> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.generationcountry.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Only Guy Without Boots: Steve Bogard - URL: https://www.generationcountry.net/the-only-guy-without-boots-steve-bogard/ - Published: 2026-10-13T22:02:07.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-15T13:46:51.000Z - Description: He wrote "Carrying Your Love with Me," and "Every Mile a Memory," and put songs at No. 1 in four straight decades. Then he carried a small Martin into a federal hearing room and helped change what streaming services pay the people who write the songs. Steve Bogard tells it in his own words. - Author: Jared Ingersol - Tags: Songwriter Spotlight, Steve Bogard There were something like fifty lawyers in the room. The Copyright Royalty Board was setting the rates streaming services would pay songwriters for the next five years, and Amazon, Apple, Google, Pandora and Spotify had each sent a team. Across the aisle sat the publishers, the Nashville Songwriters Association International, and a few working writers who had agreed to testify. One of them walked to the stand carrying a small Martin guitar and set it on the floor behind him, where nobody thought to object. Steve Bogard had a problem the rules would not let him say out loud. Streaming paid the master recording — the artist and the label — somewhere between ten and seventeen times what it paid the song underneath it. Board procedure forbade a witness from drawing that comparison in so many words. So he answered what he was asked, and when one of the three judges asked whether he had anything further, he said yes. He would like to play them a song. "The whispers and groaning from the streaming services' attorneys were unmistakable," he tells Generation Country, "but it was me and the judge, so none of them said anything." He played the first verse and chorus of "Carrying Your Love with Me." Then he took out his phone, already cued up, and played the George Strait record of the same song — four weeks at No. 1 in 1997, one of the singles country music's biggest decade is remembered by. Then he asked the judges whether they thought that record was worth more than ten times what his music and lyric were worth. The song was not a sentimental choice. He picked it for three reasons, he says: in an acrimonious room full of lawyers who mostly wanted to pay songwriters less, its warmth would help the cause; second, "I can sing it pretty well, and it's not a terrible comparison to George"; and third, anyone who had ever listened to country radio would know it. The judges nodded. The proceeding ultimately moved the headline all-in royalty rate for interactive streaming from the previous 10.5 percent benchmark to a phased 15.1 percent by 2022 — a jump of nearly forty-four percent and the largest increase of the Copyright Royalty Board era. The case spent years on appeal and remand before that endpoint was confirmed in 2023\. Bogard's testimony showed the judges what those percentages meant to a working writer. In the same period, a separate fight was moving through Congress. The Music Modernization Act cleared the Senate without a dissenting vote in September 2018 and was signed into law in October. Every songwriter collecting the mechanical share of an interactive-streaming royalty today is working under a structure Bogard helped fight for. **LYN-LOU** He was born in Kansas, and the career started in Tampa in 1963 — a teenager fronting his own band through high school and into the University of South Florida, studying English by day and working the clubs at night. By 1968 he was in Memphis, cutting his own material with Larry Rogers at Lyn-Lou Studios. The first single, a band called The Promise and a song called "Sundown Sky," came out that year on Scepter, Florence Greenberg's New York label, the house of the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick. He enrolled at Memphis State, took a staff-writing job at Bill Black Music, engineered sessions to pay for the habit, cut a single of his own for Dick Peirce's Happy Tiger label, and worked the Mid-South circuit behind Charlie Rich, Bill Black's Combo and Jerry Lee Lewis. The cut that told him he was real came through a stranger with a clipboard. "An older gentleman named Carl Wells used to make the rounds of Hi, Stax, American and Lyn-Lou studios with a wooden clipboard full of handwritten song ideas and lyrics," Bogard says. "It was 1968\. The civil rights movement was always, as it still is, near and dear to my heart. When Larry and I saw the title, we loved it immediately, knowing it was a metaphor for what was happening in America at the time." The title was "Freedom Train." Goldwax had a James Carr session booked; Rogers pitched it and the producer took it. Carr was the voice of "The Dark End of the Street," a soul singer people mention in the same breath as Otis Redding. What Bogard remembers of their record is physical. Teeny Hodges — Willie Mitchell's guitar player, the man behind "Soul Serenade" — laid down the intro, "and I got gooseflesh, arms and legs. Then James's raw vocal sealed the deal and I knew we had something." Then the song emigrated without telling him. Jamaican acts had it within a few years; the Pioneers cut it for Trojan, and in 1988 Toots Hibbert of the