Pegram's Wood Newton — Yeah, he does that too

If you've ever rocked the dance floor to the Oak Ridge Boys' b-b-b-bouncy “Bobbie Sue” or shed a nostalgic tear as Kenny Rogers sings you back “Twenty Years Ago” or imagined yourself folded into that ghostly '66 Corvette with David Ball as he recalls “Riding With Private Malone,” then raise your glasses high to songwriter and recording artist Wood Newton, the co-creator of all three of these country music hits.

A resident of Pegram since 2005 and a frequent performer at Kingston Springs' Fillin' Station, Newton remains fully immersed in a musical career that took flight in the mid 1970s when he and his wife moved from their native Arkansas home to Nashville's fabled Music Row.

In recognition of his many successes since then, the Arkansas Country Music Awards (ACMA) organization has just announced that he will be honored this coming year with its Lifetime Achievement Award, along with fellow “Arkies” K. T. Oslin and Randy Goodrum. Previous ACMA honorees include Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell and The Browns.

Wood Newtown will be honored with the 2024 ACMA Lifetime Achievement Award / Wood Newton

Newton says he became serious about songwriting around 1968 when he was still a student at the University of Arkansas, from which he would graduate two years later with a degree in business.

To pay for college, he began selling books for Nashville's Southwestern Publishing Company and eventually worked his way up to a sales manager position over a five-state region. He also invested in real estate and established an aerial photography service that took sky-view pictures of large farms and estates.

“I'd knock on their door, show them a proof and sell them a $150 16 x 20 blowup,” he said. “The sales [rate] was a hundred percent.”

He was still doing photography when he moved to a basement office on Music Row close by a thriving music publishing company. “By 1976, I had written about 30 songs,” he said, “a couple of them co-writes” and was thus ready to make a career transition.

His first song to get recorded — by a gospel artist named Cynthia — was titled “Aunt Rhoda Said Praise the Lord.” In 1978, he was signed by Elektra Records, then the label home of such high-profile country acts as Eddie Rabbitt and Stella Parton. During the ensuring two years as a singer, he charted “Last Exit To Love,” “Lock, Stock & Barrel” and “Julie (Do I Ever Cross Your Mind).”

Still a part-time photographer, he shot and designed album covers for artists as diverse as Deborah Allen and Townes Van Zandt. Ken Burns used two of Newton's Van Zandt photos in his historic 2019 “Country Music” documentary.

Newton's first publishing contract netted him only a $50-a-week advance. But as more artists were drawn to his songs, he worked his way up to a $150 advance at another company. It was at this level that he co-penned “Midnight Hauler,” a 1981 No. 1 for Razzy Bailey.

Soon he was enjoying such other chart triumphs as “Bobbie Sue” (1982), Steve Wariner's “What I Didn't Do” (1984), Restless Heart's “I Want Everyone to Cry” (1985),“Twenty Years Ago” (1986) and “Riding With Private Malone” (2001).

To date, nine Country Music Hall of Fame members have recorded Newton's songs, including George Jones, Charley Pride, Alabama, Conway Twitty, Eddy Arnold and Marty Robbins. He said an ongoing ambition is to score a George Strait cut. One of his newer songs might just fit the bill.

Unlike most songwriters who blaze brightly for a moment and then fade away from public notice, Newton has always managed to keep his hand in the game. He maintains an office and studio in the old RCA building on Music Row where he communes regularly with other artists, songwriters and record producers.

He has his own publishing company and continues to record his own work on such albums as “My Roots Are These Trees" (2004) and “Hampton” (2019). He also performs regularly at that lyrical Lourdes, the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, where new talent and great songs are always being discovered and career-launching deals are made.

On the side, Newton is a furniture builder, woodworker and sculptor who selects his own trees and saws his own lumber even as he plumbs all sectors of the music business. “With songwriting you may make a lot of money but you pay a huge amount of taxes,” he explains. “You don't have a lot of write-offs for legal pads If you don't have a way to make it through the ups and downs [financially] that weans out a lot of people. To live in Nashville is extremely expensive. The streaming money for publishing and writing is still not there. I was on the board of NSAI [Nashville Songwriters Association International] and made five or six trips to Washington. We were our own lobbyists. It's still not fair.”

Some of Newton's favorite compositions were not chart hits but “private, personal things,” among these include “Daddy Went to Heaven in a Pickup Truck” and “Cornbread Wedding Cake” – the latter of which he co-wrote with another Arkansas native, Ashley McBryde, whom he had met at the Bluebird Cafe.

Newton recorded “Cornbread” on his “Hampton” album and is urging McBryde to include it on one of her own.

Currently, Newton is working as co-producer and videographer on the documentary “She Sang.” The project – an examination of the impact of women in popular music – is the brainchild of Dona Nichols, a professor of journalism at San Jose State University.

Another of his passions is co-writing songs with military veterans as a form of therapy for the organization Freedom Sings USA.

With a former professor at Columbia State Community College. Newton has also created a six-person stage production called “The Soldier's Song” that features songs that would have been sung by combatants during the Civil War. The program will next be performed on Nov. 30 — the 159th anniversary of the Battle of Franklin — at Franklin's First United Methodist Church.