Half a century ago, a 17-year-old named Harold Ray Ragsdale traveled from his Georgia home to Nashville, Tenn., and recorded a song called “Silver Bracelet” that he’d written and first recorded in his high school cafeteria.

He then returned home, graduated from high school and spent the next three years studying classical piano and music theory and composition at Georgia State University. His junior year he went back to Nashville, this time for the long haul.

“I started recording in 1957, and I haven’t really done anything else since,” Ray Stevens, as he’s better known, told MyBestYears.com in 2007. “I’ve never had a ‘real job,’ as my dad used to say.”

Stevens says he knew from the time he was a 6-year-old taking piano lessons that his life was going to be about making music. At 15 he and some friends started a band, The Barons, that played at dances, parties, civic club events and similar gigs. By that time his family had moved from his hometown of Clarkdale, Ga., to Albany, Ga. Stevens moved again, to Atlanta, for his senior year of high school.

In Atlanta he met Georgia Tech football announcer Bill Lowery, who had recently started a music publishing company and was recruiting artists. “I went out to Mr. Lowery’s house, and I said, ‘My name is Ray Ragsdale, and I’m going to write songs for you,’” Stevens told MyBestYears.com. “He said, ‘OK, lad, go to it.’ Amazingly, when I brought him my first one, he actually liked it.”

Lowery called Ken Nelson at Capitol Records, who signed Stevens to one of Capitol’s small labels, Prep Records. And thus Stevens recorded “Silver Bracelet” that year in Nashville.

Except he wasn’t known as Ray Stevens at that point. Nelson “didn’t like my name and changed it. He was famous for doing that,” Stevens explained on “The Bill Miller Show” in 2007. “He liked zippy names, but I told him he’d make my mother mad if he changed my name so he said, ‘What was your mother’s maiden name?’ And I said, ‘Stevens,’ and he said, ‘That’s it.’”

“Silver Bracelet” turned out to be popular in Atlanta but nowhere else. Still, the process of recording it led to his meeting Nashville industry insiders and was an important stepping stone for his career.

Stevens’ career has included more than a few accolades. He has won two Grammy Awards, sold more than 25 million albums and 4 million videos, and performed a slew of hit songs. This Memorial Day he released a new album, “One For The Road,” a collection of 15 of his original songs. The album, marketed as a trucker record, is being sold exclusively at Pilot Travel Centers through this summer.

“I’ve been on the road since that bulldog on the hood of a big Mack truck was just a puppy,” Stevens says. “I hope this album will provide folks comfort and laughs and make the miles go faster.”

Stevens’ contribution to the music industry is nothing if not eclectic.

His first national Top 40 hit, in 1961, was “Jeremiah Peabody’s Poly Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills” – possibly the world’s longest song title, Stevens jokes.

He recorded his first No. 1 hit in 1970 after being hired as the host of the summer replacement show for NBC’s variety show “The Andy Williams Show.” “I needed a very special song for the program,” he told MyBestYears.com. “I went down in my basement for about three days. I had crumpled paper all over the place. And suddenly the idea for the song came to me. I wrote it in maybe 45 minutes.” Besides topping the pop charts, “Everything Is Beautiful” earned Stevens his first Grammy, for Male Vocalist of the Year.

Many of his hits fall into the “novelty” category, such as 1974’s “The Streak,” which Stevens was inspired to write after reading an article about the college student fad of streaking. The song consists of three “news segments” reporting on streaker sightings; if the phrase “Don’t look, Ethel!” rings a bell for you, it’s because of Stevens.

The song was released five days after photographer and art gallery owner Robert Opel streaked across the stage of the 1974 Academy Awards during Elizabeth Taylor’s introduction. “The Streak” hit No. 1 on the pop charts and No. 3 on the country charts; it’s still the song people mention to him most often, he says, and it sits at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 Country Songs of All Time.

Only a year later he received his second Grammy for his bluegrass arrangement of a remake of the Erroll Gardner and Johnny Burke classic “Misty.” In 1980 he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Stevens joined MCA Records as a “country comedy” performer in 1984 and from then on focused on novelty song albums. This niche included songs like “The Streak,” “Harry the Hairy Ape” and “Shriner’s Convention.” (“I was up all night in a hotel where [Shriners] were headquartered for a convention one year, and I just knew that I had to write a song about those guys,” Stevens told Bill Miller.)

A tradeoff of Stevens’ shift to the novelty niche was that most of his songs were neither breaking into the Top 40 nor getting much radio play, but he maintained solid sales and an enthusiastic fan base. Fans voted him Comedian of the Year with the Music City News Awards for nine straight years – 1986 through 1994.

Since the 1990s, some of Stevens’ work has been distributed as video compilations. “Comedy Video Classics,” released in 1992, featured eight music videos and won awards including the 1993 Billboard Home Video of the Year. In the course of his career Stevens also has appeared in two movies and worked with stars such as Elvis Presley, Patti Page and Dolly Parton.

“Truthfully, I just record what I want to,” he told MyBestYears.com. “The industry is constantly changing, but if I do material that really appeals to me, I feel like others out there will like it, too.”

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July 1st, 2009 | Category: Featured
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