It’s not like Bill Anderson hasn’t had his share of hits — a slew of them in the ’60s and ’70s, with “Still” and “The Tip of My Fingers” even becoming standards.
Now, at age 67, the singer-songwriter nicknamed “Whisperin’ Bill” for his breathy, conversational style is on the charts mostly as a writer rather than singer.
“Whiskey Lullaby,” a song he co-wrote with Jon Randall that Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss recorded as a duet, is nominated for four awards at the Country Music Association show Tuesday, including song of the year.
“There’s no way to describe it,” Anderson said of the honor. “I knew when we wrote it that we had written a good song, but I didn’t know that we had written a good song for 2004.”
It’s a dark tale about a woman who breaks a man’s heart, watches him drink himself to death and then is so guilt-stricken that she too — as the songs says — “put that bottle to her head and pulled the trigger.”
He pitched the song for several years before Paisley recorded it.
“I think the general perception of it was that it was the dreaded two words — too country,” Anderson said. “It went against the grain of everything. It was sad, it was a drinking song, it was long.
“I had given up on ever getting it recorded as a mainstream country song.”
Reminiscent of classic countryAnderson credits Paisley with having the vision not only to record it, but to make it a duet with Krauss, whose stark voice seems perfect for the song’s plaintive tone.
“It made sense because the first part is about the guy and the second part about the woman,” Paisley said. “And when I thought about that line ’The angels sang a whiskey lullaby,’ I wondered what voice best follows that. And I thought, ’If I’m lucky enough to hear angels sing in heaven someday, I’d be disappointed if they sounded anything less than Alison Krauss.”
The song, Paisley said, is reminiscent of classic, tragic country songs like George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
“The melody is wedded perfectly to the words, and that’s the key,” he said. “It was exactly what I was looking for. To me, it’s classic; it’s genius.”
At a stage of his career when most country singers have long since retired or are at least winding down, Anderson’s sails are full. He’s co-writing with some of Nashville’s top tunesmiths, still releasing albums and hosts a weekly interview show on XM Satellite Radio.
Backstage before a recent performance on the Grand Ole Opry, the venerable radio show where he has been a cast member since 1961, he arrived from a songwriting session with Jeffrey Steele, who’s penned tunes for Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Trace Adkins and Rascal Flatts.
He and his six-piece band rehearsed in his dressing room. He wore a black jacket with white cowboy boots and a string tie, and with only an hour until showtime, he still hadn’t decided which songs to sing.
“Any requests?” he asked the band.
They ended up doing “But You Know I Love You,” a hit for Anderson and Kenny Rogers in 1969; and “The Tip of My Fingers,” an Anderson composition that’s been a hit for five different singers: Anderson, Jean Shepard, Roy Clark, Eddy Arnold and Steve Wariner.
Versatile tunesHis songs are remarkably versatile that way. Everyone from Elvis Costello (“Must You Throw Dirt in My Face”) to Aretha Franklin (“I May Never Get to Heaven”) to Conway Twitty (“I Never Once Stopped Loving You”) have recorded them.
Even a recent tune like “Whiskey Lullaby” has already been done by Paisley and bluegrass singer Melonie Cannon, and will be on upcoming albums by Anderson and Randall.
“He’s a terrific songwriter, and he’s as hot as he can be right now,” said Con Hunley, a country singer on the comeback trail with a remake of Anderson’s “Still.”
Hunley, a soulful singer and piano player in the style of Ray Charles, had changed the arrangement and some of the lyrics to “Still” and sought Anderson’s approval.
“I went to his house and sat down in his living room at the piano,” Hunley recalled. “He said, ’Let’s hear what you did to my song.’ I started singing, and he started rubbing his arms a little and after I was done he said, ’Con, I absolutely love this. You have made it a whole new song.”’
Anderson says he never tries to write a song to suit a particular singer, he just writes it and leaves it open for interpretation.
“People ask me, ’Did you know this song was going to be a hit?’ You never know if it is going to be a hit unless the public tells you it’s a hit. But you do know if you’ve taken the subject and gotten all out of it that you could get out of it.”
Anderson, a South Carolina native, was studying toward his journalism degree at the University of Georgia when he wrote “City Lights,” which became a No. 1 hit for Ray Price in 1958. It earned him a deal with Decca, and from 1960 to 1978 Anderson had 37 Top 10 hits, seven of them No. 1s.
He branched into television, hosting a syndicated series, a network game show and a cable show, was a regular on the soap opera “One Life to Live,” and appeared in some B movies.
But by 1982, with his recording career cold and country music in the throes of a transformation, he stopped writing songs.
“We had come through ’Urban Cowboy’ and were going into an era of lush pop country kind of things,” Anderson recalled. “I just wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Then, in 1992, Wariner had a hit with a cover of “The Tips of My Fingers,” and Anderson had a revelation.
“I said, ’Wait a minute. I thought this had passed me by. I wrote this song 32 years ago and it’s No. 1 today? I know I can write songs like that.”’
On Tuesday, when the CMA announces its awards, everyone else may know it too.