know what we were going to do. We had this really small budget – I mean really small, the smallest one I’ve ever worked with. We wanted to get “Wine Into Water”, a song that we wrote about me getting straightened out. We wanted to get that back out there. We’re trying to help some people get sober. We didn’t know where we were going to sell it. Shelia and I are a part of this church building ministry that’s called International Cooperating Ministries. We build churches in third world countries. We wanted to proceeds to go to that. So we went in and didn’t know where we were going to sell it. We thought we would sell it on our website and at shows, which would have been okay, but it wouldn’t have been really that big of a deal. We cut all the tracks in one day and I started calling up people to sing on it. That’s how it started. We got a lot of people lined up. Then Sony came in out of the blue and picked it up. Then Provident Records, which is the biggest gospel label in the world picked it up. And then Cracker Barrel put it in all their stores. Then we got the Grammy nomination on top of that. It turned into this really cool thing. We started out like “The Little Engine That Could”. It was a lot of fun. It was my first album in a long time. It was a lot of fun.
It seemed like a multi-generational kind of album. We were working with guys that influenced you like Leon Russell as well as guys that you influenced. And you were the first concert attended by one of the guys.
You talking about Jason Crabb?
Yeah, Jason.
Have you ever heard Jason sing? Have you ever been to one of his shows? He’s killer.
Oh yeah.
I love Jason. He said he was eight years old and his daddy took him to his first show and it was me. He said, “I’ve been trying to sing like you my whole life”. (laughs) All theses guys – I’ve known for a long time. I was really so glad they came. None of them said, “Well, let me think about it.” They all immediately said yes, which made me fell really good.
Was Forever Changed one of the easiest albums you put together and did it feel more natural than some of your others?
It was the most fun I ever had. I was glad we were able to use Jim Ward’s horn section. We had real horns and real strings on it. I doubt I will ever make another album like that again that sounds like that. I’m hopefully going to get into the studio again this year and do just a stone country record – just a hard country record. I’ve never done that before. I’ve got to cut a Christmas record. I’m going to do a hymns record. Did you ever go to church when you were little?
I grew up in the church.
Were you a Baptist by any chance?
No sir, I’m Presbyterian.
The reason I’m asking that is in the Baptist church I grew up in we sang out of this hymnbook called the Falkner Hymnal. I’m getting ready to do a hymns record. We’re going to cut songs out of that. I guess it’s like a southern thing. I’ve got some plans for this year. I’m not going to let it wait as long as I did to make another record.
When you originally go into music it seemed to be more or less to have fun. You and your friends were busy playing parties. When did you start getting serious about music?
I started singing when I was in Athens at the University of Georgia. I was going to play baseball down there but I never did get to play. I had a buddy that figured out a way to make some money singing. I went to my baseball coach and told him I never sat on the bench. All I ever wanted to do was play baseball. But I’ve got this opportunity to sing and make some money. What should I do? He looked at me and said, “Tony, I think you ought to go and sing”. That was my introduction. I started singing in 1973, so I’ve been at it a long time.
Did music come naturally to you?
Yeah, it was pretty natural I think. My household was not a musical house. I didn’t have a stereo or anything like that growing up. I listened to the radio. I had a transistor radio that I listened to. My daddy – I can’t remember them listening to the radio – maybe the farm reports for something. Both sides of my family were farmers. We got this little farm here in our family for several generations.
Was country music an obvious choice for you?
Not at all. My daddy moved us down to South Georgia. I grew up 70 miles south of Macon. There’s this little town called Arabi with about 300 people. Our backyard backed up to the railroad tracks. On one side the white people lived and on the other side all the black people lived. The first band I heard was in a black church. When I was lying in bed I would have my window open. We didn’t have air conditioning, so I could hear pretty easily across the tracks. That was the first black music I ever heard – the first band, rather. Our church had a little old lady that played the piano. The station I listened to down there was a 5,000-watt AM station and they played a little bit of everything. They didn’t have a format. They might play Johnny Cash and then play Aretha Franklin and then play the Rolling Stones or whatever. I listened to all kinds of stuff growing up. But I never thought I’d sing country music. When I first started singing we sang beach music. They called it Carolina beach music where everybody would shag. We’d play The Tams, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, The Drifters, The Coasters, The Platters – that kind of stuff.
You and I grew up in a great era as far as music goes with the radio. Like the AM radio you were listening to you got to hear a variety of music. It wasn’t formatted and dissected like it is now. Today’s radio is almost unlistenable because everything is so categorized.
I don’t listen to the radio any more. When I’m in the car I do, but that’s not a whole lot. I listen to Sirius. I listen to the ‘60s channel – I guess classic rock. That’s what I really like. I had a country band when I was in Athens. I did that for a little bit and then I put together this band called T. Graham Brown’s Rack of Spam. We did straight soul music – Four Tops, The Temptations – all that kind of stuff – Motown, Stax. The coolest thing back then was I had an AM transistor radio and I could lay in the bed at night and scroll through the dial. Man you could pick up those clear channel stations from New Orleans, Nashville, WLAC. There was this station in Fort Wayne, Indiana I remember that was a really cool station.
I know. Growing up on Lookout Mountain if it was a rainy night you could pick up all sorts of out of town stations that you couldn’t get during the day. It was like exploring another world altogether.
