On Wednesday, the Nashville artist won CMA’s musician of the year for the seventh straight time. The ‘exclamation point’ comes Saturday when he plays a Pinnacle Center benefit for music education.
Hearing Music in His Head All of His Life: Award-winner Mac McNally plays Hudsonville on Saturday.
Mac McAnally might not ever experience a bigger week as a country musician and songwriter than this one.
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It started with Nashville’s BMI Country Awards Show on Tuesday, followed the next evening by the much-hyped and nationally televised Country Music Association Awards, aka “country’s biggest night,” where the 57-year-old guitarist won CMA’s musician of the year award for a remarkable seventh time in a row.
The ninth annual benefit is Saturday.
Then on Thursday, he traveled to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where he performed on stage with the Stax rhythm section in tribute to late singer-songwriter and “great friend and hero” Jesse Winchester, whose final album was produced by McAnally.
Finally, on Saturday, he arrives in West Michigan to play The Pinnacle Center in Hudsonville, headlining the 9th annual Readin’, Writin’ & Rhythm-atic fundraiser for the Music to Benefit Music organization.
And leave it to the ever humble, down-to-earth McAnally to make performing at this benefit show for a few hundred people seem like the highlight of his hectic week.
“I’m looking very forward to having this be the exclamation point on everything that’s happening this week,” he said of the concert, dinner and auction which raises money for musical instruments and music education programs in Grand Rapids area schools. The benefits have raised $232,000 since Pinnacle Center owner Bill Worst first launched the event; get details and ticket info at mtbm.org.
“I couldn’t be more tickled to be associated with this cause. … I was a trombone player in high school and my sisters and I left our instruments there at the school in our first act of instrument charity. I’ve always tried to pass on equipment to kids and kids’ bands.”
PLAYING WITH — AND WRITING FOR — SOME OF COUNTRY’S BIGGEST STARS
Indeed, despite McAnally’s high-profile stature in country music – playing with, and writing songs for, the likes of Jimmy Buffett and Kenny Chesney, producing artists ranging from Sawyer Brown to Ricky Skaggs, and serving as in-demand session musician – he continues to try to give up-and-coming young bands a helping hand by recording and mixing their projects at his Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama.
Mac McAnally
“I try to give access to a better recording studio than young kids can afford sometimes,” he told Local Spins while taking a break from mixing a project by one of those new Southern bands, Soul Gravy. “I try to be helpful to kids starting out because it’s harder now than it was when I started out.”
McAnally himself literally was a kid when he started out.
An Alabama native who sang regularly as a youngster at Belmont First Baptist Church in Mississippi where his mother played piano, Lyman Corbitt McAnally first learned to play piano and then took up guitar at age 11. He started working as a musician at age 13 “at the dangerous state-line honky-tonks” where patrons often got into fights and “revved up chainsaws instead of applause.”
He jokes that he learned early on as an under-age musician at these bars that he was “playing to the same crowd” on Saturday night as he was at church on Sunday, just at a different time.
McAnally went on to become a Muscle Shoals session musician and songwriter, with his self-titled 1977 debut album spawning the Top 40 single, “It’s a Crazy World.” He later teamed up as a songwriter with Jimmy Buffett and has since written songs for Alabama (“Old Flame”), Kenny Chesney (“Down the Road”), Ricky Van Shelton, Steve Wariner and many others while producing artists, performing on their albums and releasing his own recordings.
MOST GRATEFUL PERSON EVER TO WIN THE CMA MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR AWARD
“I’ve heard music in my head all my life and my parents told me from the time I hit the ground that’s what I was supposed to be doing,” says McAnally, who started working in recording studios at the tender age of 15. “That’s what I think about when I wake up and when I go to sleep, and then I get to do it for my job.
“It’s truly a blessing. I can genuinely say I’ve never been bored in my life. I can literally sit in the hammock and listen to music: It’s going in my head.”
McAnally on Wednesday after winning his seventh straight CMA award.
He’s also humbled and thrilled to win the CMA award for musician of the year annually since 2008, a true acknowledgment of his talent by industry peers who also heaped high-profile awards this year on mega-stars Miranda Lambert and Luke Bryan.
“The people who are voting are basically the people that do the same thing that I do. My particular specialty is really as an accompanist. I’m an acoustic guitar player,” he says.
“I try to frame the melody in a positive way. That’s a pretty subtle thing as opposed to Jimi Hendrix or a ripping soloist or a Chet Atkins. It’s pretty fortunate on my part that someone would recognize something that’s so subtle as what I do. I’m very blessed. Whether I’m deserving or not, I don’t know, but I’m the most grateful person to ever get the award.”
With a hectic studio schedule, as well as touring in Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band and with other acts, McAnally concedes he’s accumulated a backlog of “a record’s worth of songs” and hopes to finally “get them out of my head and get them out of storage” this winter for an upcoming solo album. His last studio album was 2009’s “Down by the River.”
Indeed, he loves all of the hats he wears – songwriter, producer, musician, performer, mentor – and appreciates the longevity of his successful career.
“I’ve got 42 years in and I’m not remotely interested in retiring,” he says. “If you miss the opportunity to enjoy music you have really missed something. I believe music is one of the few things in the world that can turn bad into good, and I treat it like magic.”
Copyright 2014, Spins on Music LLC
