No one treads Music Row’s ever-shifting sands more surefootedly than Norris D. “Norro” Wilson. “I’m just excited that I can even work anymore,” says the ebullient 58-year-old. “It’s such a young business.”
Recently inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Wilson has also served time as a recording artist, label executive, music publisher, and producer. He was point man in the studio for Keith Whitley and Shania Twain when they were just getting their careers under way. As head of Norro Productions, he currently coproduces George Jones, Mindy McCready, and Keith Gattis. Beginning in January, he and Buddy Cannon will take over production chores for BNA Records’ Kenny Chesney. In addition, Wilson is working with new artist Shannon Brown for RCA Records.
In spite of being so immersed in the business, Wilson says he’s not completely happy with what he sees and hears in today’s country music. He doesn’t believe, for example, that the overall quality of performers today matches that of performers past. “Because of recording technology, we’re able to do things today we weren’t able to do 10 or 20 years ago,” he explains. “It used to be that artists really had to be on top of things when they went into the studio to record. They had to really know their music, and they had to get it in two or three takes at the most. As time went on, we were able to do more takes.... Anymore it’s such a marketing and commercial thing. It steers away from the art form in a way.”
Then there’s the matter of star quality. “They used to come to the table and they were stars already,” Wilson maintains. “That’s not so today. We help make them into that. We teach them to sing and dance and talk and everything. Back in the old days, you’d see a person and they just looked the part.”
Wilson should know—he’s spent 40 years watching Music Row bloom. Born in Scottsville, Ky., he got his start singing in the Southlanders, a gospel quartet. He came to Nashville from Bowling Green, Ky., in 1958 to join the group. After touring through the Southeast with the Southlanders, he subsequently joined The Omegas, a short-lived trio on Decca Recrords, and then recorded as a solo act for Monument and Hickory. He didn’t achieve his first hit on the country charts until 1969, when he covered the Platters’ “Only You” for Smash Records. Within the next eight years, he charted nine more times, variously for Smash, Mercury, RCA, Capitol, and Warner Bros.
During his early days in Nashville, Wilson says he hung around at Acuff-Rose publishing, where he began helping John Loudermilk produce demos. Impressed by Wilson’s musical tastes, the songwriter linked him up with Irish singer Carmel Quinn, who was a regular on The Arthur Godfrey Show. She became the young Kentuckian’s first production project. Wilson’s executive posts in the business have since included managing Al Gallico Music and heading the A&R department for Warner Bros.’ Nashville office.
After years of working on the Row, Wilson has become especially contemptuous of radio, but he is acutely aware of its power to make or break an artist—and, by extension, an artist’s producer. “I’m just as mad as hell at radio,” he erupts. “They totally control our lives.... I think they have too much power. It’s a monopoly. They’re in control of some little person’s destiny who’s just trying to make a living. One guy can shoot down a record.”
Still, Wilson hasn’t stayed at the top of the game by ignoring reality. “If we as producers have to make this kind of cookie-cutter music that radio wants to play,” he concedes, “then we’ve got to give them what they need. They don’t want to play a song that has a great deal of substance to it or if it’s a little bit sad.... But I guess if it’s selling, it’s working.... Some of the little ditties are put together in a crafty sort of manner and really are good, but some of them are absolutely dumber than hell.”
As a songwriter, Wilson has excelled in giving radio what it wants. His credits include “The Most Beautiful Girl” (which he says “laid around” more than seven years before Charlie Rich recorded it), “A Very Special Love Song,” “The Grand Tour,” “I’ll See Him Through,” “He Loves Me All the Way,” and “Baby, Baby.” Of his current songwriting efforts, he proudly reports that he has a cut on mega-seller George Strait’s Blue Clear Sky album, “Rockin’ in the Arms of Your Memory,” which he cowrote with Dean Dillon. “I’ve been sending [Strait] $5 a month,” Wilson quips, “trying to get him to release it as a single.”
Wilson headed Merit Music for nearly five years before absenting himself from active publishing matters. “I’m not doing any music publishing anymore,” he says. “I have a copublishing deal with Opryland Music Group. We’re all claiming it’s the best deal in town: I don’t write nothin’, and they don’t pay me nothin’.”
Whatever his current gig happens to be, Wilson’s first love is the song. “I think the song is more important than anything else, because it becomes a catalyst for a person’s career.” His induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, he adds, “pleased me terribly—I felt a lot of warmth from it.” He laments that the music business now runs counter to the kind of longevity he has enjoyed, opting instead, as he sees it, for artists, songs, producers, and record executives who are “disposable.”
In spite of his darker visions of the business, Wilson notes some bright spots. He says Mindy McCready was the best 20-year-old singer he’d ever heard and that 14-year-old LeeAnn Rimes is “greater than anybody I’ve heard since Brenda Lee.” Women country artists, he adds, are generally more distinctive today than their male counterparts.
With the cost of launching a new country artist now hovering around the $500,000 mark, Wilson says he’d like to see major record companies establish “starter labels.” These would operate on far more modest budgets and consequently have to sell fewer albums to turn a profit. More to the point, though, they would focus attention on music instead of research, promotion, and marketing. “The way it is,” he notes, “I see opportunities going down the drain.”
Wilson says he also longs for a return to more meaningful music: “I want to hear somebody write some really great love songs—the kind that make you have to stop your car and wipe a tear.” It was this musical magic, he points out, that brought him to Nashville in the first place. “I’ve been loving this town forever,” he confesses, “and I haven’t stopped.”
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