Emory Gordy Jr.

He was born Emory Lee Gordy Jr. in Atlanta on 25 December 1944. He started piano at four and trumpet at six, and went on to banjo, euphonium, guitar and ukulele; in high school he played in string bands, Dixieland bands and a Top 40 group, and he later studied at what is now Middle Georgia State University and at Georgia State University, playing French horn in the concert band.

His studio career began in Atlanta in 1964, when he filled in for a Tommy Roe concert and the producer Joe South called him for sessions the following week. He went on to record with Roe, Mac Davis, the Tams and Freddy Weller, toured with Lou Christie and Billy Joe Royal, arranged Roy Orbison’s “Walk On,” and wrote the Classics IV hit “Traces” with Buddy Buie and J. R. Cobb. Early in 1970 he moved to Los Angeles. He toured as Neil Diamond’s bass player in 1971, and in 1972 he played bass on Elvis Presley’s “Separate Ways” and “Burning Love,” touring with Presley’s TCB Band in 1973. With TCB players James Burton, Glen D. Hardin and Ronnie Tutt he backed Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris on Parsons’s Grievous Angel.

In the mid-1970s he was an original member of Harris’s Hot Band, with Burton, Hardin, John Ware, Rodney Crowell and Hank DeVito, and stayed with her until 1977. He kept working for her on record: he played bass on Roses in the Snow (1980), alongside Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice and Jerry Douglas, and in the small acoustic band of Vince Gill and Carl Jackson that cut her gospel album Angel Band (1987) live in the studio. Between Los Angeles sessions for the Bellamy Brothers, Billy Joel and Tom Petty he played in the Cherry Bombs, the band of Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash, with Tony Brown, Richard Bennett and Vince Gill. In 1979 he joined John Denver’s touring band. In 1982 he made Here Today, a one-off bluegrass album with David Grisman, Herb Pedersen, Jim Buchanan and Gill, released by Rounder in 1983.

In 1983 he gave up touring to become a staff producer at MCA Records in Nashville. There he co-produced Steve Earle’s Guitar Town (1986) and Exit 0 (1987) with Tony Brown, produced George Jones’s Walls Can Fall, whose “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair” was the CMA’s Vocal Event of the Year, and produced Bill Monroe’s Southern Flavor (1988), on which he also played bass on three songs; it won Monroe the first Grammy given for bluegrass. He also worked with Nicolette Larson, Riders in the Sky, Brenda Lee and Patty Loveless. As an independent producer he went on to make Vince Gill’s Turn Me Loose and The Things That Matter, Alabama’s In Pictures (1995), and records by Aaron Tippin, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Delbert McClinton.

His longest partnership has been with Loveless. For Mountain Soul (Epic, 2001), recorded in Franklin, Tennessee, between January and March 2001, he produced and co-wrote several songs with her, including “Rise Up Lazarus,” “Pretty Little Miss” and “Soul of Constant Sorrow.” A bluegrass Christmas album, Bluegrass & White Snow, followed in 2002, and he produced Mountain Soul II (Saguaro Road, 2009), which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2011. He was active as a producer until the mid-2000s and has since been semi-retired.

He was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1992, and in 2015 Middle Georgia State University named him its first Alumnus of the Year.