Maytals recorded it on *Toots in Memphis*, his album-length love letter to the city. Bogard found out from a phone call. "I didn't really know about the Toots and the Maytals or the Pioneers cuts until Larry called and told me. But when I heard them, I wasn't surprised. Reggae has always had a social justice component, and roots music is roots music, no matter the interpretation." Charlie Rich in those years was still the "Mohair Sam" and "Lonely Weekends" Charlie, several years away from his country superstardom, and he wanted Bogard as his band leader. Bogard never stopped admiring him. "Charlie was a sweet, wonderful, gifted soul and could pivot from Mose Allison to Rachmaninoff," he says. Bogard spent those years working the same Mid-South circuit as Rich, Bill Black's Combo and Jerry Lee Lewis. **CRITERIA** Atlantic signed him as a staff writer at twenty-one and sent him back to Florida — to Miami, to Criteria Recording Studios, where the label had just relocated the Dixie Flyers wholesale out of Memphis. Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler were running sessions in those rooms: Aretha Franklin's *Spirit in the Dark*, and a Derek and the Dominos record called *Layla* that would need a few years to become scripture. Bogard turned in his first demo session for Cotillion and sat down with Dowd to listen. One of the four songs, "Glad to Be a Woman," got cut by Dee Dee Warwick. Dowd, who could have simply said well done, did not. "Tom, kind and thoughtful as he was, knew I needed more than approval," Bogard says. "He puffed his pipe and said something I carry with me in every writing room and on every song idea I come up with to this very day. 'Steve, you know HOW to write. Now figure out WHAT to write.'" Wexler's contribution came in the big control room before one of the early sessions, delivered to the Dixie Flyers and whoever else was sitting there. Bogard remembers the lesson as a blunt one: music for the Deep South had to understand the pull of both church and desire. Twenty-seven years later, a man would be driving down a two-lane with a George Strait record on, singing *I'll be movin' at the Good Lord's speed, carrying your love with me.* Bogard makes the connection himself, unprompted: love of God and love of each other, he says, are still at the heart of great songs. Bogard sat on the stairs and listened to Aretha at the piano rehearsing "My Way" with a young background singer and was moved to tears. When Eric Clapton didn't care for the acoustic guitars he was playing on the Dominos sessions, Atlantic sent over a truck from Ace Music loaded with instruments, and Duane Allman and Clapton and Gene Cornish of the Rascals stood in the Criteria lobby passing guitars around and trading licks for hours with the stairwell and the balcony packed. "It was a priceless education," Bogard says, "and I remind myself often of the magic of just saying yes to life's crazy opportunities." When Atlantic wound down the Miami operation, he stayed. He played clubs; a 1972 single on the tiny Geminix label was pressed under the title *Bernard's Club in the Carriage House Presents Steve Bogard*, which is its own portrait of those years. He engineered. He wrote, produced, and performed jingles. In January 1976 the Canadian trade magazine *RPM* introduced him as "a landed immigrant from Miami" with an Attic single at radio and an album underway. The finished record appeared on Badger in early 1977, and *RPM* reported country and middle-of-the-road airplay. He also cut sides for Decca in the U.K. He also met Beverly, and that has outlasted every label on this page. It happened because a radio spot caught him at the right second. Atlantic had pulled back its Criteria schedule and sent the Dixie Flyers home to Memphis, and Bogard was driving down Southwest 8th Street when a commercial came on: the Pieces of Eight Lounge, a University of Miami college bar, wanted a solo guitarist for a steady gig. He looked up and he was nearly in the parking lot, his old Gibson f-hole in the back seat. He pulled in, auditioned, and started that week. The Pieces ran like *Cheers*, all regulars, and one of them was a med student named Richard Walbert — the high-school best friend of a girl named Beverly. Walbert didn't think much of who she'd been dating, and he had a nice guy he wanted her to meet, so he brought her in to watch Bogard play. Bogard barely acknowledged her. She was, he says, drop-dead beautiful — long dark Ali MacGraw hair, a great laugh, a killer Pong player — and he assumed she was Walbert's girlfriend. It took three visits before Walbert pulled him aside on a break: "Steve, are you gonna ask her out or what? You're practically ignoring her." Bogard, who'd had no idea he was being set up, asked her out for that Sunday after his afternoon set. She sat at the bar while he packed up. Then a woman with short reddish hair said hi, and it took him a beat to place her — Beverly and her mother had gone wig shopping that day, and all that long dark hair was tucked up under a short red wig. They went to *Lovers and Other Strangers* that night and found out they both liked the third row. Three weeks later, on the phone from Bimini, he asked her to move in with him. She said no. So he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, and three