Scott Billington
Scott Billington is a record producer and harmonica player who joined Rounder Records in 1976 and became its staff producer and later its vice president of A&R, making blues, soul, Cajun, zydeco and New Orleans records. Three of his productions brought their artists a first Grammy: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown’s Alright Again!, which was also Rounder’s first Grammy, Irma Thomas’s After the Rain and Bobby Rush’s Porcupine Meat.
He grew up in the Boston area and started out playing harmonica in bar bands around New England. After a job in a record store he went to work for Rounder, then based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first in sales and then writing liner notes and designing album covers, before moving into A&R and production. In 1978 he and the writer Peter Guralnick edited live tapes into the Johnny Shines album Hey Ba-Ba-Re-Bop. Alright Again!, which he co-produced, won the Grammy in 1982, and in the mid-1980s he started a Modern New Orleans Masters series for the label.
Over the next three decades he produced more than a hundred records, among them albums by Irma Thomas, Johnny Adams, Solomon Burke, Charlie Rich, James Booker, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the Soul Rebels, and projects with Robert Jr. Lockwood, Sleepy LaBeef and Marcia Ball; his records drew eleven Grammy nominations. He sometimes sat in on harmonica at the sessions he ran, and he plays on Hazel Dickens’s “Only the Lonely” from her Rounder album By the Sweat of My Brow (1983). He has also recorded on harmonica with Irma Thomas, Boozoo Chavis and Sleepy LaBeef and toured with Nathan Williams and the Zydeco Cha Chas.
Porcupine Meat (Rounder, September 2016) was his last album as Rounder’s staff producer, and it won the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in 2017. In June 2016 he received the Slim Harpo Music Ambassador award in Baton Rouge. He lives in New Orleans and performs with his wife, the children’s musician and author Johnette Downing, as Johnette and Scott, and he wrote about the artists he recorded in Making Tracks: A Record Producer’s Southern Roots Music Journey (University Press of Mississippi).
