Steve Bogard

Steve Bogard has written a number one hit in every decade for the last forty years.

SALTYmf caught him at the Fernandina Beach Songwriters Festival, across the street from the river, on the second songwriters festival the show had covered. Brad Banyas had come into the music world from outside it and was still working out how songwriters actually get paid. Bogard, who spent thirteen years as president of NSAI and has testified at the Copyright Royalty Board, was the right man to ask.

He had a band in Tampa at twelve or thirteen that played a local television show called Hightime every two weeks, a Dick Clark sort of thing. The director told him the crowd would like the performances better if some of the songs were his own, so he started writing at thirteen or fourteen. At sixteen or seventeen he took the band to Memphis, met Larry Rogers and cut a record for Scepter that produced a couple of singles and a little regional success. When the band broke up he went back to Memphis, wrote with Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, and had a top twenty R&B record at nineteen. Then Miami with the Dixie Flyers, a publishing deal through Tom Dowd, and cuts on Dee Dee Warwick and Delaney and Bonnie while Derek and the Dominos were cutting Layla in the same building. He reckons he was writing two or three hundred songs a year.

He stayed in Miami about twelve years, doing jingles and raising two kids. Around 1982 he opened a trade magazine at Criteria and found a song he had written eleven years earlier sitting in the top ten, recorded by Marty Robbins. Nobody had told him. His wife Beverly asked whether he wanted to be rolling his Super Reverb into doctors' houses at fifty, playing cover songs. They put a four year old, an eight year old, eight rooms of furniture and a black lab into a U-Haul with a big wheel strapped to the back and drove to Nashville with no gig and a couple of grand in the bank. His first writing draw there was fifty dollars a month, which at least bought him demos. Beverly took a job at Red Lobster. They struggled a year or two before the cuts started coming.

A couple of days before the interview, Bogard's son was at a job site selling whole house water treatments when the homeowner's wife found out whose son he was. Her favorite song, she said, is If You Ever Feel Like Loving Me Again by Clay Walker, which was a chart record rather than a big hit. She and her husband had split in December after seventeen years and got back together the following September. She plays it in the car every morning on the way to work. That is the reason Bogard keeps turning up at festivals like this one. Rory Bourke, one of the writers who let him hang around while he was on fifty dollars a month, introduced him at his Hall of Fame induction in October.