months later they were married at Plymouth Congregational in Coconut Grove. That was more than fifty-five years ago. By the end of the decade he was a journeyman in his early thirties with a résumé touching three genres and three countries, a wife whose instincts he had already learned to trust, and no particular reason to think the best of it was ahead. **AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SONG** What moved him to Nashville was a B-side written on a bet. Henry Hurt — later his publisher at Chappell, at that time an executive with Dot Records — brought a Texas band called Tommy Latham and the Traveling Magic into Lyn-Lou to record a single. Michael Utley was on the session — a friend from the Bill Black Combo gigs and a regular co-writer, whose songs with Bogard would end up with Rita Coolidge, Delaney & Bonnie and Dee Dee Warwick. The band had exactly one song, and a single needs two sides, and in those years the B-side paid the same mechanical rate as the A. Bogard did the arithmetic out loud. "I said to Mike, 'If we write a song tonight with the word "magic" in the title, I bet they'll cut it tomorrow.' So we wrote it in a few hours that night. At that time The Turtles were popular, so we borrowed a little of their groove, and I wrote a little inoffensive pop lyric. They cut the song. And that was it." That was it for eleven years. Then Bogard was sitting on the couch in the Criteria control room, opened the country chart page, and saw "Touch Me with Magic" and two familiar names climbing it. Marty Robbins had cut it. Al Gallico, who owned a piece of the publishing, had gone digging for something to get Robbins back on radio and found a forgotten B-side from Memphis. It became a hit and won a BMI award, and the invitation to the dinner arrived engraved in gold. Beverly told him it looked important and he ought to go. He told her Nashville was too far to travel for a dinner and he had gigs to play. The award came in the mail instead, rolled up in a cardboard tube, and he was somewhat impressed. "Then the checks started coming," he says, "and I was really impressed." That was the beginning of Beverly's conviction that they should be living in a songwriter town — New York, Los Angeles or Nashville. It took a few more years, but the argument was over. Robbins himself never much liked the record. There is footage of him introducing it as his new single, and then adding that he supposes it's what the kids are calling country music these days. Bogard sees a broader problem in the song's history. "The song's path is a great example of the mistaken tendency the business has to super-prioritize brand-new songs over songs that have staying power." Ronnie Dunn once cut a Bogard song on a solo record that he'd first put on hold for Brooks & Dunn seventeen years earlier. "I honestly believe I have, from five decades of writing hits, numerous songs that just need to be pitched and recorded. The songwriter is not always the best promoter of his own work." He moved to Nashville in 1982 and signed with Chappell in 1984\. Chappell became Warner Chappell, and Bogard stayed twenty years. The cuts came from everywhere — the Forester Sisters, Waylon Jennings, the Four Tops, the Oak Ridge Boys, John Schneider, John Conlee, Conway Twitty. **THE ONLY GUY WITHOUT BOOTS** The first No. 1 started with a four-year-old at a front door. Jeff Tweel came into a co-write at Chappell one morning and reported that he could not get out of the house to take his daughter to school without his son Chase running after him, begging for a morning ride. "So out of that sweet innocence," Bogard says, "came a fairly provocative hit for Lee Greenwood." James Stroud played on the demo. Henry Hurt, a man of few words, delivered the news the way publishers do: *I heard you got you one, Bogie.* Which meant the pluggers had been talking it up. MCA released "Mornin' Ride" in November 1986\. It went to No. 1 in March 1987\. Bogard was thirty-nine years old and twenty-four years into the business, and what he felt was less triumph than admission. "Having my first number one in Nashville was a huge validation for me, and I finally felt like an insider in this music community instead of the only guy who didn't wear cowboy boots." That January the *Tennessean* printed the whole song, chords and all, next to a photograph of its two bearded staff writers. He still keeps the article in his lyric folder and still has a copy of the photo. Vince Gill and Larry Stewart stacked the background vocals on that record. Bogard did not know Stewart was on it until he was asked about it for this piece — though the two would go on to write a run of Restless Heart songs together, and Stewart later released a Wednesday song, "I'll Cry Tomorrow," as a solo single. Gill mentioned the other half of it to him at the Bluebird recently — that he had sung on several Bogard songs, and that background vocals were what he moved to town to do in the first place. **WEDNESDAYS** Rory Bourke—who died on October 10, 2026, at 84—made the introduction, and Rory Bourke was right. Bogard had met him at Welk Music, where he was sharing an office in the early eighties. One day he saw Bourke, Charlie Black and Tommy Rocco in the coffee area and floated a song title he was chewing on. Bourke said yes, he'd written that