About a month ago, a fellow named Jerry Salley released a video, “I Take the Back Roads”, telling about how he takes the back roads when he goes and visits friends and relatives in his hometown of Chillicothe Ohio. It should be noted that Mr. Salley is a major force in Bluegrass music as a singer/songwriter, producer and record label executive. Quite an impressive resume if you were to look it up on the internet.

The video caught quite a few of the people from Chillicothe Ohio on my Facebook feed by surprise. None more than me. My surprise came from quite a few years ago when a kid and his mother were ushered into the radio studio where I was working, asking if I would play a record he had just made. Sure. Why not? The owner’s mother ushered the kid and his mother into the studio, with the unstated request that I needed to play the record.

The record itself was a forgettable ballad written by a pair of Tin Pan Alley writers and picked up by either the kid or his mother to record in Nashville in what was likely a demo pressed by a “Vanity” studio. The point was that the record was made in Nashville, a city which had (and still has) a certain cachet to it as a place where “Anyone can make it here!” While the song was forgettable, the kid had a voice, and he was local. We played the record a number of times before it wound up in my collection of curiosities and one-offs.

There was at least thirty years between by brief meeting with Jerry Salley and my running into his name again through some reference on the internet. A lot of water passed under the bridge in those years.

I had a relatively lackluster career as a radio “disc-jockey” during many of those years and have had contact with quite a few wanna-be singers who had gone to a studio to make a demo record. They were also happy to give me one of their recordings in hopes that I would play their hopeful hits on the air to launch them to fame and fortune. Most of those recordings made it as far as the trash bin.

One of the stops I made was to a radio station along the Ohio river where I went for an interview. As part of the tour of the facility, I was shown a studio filled with junk, assuming that was where “Marconi dropped his stuff and ran.” (An inside radio joke when encountering a radio station abounding with old, outdated equipment.) I was told that at one time the radio station had a side business of recording anyone who came through the door wanting to make a record. A little further research confirmed what I had been told. The station in question was one which had been a major force in that part of the Ohio River Valley back in the day. You pays your money, you sings into the microphone and you get yer record which the station would play a time or two before the next aspiring singer came along.

No doubt that there are hundreds of other radio stations out there which at one time or another appealed to the vanity trade… not to mention more than a few independent studios which do the same thing. One of them was set up a few miles down the road from my former hometown by a fellow who made ends meet by being a substitute teacher on the side.

Joe Waters spent quite a bit of money and time setting up what he named Appalachia Sound Studios in the little burg of Massieville Ohio. While he had a few people using his facility, he was always on the lookout for other avenues to generate revenue. At one point, he composed and tried to sell commercial jingles. Sometime in the eighties, he appeared to be on the cutting edge, opening a video store – Video Avenue – renting VHS movies for home use. His biggest success came about when he set up a school to teach people how to run a recording studio.

As I said, a lot of water passed under the bridge between the time Mr. Salley and his mother visited me while I was working at WBEX in Chillicothe Ohio and the video he made showing bits and pieces of Chillicothe as a backdrop to a very good tune he wrote and sang. If there is a point to be made, not everyone hits the “Big Time”, but those who do are the people who keep at it long enough to see their efforts pay off.

Of course, I would be remiss in my duty if I didn’t include the link to his song: https://youtu.be/nB1MTboYR2s

Be Seeing You!