Jerry Salley

Jerry Salley has had more than 600 songs recorded across bluegrass, gospel and country, and he runs three record labels.

Salley sat down with the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast at the Fernandina Beach Songwriter Festival about an hour before he was due on stage. It was his first year at this particular festival, though he plays a lot of them, and he had taught a songwriting workshop there the day before. Brad Banyas said he would not try to summarize the career, on the grounds that Salley was the one who had lived it.

His father was a banjo player, never professional, who hauled him around to every pickin' party he could find. Salley won a talent show at ten singing Johnny Cash's I Still Miss Someone, and that was the hook. Tom T. Hall's records convinced him songwriting was a job a person could have, and years later he was sitting in Hall's living room as a friend. His first Nashville job was at Opryland USA, in a show where performers imitated country artists, and there he got close to a young singer from Paducah, Kentucky named Steve Chapman who wanted gospel while Salley wanted country. The song the two of them wrote, His Strength Is Perfect, went into the 2009 Baptist Hymnal, and Chapman became Steven Curtis Chapman. Salley signed a publishing deal with Chappell and later EMI. He was the second writer Chris Stapleton ever sat down with in Nashville, and the two of them wrote Outlaw State of Mind for Traveller with Ronnie Bowman, and It Takes a Woman on Stapleton's current record.

He wanted Belmont for its music business degree and the family could not afford out of state tuition, so his father sent him to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He lasted a year as a voice major. At his first piano lesson the instructor, Juilliard trained, asked who his favorite pianist was, and Salley said Ronnie Milsap and got a blank look. He ran down the hill to his dorm and called his parents from a payphone to say he did not know what he was doing there. He switched to a four year business degree, and about four weeks after graduating in 1982 he was living in Nashville, where in his own words he starved to death for several months while knocking on publishing doors on Music Row.

When country moved into what got called bro country, Salley tried to write it so he could stay on the radio, and says it just was not in him. He went back to the bluegrass he grew up on. Independent acts he produced kept telling him they wished he had a label, so in 2018 he partnered with a long running gospel company near his home in Hendersonville and started Billy Blue Records. There are three labels now. His album The Believer came out the night before this interview, and he woke up to find it had the number one song on the bluegrass gospel chart.