one, Louise Mandrell had cut it — but he liked the way Bogard was thinking. They set up a write. Bogard went to Bourke's house, and Bourke asked if he wanted to hear a new Anne Murray cut they'd just gotten back. It was "A Little Good News." "I was understandably blown away," Bogard says, "and knew then and there that this was the big time." So he brought his best ideas and his A game. Bourke started bringing him into writes with him and Charlie Black; a trade article even ran about how the veteran team liked to pull in newcomers whose work they admired, to get fresh influences into the songs. Bogard was beyond grateful. The gratitude compounded. When his fifty-dollar-a-month Welk deal ran out and he had two kids in an apartment and no money coming in, Bourke went to Irwin Robinson at Chappell and told him that if Chappell didn't sign Bogard, Bourke would find a way to sign him himself. "I think he was bluffing," Bogard says. A week later he met with Robinson and was signed to Chappell — at the time ASCAP's publisher of the year with only twelve writers on the roster. The three-hundred-dollar-a-week starting draw felt like hitting the jackpot. Bourke also handed him his other great partner. Rick Giles had arrived in Nashville around the same time, in '82 or '83, after a New York publisher told him his songs were too country. "One day Rory said to me, 'You need to write with this new writer, Rick Giles. You're the same guy.'" They were both older than most newcomers, both from urban backgrounds, both carrying songwriting experience from other genres, and both hungry. Their first cut, Bandana's "It's Just Another Heartache," reached No. 46 in 1985, and the friendship took — theirs, and their wives'. Giles had a home studio and a publishing affiliation with Dick James Music, so they started writing every Wednesday, first at his house in Sylvan Park and later at the studio he bought on Division. The appointment held for something like fifteen years. A Wednesday started at nine, an hour before anybody wrote anything. Giles made the coffee. There was a small kitchen in the studio and they used it for what Bogard calls bullshit hour, in which the two of them worked through whatever had happened lately in their lives, their marriages and the business. "There was lots of song fodder there," Bogard says, "especially for two friends who shared a lot in terms of values and emotion." There was no designated skeptic, because they didn't need one. They saved ideas they thought suited the combination and wrote nothing they weren't both in on. The real test came at pitching time, since they were always reaching for something a little fresh and some of it sat too far outside for the town and the moment. Very few Wednesdays failed to produce a song. By 2000 the two of them had settled on a name for whatever that sum was. After sixteen years of writing together, they told the Tennessean, a "third personality" takes over and does the songwriting work. Out of those Wednesdays: "'Til You Cry," a top five for Eddy Raven. "We Got the Love" for Restless Heart. "Hangin' In," a top five for Tanya Tucker. "There You Have It," which gave Blackhawk a top-five country hit and reached No. 41 on the Hot 100 in early 1999\. "Let's Jam" for the Four Tops. And in March 1989 "New Fool at an Old Game," written with Sheila Stephen, gave Reba McEntire a No. 1 and Bogard his second. The Wednesdays also produced a singer, though the finding wasn't Bogard's. Giles was at an outdoor festival in Canada with their friend Gilles Godard when a voice carried over from a distant stage. Giles asked who the singer was. They wandered over and found Michelle Wright, her husky alto rising above the festival grounds. Giles met her, they talked, and at the next Wednesday he proposed that the two of them write and produce her. They said yes, never dreaming that the work ahead would help carry Wright into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame. She came to Nashville and stayed at Bogard's house and wore his daughter's bunny slippers. They spent the days getting to know her so they could write *for* her — her ambitions, her romantic wins and losses — and assembled her first Canadian album for no fee and no royalty, with her manager's label covering expenses. It produced seven chart singles at home and helped Wright secure her U.S. deal with Arista Nashville. Years later Reba cut three songs off it on *Reba*: "Wish I Were Only Lonely," "Do Right by Me," and "New Fool at an Old Game." "Take It Like a Man" broke Wright in the States, and at the 1993 ceremony she received the ACM's 1992 Top New Female Vocalist award. Two Bogard songs, "Guitar Talk," written with Colin Linden, and "One Good Man," written with Giles, went to No. 1 in Canada in 1993 and 1994, respectively, which is why an honest count of Bogard chart-toppers requires two countries. Asked whether the Canadian records belong in his total, he gives the answer of a man who has never bothered to inflate anything: "I don't count the Canadian No. 1s in my 10, but maybe I should, and that would make 12." By the next album Giles had stepped away, and Bogard was making the record with Mike Clute. They had "Walkaway Joe" and "I Try to Think About Elvis" in the can when a change in creative direction ended the partnership. "Walkaway