Jim McBride, a former postal worker from Alabama whose ability to write catchy country songs inflected with honky-tonk flair resulted in a long string of hits for artists like Alan Jackson, Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty, died on Jan. 7 in Huntsville, Ala. He was 78.
His death, at a hospital, was from complications of a fall at his home in Hazel Green, a community north of Huntsville, his son Brent said.
Mr. McBride was a leading figure on Nashville’s Music Row in the 1980s and early ’90s, when musicians like Mr. Jackson, Dwight Yoakam and the Judds rejected the pop influences of the late 1970s and ’80s in favor of traditional country styles and instruments.
His biggest hit, “Chattahoochee,” which he wrote with Mr. Jackson in 1992, is a case in point. A throwback to the honky-tonk sounds of the 1950s, it is propelled forward by an onslaught of piano, fiddle, steel guitar, an irresistible drumbeat and lyrics that hark back to rural adolescence:
Well, way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie.
We laid rubber on the Georgia asphalt
We got a little crazy but we never got caught.
The song was Mr. Jackson’s first No. 1 hit on the Billboard U.S. Hot Country Songs chart; it was also Billboard’s top country song of 1993. It won a brace of awards, including Song of the Year from the Country Music Association.
By then, Mr. McBride was a Nashville veteran, having written hit songs for Mr. Twitty, Johnny Lee and the band Alabama. Over his career, more than 80 acts recorded his songs.
But it was his relationship with Mr. Jackson that brought him the most success. Mr. Jackson recorded 14 of Mr. McBride’s songs across five albums in the early 1990s, the peak of the neo-traditional country sound.
Deric Ruttan, who with his wife, Margaret Ruttan, wrote several songs with Mr. McBride in the early 2000s, said in an interview: “He was quiet, soft-spoken and so very country. He was a brilliant lyricist, but he wasn’t showy.”
Jimmy Ray McBride was born on April 28, 1947, in Huntsville, Ala., to Alvin McBride, a postal worker, and Helen (Hillis) McBride, who managed the home.
He grew up listening to WSM, a radio station based in Nashville that broadcast the Grand Ole Opry every week, and his mother encouraged his love of music.
He started writing songs in high school and continued after graduating in 1965, writing in his free time once he got a job working alongside his father at the post office. When he was 21, he sold his pistol to pay for a Yamaha guitar. An uncle taught him to play.
Every few months, he would drive up Interstate 65 to Nashville, where another Huntsville native, Curly Putman, had started a music publishing company. Mr. Putman gave him feedback and encouragement, but told Mr. McBride that he was out of sync with the times.
“The first song I played him, he said, ‘This song would have been a hit 30 years ago,’” Mr. McBride told American Songwriter magazine. “And I thought, ‘Oh no, I have 30 years to catch up on.’”
He spent most of the 1970s struggling to get noticed, putting aside his guitar for years at a time. Several of his songs were recorded by the Hager Twins, a musical-comedy duo who played some of them during regular appearances on the TV variety show “Hee-Haw,” but they didn’t get Mr. McBride noticed.
Finally, in 1980, he broke through. Mr. Twitty recorded his song “A Bridge That Just Won’t Burn,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard country chart in early 1981.
Mr. McBride knew that to advance further, he had to be in Nashville. But his mother was dying of cancer, and he wanted to stay with her. She insisted that he go anyway.
“What she always told me was she wanted me to be good,” he told The Huntsville Times in 1994.
It wasn’t easy. He was writing music in the vein of Hank Williams and Buck Owens, at a time when “Urban Cowboy” pop-country was at its zenith.
It wasn’t until 1987 that he began to rack up regular hits. That year, Mr. Jennings recorded “Rose in Paradise,” which Mr. McBride wrote with Stewart Harris. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart.
The next year, Mr. McBride noticed a lanky young man in cheap boots and a white cowboy hat hanging around the lobby of his office.
It was Mr. Jackson, who had just moved to town from Georgia. He was a fan of Mr. McBride’s, and one day asked Mr. McBride to write a song for him.
The two hit it off. Their first song, “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow,” peaked at No. 2 in 1990. More hits followed: Along with “Chattahoochee,” the pair wrote “(Who Says) You Can’t Have It All,” “Someday” and “If It Ain’t One Thing (It’s You).”
Along with his son Brent, Mr. McBride is survived by another son, Wes; his wife, Jeanne (Ivey) McBride; a stepdaughter, Amy Rawlinson; a granddaughter; three stepgrandchildren; and a sister, Teresa Portzer.
Mr. McBride was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2017.
One of the keys to his success, he said, was not trying to imitate the flowery language of someone like Kris Kristofferson.
“Another thing I had to unlearn was that I wasn’t Kristofferson,” he told American Songwriter. “I cut back on the poetic stuff. I’ve learned to write songs in the moment, not the great American novel in the song.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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