Jerry Kennedy, the guitarist, producer and record executive who had a major hand in shaping the music being made in Nashville in the 1960s and ’70s, including chart-topping hits by Roger Miller, Roy Orbison, Tom T. Hall and Tammy Wynette, died on Wednesday in hospice care in Franklin, Tenn. He was 85.
Mr. Kennedy’s death, from congestive heart failure, was confirmed by his son Gordon, the guitarist who co-wrote Eric Clapton’s Grammy Award-winning single “Change the World.”
Mr. Kennedy was not associated so much with a particular style of music as with a sensibility or approach — a knack for hearing what was unique in an artist and capturing that uniqueness in the studio.
As a producer and guitarist for Mr. Hall, a master storyteller whose songs needed little adornment, Mr. Kennedy employed uncluttered arrangements while injecting bluesy impeccably timed accents on Dobro resonator guitar.
On “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” a wry sendup of small-town hypocrisy that topped the country and pop charts for Jeannie C. Riley in 1968, his reverberating Dobro riffs echo the indignation of the song’s embattled protagonist. His empathetic guitar intro on Ms. Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” a crossover hit from the same year, heralds her painful admission, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.”
“Jerry is truly one of the lead architects in the creation of the Nashville sound,” Marty Stuart, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, said in an interview with Vintage Guitar magazine posted on Facebook.
Mr. Stuart went on to cite Mr. Kennedy’s work with Ms. Riley and Mr. Hall, as well as with Jerry Lee Lewis, whose recordings under Mr. Kennedy’s supervision he considers to be “some of the greatest country music that has ever been made.”
A member of Nashville’s A-Team of first-call session musicians, Mr. Kennedy appeared on several tracks on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde On Blonde” while also unleashing the ferocious guitar solo that opens Mr. Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” a No. 1 pop hit for three weeks in 1964. He worked on many of the R&B records made in Nashville in the ’60s, notably Clyde McPhatter’s “Lover Please,” a Top 20 pop hit on which he conducted the string section and played guitar.
Mr. Kennedy’s biggest coup as a talent scout was signing Roger Miller to a recording contract and producing his wacky mid-60s singles “Dang Me” and “King of the Road.” Both records became No. 1 country and Top 10 pop hits and earned multiple Grammy Awards.
Mr. Kennedy credited the producer Shelby Singleton, an early supporter who hired him as a staff producer for the Smash subsidiary of Mercury Records, with giving him the freedom to pursue projects that might have been considered too edgy for Nashville at the time.
“Shelby let me go in and come up with stuff that was different,” Mr. Kennedy told Vintage Guitar, alluding to, among others, his sessions with Mr. Lewis and Mr. Miller.
“I had an ‘in’ that a lot of players did not have,” he said.
Jerry Glenn Kennedy was born on Aug. 10, 1940, in Shreveport, La., the eldest of three children of Gordon W. and Essie (Laird) Kennedy. His father, a deputy sheriff, was killed in the line of duty while Jerry and his sisters were young children. Their mother worked in a bakery.
His parents bought Jerry his first guitar, a Sears Silvertone model, when he was still a boy. He soon began taking lessons from Tillman Franks, a bass player and guitarist for the Louisiana Hayride, the popular radio barn dance where he attended performances by both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley.
He signed a recording contract with RCA as an adolescent, releasing several minor singles (billed as Jerry Glenn) in a teen idol vein that featured Chet Atkins on guitar. About the time he graduated from high school Mr. Kennedy joined the house band of the Hayride, where he met his first wife, Linda Brannon, who was a singer on the show. (Their marriage ended in divorce.)
The couple moved to Nashville in 1961, with Mr. Kennedy taking a staff job with Mercury Records and playing guitar on No. 1 hit singles like Leroy Van Dyke’s “Walk On By” and Elvis Presley’s “Good Luck Charm.”
He remained with Mercury, including 15 years as head of the label, until 1984, when he left to start his own company, JK Productions. After a decade or so as an independent producer, still in his 50s, he retired from the music business.
In 2007 Mr. Kennedy was inducted, as a member of the inaugural class, into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville. The performance space at the Hall of Fame is named the “Jerry Kennedy Theater” in his honor.
Besides his son Gordon, Mr. Kennedy is survived by his wife, Delores Dea-Kennedy; two younger sons, Bryan and Shelby (both hit songwriters); three grandchildren; two great-grandchildren, and his sisters, Barbara Blaylock and Kathy Price. (His second marriage, to the television director Gail Liberti-Kennedy, ended in divorce.)
Despite playing on over 1,000 recordings — and routinely being recognized as a member — Mr. Kennedy never really considered himself part of the A-Team, Nashville’s elite aggregation of studio musicians.
“I have been honored in that respect,” he acknowledged in a 2010 interview with The Steel Guitar Forum, “but I don’t consider myself part of it because I thought the A-Team was a group of players that were involved with session work before I got to town.
“From the time I arrived in Nashville I was immediately kind of thrown in with them, so some people have considered me that way. I do not myself.”
The post Jerry Kennedy, Who Helped Define Music in Nashville, Dies at 85 appeared first on New York Times.