Joe" later went to Trisha Yearwood; "I Try to Think About Elvis" went to Patty Loveless. The professional partnership with Wright had ended, but the affection survived it. Years later, Wright and Bogard danced at the CCMA Awards, and she told him how much she had valued working with a producer who cared about her and loved her music. **ELEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS** In 1988, while country radio knew Bogard as a dependable Row craftsman, Etta James cut a song of his and the blues world never put it down. "Damn Your Eyes," written with Barbara Wyrick, nearly didn't get made. The two of them played it for their publishers at Chappell, who advised against spending money on a demo, on the grounds that nobody in Nashville would ever cut it. Henry Hurt, the boss, overruled his own staff and told them to follow their instincts and spend whatever they needed to do it properly. They did. Wyrick was a fine singer — she was working steadily as a background vocalist for Ronnie Milsap — but she was on the road, so Bogard cut the vocal himself first and then went looking for the record he actually heard. He called Mike Lawler, the definitive Nashville synthesizer man of the era, who arrived with a cargo of keyboards and built the track. Then he called Donna McElroy, a gospel singer who did not ordinarily sing demos, and she agreed on one condition: he had to come pick her up at her apartment. The demo cost eleven hundred dollars, which at the time was an unheard-of number for a song nobody was supposed to want. Bogard still calls it magical. It reached Etta James the old way, through somebody with nothing to gain. Wyrick was close friends with Kevin Lamb, a Muscle Shoals native running Alabama's Maypop Music. When Barry Beckett, another Shoals man, called Lamb to say he was cutting Etta in Nashville and needed songs, Lamb phoned Bogard for a copy of the demo. "Kevin did that in the spirit of the old Nashville," Bogard says, "since he had no skin in the game — just helping friends with a great song." Beckett invited him to the studio to meet her. She could not have been more gracious. Then it came time to sing. "She looked me in the eyes and said, 'I don't sing in front of no songwriters.' I took the cue." The record refused to stay finished. Sinéad O'Connor put her version out in 1990 — Bogard didn't know until Beverly heard it come out of Lightning 100 here in Nashville. The Irish jazz singer Mary Coughlan took it, and so did Zap Mama, and a Chicago blueswoman named Zora Young. Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa cut it on *Black Coffee* in 2018, thirty years on. Etta's own *Montreux Years* set carried it again in 2021\. Bogard learned about several of those recordings from the questions submitted for this article. He is not surprised that the song travels. "I knew as soon as Barbara sat down at the piano and we started working out the song that the idea came from a very real and painful place for her. So the fact that so many other singers feel that emotion doesn't surprise me one bit." **CARRIED AWAY** The George Strait songs came out of a different partnership. Jeff Stevens, a West Virginian who had fronted his own band on Atlantic, became Bogard's other great collaborator in the nineties. As Giles had Wednesdays, Stevens had a standing Tuesday-and-Thursday appointment. In 1996 MCA released their "Carried Away" as the second single from *Blue Clear Sky*. It spent three weeks at No. 1 — Strait's thirtieth career chart-topper, a total only Conway Twitty had ever exceeded, and Strait would eventually pass him too. The title, Bogard has said, was nearly an apology, the sound of a man admitting he'd gotten too far gone over somebody. The follow-up took its time on purpose. Stevens was driving down the road one day when the title came to him, and he handed it over the way the two of them handled titles. "One of us will throw a title back and forth to the other one so it can ruminate for a while," Bogard told the Tennessean at the time. "Jeff had that title, and he told me about it. I probably let it sit in my head for two or three months before I came up with the chorus." In a town where co-writers usually get two or three hours to finish a song, he considered the slowness the whole point: it was "an idea that had some merit, and you had to let it grow with someone you trusted." They didn't write it *for* Strait — not exactly. "If you write a country song and you take George Strait, with his parameters and his ethic, as a model, that works all the way down the line." When they finished it, Strait was the first artist they pitched it to. "Carrying Your Love with Me" spent four weeks at the top in the summer of 1997, the title cut of an album that won the CMA's Album of the Year. Crowds still sing it back to Strait word for word, and a quarter century later Parker McCollum recorded a version of his own. Tim McGraw drew from the same partnership — by the summer of 1996 the trades had Bogard and Stevens writing "Renegade" for him, and he cut "You Get Used to Somebody" in 2001 and "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" on *Live Like You Were Dying*, an album that sold past diamond. Strait kept coming back to the well, too — "Why Not Now," "I Look at You," "Easy as You Go" on *Twang*, "When the