John Paul White
continued from page 22
Room, but we wrote in the actual Bill
Anderson Room. And that didn’t faze him
at all. He kind of rolled his eyes a little bit
at first. BUT I knew he was proud of that
room. But what was surreal was that some
asshole next door kept playing this huge
thumping drum loop over again, while we
were trying to write. He didn’t care. But I
wanted to scream at the guy next door, ‘Do
you have any idea the legend you’re dis-
turbing right now?'
IE: And then you tracked down Bobby
Braddock, who also played keyboard for
the late, great Marty Robbins?
JPW: Braddock is one of my favorite song-
writers, and he told me a lot of Marty
Robbins stories — most of which I can’t
repeat. But there ’s one that I can repeat —
Braddock said that Marty would always
say, “I don’t like any singers who don't like
the sound of their own voice. Because then
he’s just not compelling, and I'm not gonna
believe anything coming out of his
mouth.” Then one day Marty said, out of
the blue, “Hey, Bobby - you’ve got a good
voice, a good commercial singing voice.
We should make a record with you behind
the microphone one of these days.” But
Bobby said he hemmed and hawed, saying
he didn’t know if he would ever be worthy
of his own album. And Marty said,
“Okay,” walked away, and never men-
tioned the idea again. Bobby said he
learned his lesson — next time anyone
asked him to sing, he jumped at the
chance.
IE: Who else did you meet with after that?
JPW: I got to write a song with Whitey
Shaeffer, who wrote: “That’s The Way Love
24 illinoisentertainer.com june 2019
Goes,” and he wrote, “Oceanfront
Property" for Geoge Strait. It goes on and
on. But Whitey hadn’t written a song in ten
years - he just kept running into brick walls
in Nashville because Music Row didn’t
want the kind of songs he was writing. So
he just stopped writing. And his wife, it
turned out, she had come to one of my
shows. And we’d met afterward, and she’d
said, “I’m gonna convince Whitey to write
a song with you — I’m gonna make him do
it.” So she did! I went to his house, and we
wrote a song that didn’t end up on the
record called “I’m Never Gonna Fall in
Love Again.” But it’ll get out there in the
world at some point. It’s a love song, it’s
the only song we wrote, and then he
passed away. And I actually got to go sing
it at his memorial. It was really hard, with
all those serious songwriters sitting there.
But it was quite the honor.
IE: Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders
recently said, “Within the next ten to
twenty years, all of your childhood idols
will be dead. So I’m out looking for new
blood.” Ghoulish, but true, right?
JPW: Well, you know what? That’s exactly
what Bill and Bobby and those guys are
doing, too. They love writing with new
blood; they love new ideas and new per-
spectives. They don’t want to be stuck in
the past. So it took a little convincing on
my part to get them to go there [with me]
because they still want to have hit cuts on
The Row, but I was like, “Hey — you can
do that tomorrow. Let’s write an old coun-
try song. You know — for the good times.”
Appearing 7/25 at Lincoln Hall, Chicago.