Legendary Bill Anderson Chats With Country Icons On XM.

Navigation: Main page

Author: Bessman, Jim

Country Music Hall of Famer Bill Anderson's career has come full circle with the recent extension of his contract with XM Satellite Radio through November 2004. The circle, which began while he was working as a DJ at Commerce, Ga., country station WJJC at age 19, will remain unbroken at least until then.

Anderson, who wrote the 1958 Ray Price hit "City Lights" while working at WJJC, returned to radio when the Washington, D.C.-based XM launched one year ago, carrying his hour-long Bill Anderson Visits With the Legends on its America Channel. After paying tribute to the late Chet Atkins on his first installment, Anderson has highlighted the likes of Vince Gill, Brenda Lee, Eddy Arnold, and Charlie Louvin on the program, which is taped in Nashville and airs eight times a week.

"I've been in business 40 years, and I'm still doing what I started with," the busy Andersonâ€"who co-wrote Kenny Chesney's latest single, "A Lot of Things Different," with Dean Dillonâ€"says with a laugh. "I'm still writing songs and doing radio showsâ€"I haven't progressed at all!"

Anderson's initial one-year contract called for 45 episodes of Legends, which is produced in cooperation with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum by Roxanne Russell, longtime producer of Anderson's Opry Backstage TNN series. Tapings for the next episodes commence this month.

"I think the show's done well. They've certainly given me a tremendous amount of freedom," Anderson says of XM. "It's an hour show, but if I get a guest like Willie Nelson or Kenny Rogersâ€"who you're not liable to get oftenâ€"I can do 90 minutes."

He modestly notes that the show's content is well-indicated by its title. "I'm certainly not an interviewer," he says. "I just turn on the tape and it's a conversation with friendsâ€"with a few hundred thousand of our closest buddies listening in. A lot of the shows have live music, like when Willie brought a guitar and sat there and sang and talked. Same thing with Mac Davis. There are no commercial breaks, and we're not constricted by any kind of format. Whatever we want to do, we do it, and it makes for some fun stuff. And from me being friends with these people, they know I'm not going to embarrass them or put them in a negative light, so they really open upâ€"and we get great feedback from listeners."

America Channel PD Ray Knight says that XM gets "tons" of positive phone calls and e-mails regarding Legends. "People in the industry believe that fans don't care, but they do," says Knight, crediting Andersonâ€"who was recently honored with BMI's Icon Award (Billboard, Nov. 16)â€"with "opening up a whole world" for country music fans thirsting for the "inside story" surrounding favorite artists and their songs.

"It's like sitting around the kitchen table with a couple beers talking about the world of country music of the last 50 years," Knight adds. "And when you've got a legend like Bill doing it, you end up with one more legend in the room to begin with."

Anderson has, of course, seen numerous technological changes in the radio industry since he first entered the business decades ago. "But in a lot of ways, it really hasn't changed," he says. "Radio still offers the most personal and intimate form of communicatingâ€"even if you're bouncing off a satellite. You're just right there with people, and even if 95% of them on satellite radio are in a vehicle somewhere riding down the road, it's really still just you and them. Hopefully, at the end of an hour you see that you've driven 65 miles with Bill Anderson and his friends there in the car with you."

Anderson is pleased to have the new Chesney single representing him again at mainstream country radio, but he still has some reservations about the format from his vantage point as a country-radio veteran.

"Lord knows I don't want to offend anyone in country radio, but to me it's so restrictive, with ungodly large amounts of commercials to deal with," he says. "So it's good to have the freedom and flexibility to do something like what I'm doing at XM. I don't know that I could take it and put it in a structured environmentâ€"and the fact that it has no structure is one of its real charms."

Anderson is free to play his own music but rarely does. "The only record of mine that I remember playing is [1964 hit] 'Three A.M.,' when I did a theme show on steel-guitar players that included Weldon Myrick, my original steel player," he says. "I didn't play it because it was my record but to show off the unusual steel work he did on it. I also played some songs I wrote for other people, but that's not why I do the show. And when the guests start talking about me, I try to switch the subject."

As for Anderson's own recording career, Varese Sarabande issued its fifth Anderson disc Oct. 29, There's No Place Like Home on Christmas.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): ANDERSON

~~~~~~~~

By Jim Bessman