Credits Roll" as late as 2013, six cuts across seventeen years. **PRAYIN' FOR DAYLIGHT** Bogard asked his wife one morning how she had slept, and she told him she had been praying for the light of day. He carried the remark into bullshit hour, and he and Giles both heard the title inside it. The title fought back first: "Prayin' for the Light of Day," the phrase as Beverly had said it, resisted every rhythmic groove they tried, and the song only fell together once they compressed it to "Prayin' for Daylight." Giles had worked as a single in Maryland singing over recorded doo-wop tracks before he came to Nashville, and his background vocals were always the strongest thing on their demos, so the song arrived sounding like it belonged to a band rather than a singer. The talk on the Row at the time held that with boy bands running pop music, a country version was only a matter of time. It made the rounds before it found its door. Diamond Rio's producer, Mike Clute, liked it enough to take it into the studio with the band several times without ever getting a finished record. And Bogard had a natural place to send it: Henry Paul was his neighbor and had been his catcher in Little League, and Bogard and Giles had already had a hit with Paul's band Blackhawk. He ran into Paul at an airport and told him about the song, then pitched it to Blackhawk's producer, Mark Bright, who loved it and immediately put it on hold — a one-sided arrangement in which the writer agrees not to pitch the song anywhere else and receives nothing in return. More than a year went by. Then Bright called and told him to come over and hear something. He had cut the song on a new band. They had no record deal. They had not settled on a name. "I went over that afternoon and sat in front of the big fancy producer speakers and heard the cut," Bogard says. "Blown away would be putting it mildly. I tried to act miffed but couldn't. I just asked if I could pitch them more songs, but they were done by then." "Prayin' for Daylight" introduced Rascal Flatts to country radio in the spring of 2000 and ran to the top five. That Thanksgiving the band lip-synced it on a float in the Macy's parade, and the Bogard family went nuts in front of the television. Rascal Flatts went on to sell tens of millions of records. As for the harmony that runs through so much of the catalog — the Foresters, Restless Heart, Alabama, Blackhawk, the Oaks, River Road, and Gill and Stewart stacked on his first No. 1 — Bogard says it was never a plan. He sang background himself in Memphis alongside Mary and Ginger Holladay, Allen Reynolds and Wayne Jackson, and before that the Paragons had done note-for-note covers of the Beach Boys, the Four Freshmen and the Beatles. "I think vocal harmonies just occur organically for me, not really pre-planned. They arrive at the demo. That being said, I think about them when I'm thinking about the lift in a chorus, and what interesting moments the right chord changes could inspire." **THE PRESIDENT** In 2006 the Nashville Songwriters Association International made Bogard president of its board, one of the most demanding volunteer jobs on Music Row. He served seven consecutive terms, later returned to the chair, and by his count completed thirteen one-year terms in all. "It was a labor of love, and I'm still heavily involved with the organization," he says. "It's a volunteer position and eats up lots of time and energy, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. The ability to stand up to lobbyists and attorneys whose suits cost as much as my first car was like pitching in Yankee Stadium." In July 2009 NSAI and Frost Specialty announced the first group copyright-infringement insurance plan for American songwriters. Until then, a writer generally had to buy at least a million dollars in coverage, whether or not the catalog or the claim justified it. The new plan started at $100,000 of protection for less than $1,600 a year. Bogard told *Billboard* that a suit did not need merit to wreck a working writer: before a musicologist or judge ever reached the song, $20,000 to $100,000 in legal bills could pile up, royalties could stop, and a home purchase or catalog sale could freeze. Seventeen years later, NSAI still offers the program. The first Phonorecords proceeding began that same year, songwriters and publishers across from the labels and digital services. When it reached testimony in 2008, Bogard was one of the working songwriters who went before the Copyright Royalty Board. He testified that Nashville had lost close to two-thirds of its professional songwriters. Piracy and file sharing had gutted the community, and half the offices on Music Row were sitting empty with signs in the windows. The RIAA's attorney asked the obvious counter: if two-thirds of the songwriters were gone, why had NSAI's professional membership held roughly steady? "I told her that those of us who were left could feel the desperate nature of the situation and had to band together, so that number reflected a much higher percentage of the songwriting community. Even the lawyers on her side nodded their heads." His years in the chair also brought a mechanical royalty right for songwriters in interactive streams, the purchase of NSAI's Music Mill headquarters and the Songwriters Capital Gains Tax