That was the thing, man. That’s exactly the thing – like exploring another world. That little town I grew up in didn’t have anything and I could just get taken away – scrolling through the dials. It was really fun. I get in trouble about it by not going to sleep. I got yelled at a lot (laughs)
You did a lot of jingle work like the Taco Bell ones we were talking about earlier. Was that a lot of fun or was it one of those thing were you were biding your time waiting for something to break?
They called me. They just started calling me. (laughs) I think the first one I did was a McDonald’s commercial. It was a national commercial. Then they started calling. So I just kept doing them. It was pretty much after I had this record deal with Capitol. I didn’t do a whole lot of jingles up until right before that. They just kept calling. So I kept doing it. (both laugh) They kept paying me. They paid pretty well. And they were easy. You would go in there and maybe be done in an hour. It might run for there’s no telling how long. I did “sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.” You remember that? I did that for seven years. You could go in and sing on something – I was always fast in the studio, anyway. I did every drink, fast food, car and truck – I did a lot of them. I bet I did as many jingles as anybody ever.
Before you signed your first recording contract you were already under contract as a songwriter.
Yeah, I moved to Nashville in ’82 and got a writing deal published six months after that. It was May of ’82 that Shelia and I did. CBS Songs signed me. They’re now with EMI. Their name changed; I don’t think the company really changed. I was over there for like 16 years.
It seems like the country genre is more of a collaborative effort compared to rock and roll. It seems there are a number of people putting in time to harvest a song compare to other genres where the band does everything for themselves.
Nashville’s known for songwriting. Everybody that lives there listens to songs. I listen to songs when I’m getting ready to cut something. I try to find the best songs. There’s a ton of songwriters here. It’s that old joke: How do you get a songwriter off your front porch? Pay him for the pizza.
You are also known for your colorful stage attire. Do you think that’s a lost art with today’s country artist – the actual visual aspect of the experience?
Probably. I know Sheila had me tow really cool suits made this year that a guy from Hollywood named Harvey Krantz. He must be 80 years old. He’s done them for everybody. I looked him up one night on the internet. He’s done them for every act from The Temptations, George Jones, Leon Russell – hundreds of them. There used to guy named Nudie [Cohen] that did these Nudie suits. Harvey and Nudie were contemporaries. Nudie died and then Manuel [Cuevas], one of Nudie’s students, you might say, has moved to Nashville and he has a neat store here. He still makes some good stuff. There’s not anyone willing to do that these days. I don’t wear them all the time, but it’s cool to have them hanging in the closet anytime I feel like it. They’re expensive; I know that for a fact. (laughs) That might be why nobody wears them these days.
What do you think of the sudden boom in the number of country artists out there? I know a number of guys that were writing and performing pop songs ten years ago now that are country artists.
Well if you want to know the truth about it, I don’t listen to country radio. I don’t really know what’s going on, man. I just say more power to them if they can pull it off. It’s hard to pull off. I’d hate to be starting off these days. It seems to me there would be more competition.
The one advantage they have is the internet. They don’t necessarily need a record label like you traditionally did in the past. But now it’s like a big high school popularity contest hoping it will catch on with the right clique instead of having a company behind the product promoting it. There’s also a quality control issue. You don’t know what to expect something uploaded online sounds like whole there was an industry standard for record labels.
Well it’s a different world, brother. All it takes is a computer to make a record. I’m definitely old school. Like that saying, I’m an analog man in a digital world.
What do you see your motivation as a musician being today compared to 20 or 30 years ago?
I just try to get out there and have fun. I’ve got a great band. We’re all grown up now. We’re not out getting drunk all the time or doing whatever it was we used to do. I just try to have fun and keep a good band. I’m still out there on the road. I’ve still got a bus and a band and all that hillbilly stuff. Same way with making records – I just try to do something I like. That’s my motivation, I guess. I’m having more fun now than I’ve ever had.
Do you find yourself more focused as a writer these days?
You know, I don’t write as much as I should. I don’t pick songs. I don’t have a publisher any more. I just do it for myself. I’m not really in that world of writing things and picking things and pitching things trying to get cuts.
Well you’re writing for yourself. Do you like it better when you’re the person that has to be pleased with what you write and not worry what people have to say?
Oh yeah. Then it doesn’t matter. (laughs) I try to write songs I like and go from there. I don’t have any formula or anything like that. The main thing of what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to do what God wants me to do. I’m just trying to do the right thing for the right reason. I’m trying to help people. That’s what I’m all about. I’ve done all that crazy stuff. I finally figured out what really matters. Sheila has been taking care of me for 37 years this year, so it was time for me to settle down. I was drinking so much. I can’t remember when it was but I looked in the mirror one day and said, “Listen, you’ve got to quit”. I was able to just be able to quit. I didn’t have to go through a big withdrawal. I just one day decided enough is enough. I was killing myself. I didn’t want to end up like my brother Keith Whitley. I could have easily, easily been face down in a ditch a long time ago. It was just through the grace of God and Sheila Brown that I’m even talking to you for I would have been deader than a hammer.
– Dave Weinthal
Tags: Forever Changed Grammy Riverbend T. Graham Brown Taco Bell
