John Jennings
John Jennings was a guitarist and record producer based in the Washington, D.C., area, best known for his long partnership with Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose records he produced and played on from her 1987 debut onward. He also produced and played for John Gorka, Janis Ian, BeauSoleil and others, worked on records by Tony Rice and by Auldridge, Reid & Coleman, and made solo albums of his own.
He was born John Edward Jennings in Harrisonburg, Virginia, on 22 November 1953, and as a teenager was already playing in bands around Washington. He played guitar of every kind, acoustic, electric, slide, lap, steel and baritone, as well as drums, bass and keyboards. Before he met Carpenter he played guitar in Bill Holland’s band Rent’s Due, then led his own rock band, Big Yankee Dollar, as singer and guitarist, and in the early 1980s made and produced commercial jingles.
Bill Danoff of the Starland Vocal Band introduced him to Carpenter in 1982, and the two began performing together around Washington. Work they began in his basement studio led to Hometown Girl, her 1987 debut on Columbia, and he co-produced State of the Heart (1989) and Shooting Straight in the Dark (1990). In all he produced and played on at least eight of her albums and eleven top-ten singles, and as co-producer of “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” he received a Grammy nomination for record of the year.
His work reached into bluegrass and acoustic music. On Tony Rice’s Native American (Rounder, 1988) he played electric guitar on “Nothin’ Like a Hundred Miles” and “Brother to the Wind” and guitar on “Summer Wages,” and he produced those two James Taylor and Ian Tyson songs for the album. On Auldridge, Reid & Coleman’s High Time (Sugar Hill, 1989) he played piano on one track and lead guitar on another. Among his other productions were BeauSoleil’s La Danse de la Vie (1993), John Gorka’s Out of the Valley (1994) and Janis Ian’s Revenge (1995), and he played on albums by Cheryl Wheeler, the Indigo Girls, Robin & Linda Williams and George Jones’s The Bradley Barn Sessions (1994). He also served as president of the Washington chapter of the Recording Academy.
His own records began with Buddy (Vanguard, 1997) and I Belong to You (Vanguard, 1998), and he made six solo albums in all. He left another project unfinished when he died at a hospice center in Rockville, Maryland, on 16 October 2015, at the age of 61. The Washington Area Music Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame that year.
