Bobby Tomberlin

Bobby Tomberlin was a small town radio disc jockey at eleven and has been writing country songs ever since.

Salty's Live Music set up at the Fernandina Songwriters Festival, and Tomberlin sat down between sets. It was his first time in that part of Florida and he kept saying so, about the town, the food, the strangers who talked to him on both sides at the bar. The SALTYmf crew were there because Banyas's partner Paul lives in Fernandina Beach and had been telling him there is live music every night of the week.

He is from Luverne, Alabama, an hour below Montgomery, the kind of place you drive through on the way to the beach hoping not to get a ticket. At eleven he was on the air at the local station interviewing Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Keith Whitley down the phone line. When an act played Montgomery, his father drove him up with a cassette recorder. He skipped college for a couple of years in Muscle Shoals, rooming with Shenandoah's drummer right as their first hits landed, and calls that his education. Mel Tillis brought him to Nashville and signed him to his first publishing deal.

That deal paid a hundred dollars a week, so he worked nights at a Kroger, where he checked out Conway Twitty, Brooks and Dunn, and Diamond Rio. He was bagging Diamond Rio's lettuce and bacon with no idea they would be the ones to break his career, which they did with One More Day, written with Steve Jones. The publishing stamp got his songs past the front desk at Capitol and Warner and Sony; it did not get him into rooms with the writers he wanted, and that took years. The dry spells did not stop when the hits started either. He describes still hitting stretches of wondering whether anything will ever get cut again, and then the phone rings. Streaming took the physical sales out from under everybody, and his advice to anyone moving to Nashville is that they had better love it, because the money is not the reason to go.

He writes with Bill Anderson two or three times a month, a man who had his first hit in the late fifties and still says he is learning. Between them they have landed cuts with Dolly Parton, Rhonda Vincent and Uncle Kracker. Four of Tomberlin's songs are on Willie Nelson's next record, three of them written with Nelson and Buddy Cannon. He has written with Loretta Lynn and Mac Davis, and helped finish something Hank Williams Jr. had started, which matters because Hank does not co-write with anybody. His advice to young writers is to find one person you connect with and grow alongside them. He says the friendships matter more to him than any award he has won.