Equity Act. That law took years and, by Bogard's count, more than three thousand individual visits to members of Congress; it lets qualifying songwriters elect capital-gains treatment when they sell self-created musical compositions or copyrights. Bogard's stake in that fight was personal: he sold his co-publishing in 1996 and paid better than forty percent on money he had already paid taxes on in the years he earned it. The result now protects every qualifying songwriter who sells a catalog, whether or not that writer ever knows the names of the people who made the law possible. And there is the Bluebird Café, the strip-mall listening room where half this town's careers began. Amy Kurland owned it and was ready to move on, and she was close friends with an NSAI employee named Erika Wollam Nichols. It was her confidence in Erika, Bogard says, that led Amy to make a very generous sale and transfer of the room to the songwriters themselves. Amy wanted the place to go on honoring songs, to keep giving January over to Alive Hospice, and never to take a sponsor or an event that would tarnish what the name had come to mean. To announce the pending sale, in November 2007, Kris Kristofferson played the Bluebird for the first time in his life and brought his original band with him — Billy Swan, Stephen Bruton, Donnie Fritts and Chris Gantry — for a song swap in front of a small and immeasurably lucky crowd. The sale kept the Bluebird in songwriter hands. **SEEIN' RED** The songs never stopped. In 2006 alone he had two more No. 1s: "Wherever You Are," written with Jeremy Stover for Jack Ingram, the first chart-topper in the history of a brand-new label called Big Machine, which would shortly have some luck with a teenager named Taylor Swift; and "Every Mile a Memory," written with Dierks Bentley and Brett Beavers, which brought Bogard his first Grammy nomination for Best Country Song. "Long Trip Alone," from the same trio, brought the second. The album cuts kept pace all decade — Kenny Chesney's "Life Is Good," a Brad Paisley track on *5th Gear*, Diamond Rio, Trace Adkins, three straight Dierks Bentley records. Then in February 2017, the same season he was preparing his testimony, "Seein' Red" went to No. 1 for Dustin Lynch. Bogard wrote it with Tully Kennedy and Kurt Allison of Jason Aldean's road band and with Jason Sever, all of them roughly the age of his catalog. Sever became a repeat partner — "Sittin' Pretty" and "After Party," both Lynch cuts, came from the same pairing. It gave him a chart-topping single in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s, a span almost nobody in the format's history can match. In the same twelve months, Bogard topped the country chart and argued before a federal panel that the songs beneath those records were being undervalued. **THE INTRODUCTION** On August 6, 2025, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame announced its new class: Emmylou Harris, Brad Paisley, Jim Lauderdale, Don Cook, Tony Martin, the late J.J. Cale, and Steve Bogard. At the announcement, he thanked the voters by saying he didn't really know who they all were, but they have pretty good taste. He knew who he wanted to introduce him. Bogard had produced Brett James's 1995 self-titled album for Career Records, and the two had been friends for decades. They had a Tuesday on the calendar to play golf, have a drink and work out what James would say. When Bogard asked him, James told him it would be the honor of his lifetime. On September 18, under three weeks before the ceremony, James's single-engine Cirrus went down in a field near Franklin, North Carolina, killing him, his wife Melody, and her daughter Meryl. Bogard would have asked Rory Bourke first — the man who had put him in a room with Rick Giles in 1983 with the observation that they were the same guy — except that Bourke had taken a fall and was having trouble getting around. "Like the troopers that Rory and his family are, he came through with flying colors, and I was honored and humbled." So on October 6, at the Music City Center, more than forty years after Bourke made the introduction that built half the catalog, Bourke made the other one. Dierks Bentley stood up and sang "Every Mile a Memory" back to its co-writer. Bogard told the room that the award proved dreams come true even if you don't know you're dreaming them. "I didn't know there was as much love in the world as I felt in that room on that night," he says. "From family, friends, co-workers, my NSAI crew — it filled me to overflowing. Yet it didn't and still doesn't feel like the end of something. More like the beginning of something a little different." He and Beverly have been married more than fifty-five years, and across those decades her read on his career has repeatedly proved sound. Their life together held the risks of building an independent publishing business as well as the rewards: a beautiful home, children and a grandchild, travel, and a partnership that outlasted every company name around them. "The good years have been very good," Bogard says. Beverly is still his best friend. Their daughter Jessica and son Zachary grew up in a house where the family business was three-minute stories with other people's names on them. In practice, that "something a little different" includes full reversions