BOB MCDILL: Art & Commerce: Threading a Masterful Career

Was it hard to write the songs that were of lesser importance to you, knowing you could do something higher in your estimation?

I couldn’t always write something higher in my estimation.  I had to allow those ideas to come along, and they didn’t everyday. I couldn’t manufacture those things. But those little ditties for the radio, I could manufacture those for the most part.  All I needed was a catchy little phrase.

Did you learn to do anything to encourage good ideas?

Gosh, I read a lot. I used to say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” There was a period when I was a great Southern Lit. buff. I even did a couple of lectures and panels at the University of South Carolina; I lectured on literature and southern culture. I think all that Southern Lit came to fruition in songs like “Good Ole Boys Like Me” and “Song Of The South.” I liked Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty. And Flannery O’Connor was a good source of craziness [laughs].

Did you feel a kinship with those writers?

I guess I did. I wrote “Good Ole Boys Like Me” after reading A Place To Come To, which was Warren’s last novel.

Is there a story behind writing that song?

Well, a little bit of it’s autobiographical. I did have a friend who was an amphetamine user when we were kids who became a bouncer in a bar. He straightened himself out. Did you ever read Look Homeward, Angel?  Remember the brother, Ben, staying up all night chain-smoking? There’s that sort of self-destructive theme in the South. And it was certainly a theme in A Place To Come To. It’s a Southern theme.

With “Gone Country,” you seemed to have some sympathy for the people you wrote about…Am I reading that right?

Well, I don’t know. I was trying to walk a fine line in there. I didn’t want to be too insulting-thank goodness Alan Jackson didn’t think so. Some people did. Nobody outside of Nashville got offended, but people in Nashville thought they were going to be offended. There’s a real funny thing in country music in Nashville about not offending anyone. It’s not there in Hollywood or New York, but it certainly is down here. It’s always sort of puzzled me. Gosh, in any Hollywood movie, if you want to make anybody really sinister and evil, just make them a

Christian and give them a Southern accent. Nobody [on the outside] gives a second thought as far as insulting the South. But here in Nashville, we just don’t insult people… There’s sympathy, but there’s also fun being made. I had heard many of those phrases from people who had just moved to town when country was so big [here]. And the excuses were so limitless and so transparent. Somebody’s career is in the tank out in L.A. and they’d move to Nashville and they’d say it was because of the smog and the crime and so forth-when really, they’re just looking for the opportunity to make a living.