Jerry Salley

He graduated from Chillicothe High School in 1978 and earned a degree in business administration at Ohio University in Athens. While in college he sang regularly on the WMNI Country Cavalcade, a Saturday-night radio show broadcast from the Southern Hotel in Columbus. He moved to Nashville in 1982 and joined the cast of the Country Music, USA show at the Opryland theme park, where he performed for five years in a row, sometimes playing the comedian Rod Brasfield. In 1984 Porter Wagoner invited him to make his debut on the Grand Ole Opry, where he has since appeared a number of times.

His early hits as a writer included “Breakin’ New Ground” for Wild Rose and “I’m Gonna Take That Mountain” for Reba McEntire, along with John Anderson’s “I Fell in the Water” and Wade Hayes’s “How Do You Sleep at Night.” “His Strength Is Perfect,” which he wrote with Steven Curtis Chapman and Chapman recorded, won the Gospel Music Association’s Dove Award for Inspirational Song of the Year in 1990. In 1995 he and Carl Jackson went to New York to sing with Linda Ronstadt on the Late Show with David Letterman, Regis and Kathie Lee and the Today show. With Jackson and Larry Cordle he recorded “You’re Running Wild” for Livin’, Lovin’, Losin’: Songs of the Louvin Brothers, which won the Grammy for country album of the year and the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2004.

His first album under his own name, New Songs, Old Friends, released by Mountain Home in January 2007, was a set of his own songs sung with artists who had recorded his work, among them Vince Gill, Doyle Lawson, Del McCoury, Rhonda Vincent and Ricky Skaggs, with Bryan Sutton, Adam Steffey, Stuart Duncan and Rob Ickes among the pickers. His later albums came out on his own Very Jerry label, from Showing My Age (2012) and the bluegrass gospel set Gospel from My Grassroots (2016) to Front Porch Philosophy (2017), Bridges and Backroads (2020) and The Songwriter (May 2024), which holds only songs he wrote alone. He was one of the singers and producers of “Life Goes On,” the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2012.

Bluegrass bands recorded his songs in growing numbers. “The Butler Brothers,” written with Donna Ulisse, is on the Del McCoury Band’s The Streets of Baltimore, which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2014. He co-wrote three songs on the SteelDrivers’ The Muscle Shoals Recordings, which also won that Grammy, and one of them, “Long Way Down,” topped the bluegrass charts at the start of 2016; that year he was also a co-writer on Chris Stapleton’s Grammy-winning Traveller, and he signed with the Nashville publisher Banner Music. Other bluegrass artists who have recorded his songs include the Osborne Brothers, Doyle Lawson, Rhonda Vincent, the Lonesome River Band, Balsam Range, the Seldom Scene and IIIrd Tyme Out.

In 2018 he became creative and A&R director of Billy Blue Records, a Nashville bluegrass label affiliated with Daywind Music Group, and he produces many of its records. He was named the IBMA’s Songwriter of the Year in 2018 and 2019, and in 2019 the IBMA also gave its Gospel Recorded Performance award to the title track of Gonna Sing, Gonna Shout, sung by Claire Lynch, which he produced; the project brought him a Grammy nomination as producer. He was associate producer of Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers’ “The Guitar Song” with Del McCoury, the IBMA’s Collaborative Recording of the Year in 2019, and he sang with Dolly Parton, Carl Jackson, Larry Cordle and Bradley Walker on “In the Sweet By and By,” which won both the Collaborative Recording and the Gospel Recorded Performance awards in 2022. He was nominated for the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019. In 2024 he was inducted into Chillicothe High School’s Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame in June and into the Ohio Country Music Hall of Fame on 10 August.