coming back to him on older songs, "Damn Your Eyes" among them. He holds all the publishing on hundreds of unrecorded songs written in the same years as the number ones, and he is certain there are homes out there for some of them. Asked to name a few, he doesn't hesitate. "Come 'A Runnin' Friends," written with Brett Beavers and Michael Wilkes, took its title from a line Scott Hendricks used eulogizing the late Ben Vaughn; Bogard hears a Luke Bryan–Jason Aldean duet in it. "In the Dust," written with Wilkes and the indie artist Carson Beyer, is up on streaming in Beyer's own strong version; Tim McGraw has tracked it but not yet cut a vocal, and Bogard thinks it would be a career record for him. And there is one he wrote just last week with Steve Dorff — the man he goes to when he has a lyric he loves and music he doesn't — called "We Stand on Their Shoulders," a nonpartisan patriotic anthem he can hear as a "We Are the World"–style event or a duet. He still writes with young artists and says he'll never give that up. He has run one-man seminars at Vanderbilt, Loyola and with Berklee students, splitting the day between the craft and the legislation, and he may chase that further. His friends keep urging him to turn the stories into a book. "So I guess," he says, "I'm still waiting for the dream I didn't know I was dreaming to show itself." There are still rooms he'd like to be in. Asked which writers he's never worked with and wishes he had, he names Craig Wiseman — they talked about it when Wiseman was starting out and never got to it — and [Matraca Berg](https://www.generationcountry.net/songwriter-spotlight-matraca-berg/). The song he most wishes he'd written lately is "I Drive Your Truck," the Lee Brice record that [Jessi Alexander](https://www.generationcountry.net/songwriter-spotlight-jessi-alexander/) wrote with Connie Harrington and Jimmy Yeary; he knew all three writers, texted them the day it came out, and went to the No. 1 party. He also speaks warmly of Sharon Vaughn, a fellow Floridian and former NSAI board member he calls stellar. Publishers tend to pair writers whose strengths are considered complementary, and Bogard and Vaughn are both classified as topliners — writers of melody and lyric — so nobody ever booked the session. Nothing prevents them from doing it themselves. "Yes, absolutely," he says when asked. They simply haven't. Yet. For several years, he worked as a staff writer and chief operating officer at Truth or Dare Music. After stepping away from the NSAI presidency at the end of 2023, he stayed on its board; in 2026 he is the treasurer. The longest-serving president in the organization's history is still in the room, only in a different chair. He knows what he still wants to do. "There's also a place for those of us who feel the pull of timeless songs." The Hall of Fame plaque says songwriter. The rate ruling says something more. Plenty of writers have put words in George Strait's mouth; one of them helped put a songwriter's value into federal regulation, and did it by playing the song. --- *Steve Bogard spoke with Generation Country across two rounds of written responses in July 2026\. His answers have been lightly condensed for length; the words are otherwise his own. Personal recollections are presented as Bogard's.* **RECOMMENDED LISTENING** **"Freedom Train" — James Carr (1968)** *The first significant cut, sung by one of soul's great voices. Toots Hibbert took it to Jamaica and back on* Toots in Memphis *twenty years later.* **"Mornin' Ride" — Lee Greenwood (1987)** *The first No. 1, twenty-four years into the career. Vince Gill and Larry Stewart are in there singing harmony.* **"Damn Your Eyes" — Etta James (1988)** *The country writer's blues standard, born from an eleven-hundred-dollar demo its writers believed in enough to make.* **"New Fool at an Old Game" — Reba McEntire (1989)** *A Wednesday song, with Rick Giles and Sheila Stephen. Reba cut it off Michelle Wright's Canadian debut.* **"Take It Like a Man" — Michelle Wright (1992)** *The singer Rick Giles heard from across a Canadian festival field. Her American breakthrough.* **"Jealous Bone" — Patty Loveless (1992)** *Check out our spotlight on Generation Country.* **"Hangin' In" — Tanya Tucker (1994)** *A Top 5 Bogard-Giles co-write from Tanya Tucker's* Fire to Fire. **"Carried Away" — George Strait (1996)** *Strait's thirtieth No. 1, with only Conway Twitty's forty still ahead of him. With Jeff Stevens.* **"Carrying Your Love with Me" — George Strait (1997)** *Four weeks at the top and never off the radio since. Strait was the first artist they pitched it to. Twenty years later it was played into evidence.* **"There You Have It" — Blackhawk (1998)** *The Giles co-write that crossed onto the Hot 100.* **"Prayin' for Daylight" — Rascal Flatts (2000)** *Cut on a band with no record deal and no name yet. It came out of a remark Beverly Bogard made over breakfast.* **"Wherever You Are" — Jack Ingram (2006)** *The first No. 1 in Big Machine Records' history.* **"Every Mile a Memory" — Dierks Bentley (2006)** *The Grammy-nominated one. Bentley sang it at Bogard's Hall of Fame induction nineteen years later.* **"Seein' Red" — Dustin Lynch (2017)** *A No. 1 in a fourth consecutive decade, written with two of Jason Aldean's bandmates and Jason Sever.*