Bucky Lindsey

"Bucky Lindsey takes you back to those good ole days of sweet soul music with his debut album. A great songwriter with a rich voice that could've only come from the South, Bucky shows his skills as a storyteller and a singer in the rich tradition of Clarence Carter. You'll need four of these CDs. One for yourself and three for your friends who will keep on stealing this fine piece of work from the Gulf Coast. I can almost smell the shrimp and salt water coming through your speakers every time I listen."
- Novelist Ace Atkins

Thousands of aspiring songwriters have followed their dreams to Nashville in hopes of a career in Country music. Almost as many have returned home cowboy hat-in-hand, their savings exhausted and spirits broken. Bucky Lindsey was one of the few to beat the odds and survive.


Though today, Lindsey's catalog spans several formats, with cuts by artists such as Ray Price, John Anderson, George Jones, Koko Taylor, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Solomon Burke, his path to success was not necessarily an easy one.

It all started in San Francisco where Lindsey met Shel Silverstein. Lindsey, a bassist, had been touring and singing with different bands for almost a decade.

"When I met Shel, I saw that there was another way to make a living in the music business besides playing six nights a week and living on the road" said Lindsey. "So, fresh out of a divorce, I just decided one day to move to Nashville. It was 1973. I had absolutely nothing. All I had was my ass, and that had a hole in it," Lindsey laughs. "But I knew I was going to stay no matter what. Music was all I knew how to do, and I didn't want to play the club scene anymore."

His first few months on Music Row were somewhat typical of a migrant songwriter. He played on lower Broadway and slept on the floor of country-hit songwriter Wayne Walker's publishing company. He would later discover Mom's Boarding House on 17th Street. A great deal by today's standards at $20 a week, with one hot meal a day and an inevitable portion of Jello for dessert. In 1975, Lindsey married Pamela Korcey, whom he credits with giving him the love and support necessary for him to continue as a writer, and things got better.

"After I'd been there a couple of years, Joe Allen got me my start writing songs for Combine Music. My first cut was"Southern Belle" on Arlene Harden. I thought I had it made. But back then, they were paying less than 3 cents a record, and a successful Country record only sold about 250,000 units."

Even so, Lindsey found a lot to inspire him. "It was like Paris in the twenties.There were people in every apartment building and office being creative, writing songs and showing them to each other. All of the publishing houses were wide open in those days, and you could walk into any of them and pitch your song. Every time one of us had a little success, it would give the rest of us enough hope to continue on," Lindsey remembers. "You didn't really think about how tough it was back then, because everything was so exciting. Music Row has lost that today."

The comraderie so prevalent in Nashville during that time led Lindsey to forge several lifelong friendships, among them, Larry Shell in 1976.

"We both wrote for Joe Allen's publishing company back then. Always country songs. But Larry was also from the South and loved R&B too, so we wrote a few R&B songs for ourselves, even though there was no market for it in Nashville. We'd write a song, and then go and shoot pinball at Rotier's. If you beat the pinball machine, old man Rotier would pay you a nickel a game. We got so good at it that we'd usually win enough to keep us in cheeseburgers and beer for the day."

Larry Shell, a recent CMA award winner, went on to achieve considerable success in the Country music industry, as Lindsey gravitated more and more towards his first love--Rhythm and Blues-- bolstered by the inspiration of other lifelong friends he met during that period.

"I was walking down to Troy Seals' office one day, when I met Lonnie Mack. He was parked in an old Bluebird schoolbus behind Quadrophonic studios where he was recording Home at Last for Capitol records. He asked me if I liked homemade wine. I said 'yes' and soon after he began playing his guitar and we started singing together. I didn't even know who he was. We were friends from that day forward. I wrote lots of cuts with Lonnie, and played all over the world with him in his band for years."

Lindsey continues, "It was also around that time that Chris Etheridge introduced me to Dan Penn. Dan showed me that there was some hope for an R&B writer in Nashville. Dan and I went on to write several songs with Lonnie and others. I think of of all of the projects I've ever been involved in, my work with Dan and Carson Whitsett on Dan's Blue Nite Lounge record was the most fun, and one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had as a writer."

In 1978, Lindsey scored his first country hit on Ray Price, entitled, "It Don't Hurt Me Half as Bad." But as he would soon discover, even a top ten country hit wasn't a guarantee of financial success. "Ray Price was on Dimension records, an indie label owned by Ray Pennington. As soon as the record hit #3, Dimension declared bankruptcy, and then re-opened the next day under another name, reissuing the record. So I never got a dime....and Combine kept the publishing on it, even though I was the one that got Ray to cut it. That combination of experiences made me determined to start my own publishing company, and control my own songs."

Soon after, Lindsey established Hoy Lindsey Music, and went on to achieve success with a variety of Country, Blues and R&B cuts as an independent publisher.

In 1991, Lindsey went back on the road with Lonnie Mack, after suffering a personal tragedy when his wife Pam was the victim of a fatal car crash.

"When I was in Norway with Lonnie, I was walking down the street and heard Etta James's version of "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" coming from an open window. It was a moment that doesn't come along too often in this business. Knowing that my songs are being sung half-way around the world reminded me that my songs will go on, and that maybe it was all worth it. There's some satisfaction in that," he says.

Lindsey also takes satisfaction from the fact that he has survived as an independent and pursued his own muse. "There's some gratification in recording your songs and putting them out on your own label the way they were written," Lindsey adds, speaking of his debut CD entitled Back Bay Blues, on his own Gulftone Records label.

If there are a million stories in the naked City, one gets the impression that Bucky Lindsey knows, and has lived, more than a few of them. And yet, if he had to do it all over again, there's not a lot that he would change. His advice for aspiring songwriters: "Never give up, follow you heart, and be prepared for some rough roads. But if you have the gift and stick with it long enough, you can't help but have some measure of success." - Lisa Best