From the beginning of his career, Dennis Adkins has held the respect of country music royalty.  Groomed for performance by Loretta Lynn, he honed his songwriting skills under the tutelage of Mel Tillis and penned a number one hit called Ace in the Hole which was recorded by the King of Country, George Strait.

The grandson of a railroad man, Dennis Adkins was born in 1953 in the small railroad junction town of Corydon, Indiana.  As a child he loved to sing, but when Beatlemania hit, like many other youngsters, he was inspired to pick up a guitar. His aunt, a semi-professional ragtime piano player, taught him to play Hound Dog. 

His brother, Bob, four years his senior, was also developing his natural talent and the two began pursuing a music career as The Adkins Brothers. By the time they were teens, they were doing a Saturday night radio show every week and making regular appearances on an early morning television show. 

The Adkins Brothers were a traditional country act, though according to Dennis, “We tended to lean toward the people that were in left field, but at that time there weren’t that many.  The whole music explosion changed everything and influenced country so pretty soon in Nashville you had guys like Waylon and Willie and Kristofferson.”

Bob Adkins also played private clubs as bass player for Ethyl Holland and the Blue Echoes. (Larry Richardson, lead guitar; Ethyl Holland, guitar/vocals.)  Though only thirteen, when their drummer quit, Dennis was able to learn to play drums well enough to earn the position.  They performed current hits by performers like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette and secured a gig at the Moose Lodge every friday.  Dennis recalls “The old guy at the door charged a quarter and he kept them in a cigar box.  We got that or $10, whichever was greater.  Larry and I would eat that up in cheeseburgers at the bar.”

The weekly radio show followed a Grand Ole Opry format and aired each Saturday. Two of their costars each week were Crystal Gayle (then known as Brenda Gayle) and her sister Peggy Sue.  The girls mother and stepfather ran the station.  Their sister, Loretta Lynn was just splitting with the Wilburn Brothers and was already a star when she started to featured The Adkins Brothers in her shows.  “It was my first taste of the big time.  I got to work with lots of the old time Opry acts.” recalls Dennis.

They began to tour with Loretta.  “I was  taking it all in. It was just great to be around something like that.  It’s wierd how you just learn things by hanging out.  Some professions you really can’t go to school for because 80% of success is just showing up.  It keeps a lot of people from making it.  We always said in Nashville, ‘You must be present to win’.”

The Adkins brothers were closet Bob Dylan fans.  “The whole hippie movement was taking off pretty good so I wanted to write.”, recalls Dennis. “My first song was probably about the Vietnam War.”  But a serious crack at writing was posponed.  In his words, “I got so busy trying to make a living. You have to play cover stuff, writing doesn’t pay too good in the early years.”

The Adkins Brothers continued to enjoy success throughout their teens and then went their separate ways, both pursuing music careers.  Bob went west, first to California and then to Las Vegas where he has been for the last 25 years and is now retired.

Dennis remained in the heartland working honky tonks.  He played regular gigs with several bands but at twenty he had decided to make writing his priority and relocated to Nashville. “I was trying to write more and trying to learn how; Hanging around other writers and studying them.  I studied a lot of the great country writers plus people like Dylan.  A lot of his stuff I don’t get at all, but, if you go back to Blowin’ in the Wind and a few things like that – they’re the greatest things ever.” he said.  “The outlaw movement in Nashville was bubbling under and I was following.” he continued.

Up until then, he hadn’t performed originals, because they weren’t what paid the bills. But he also didn’t believe his songs were ready.  He explains, “A lot of writers start out writing crummy stuff.  Progress, is maybe to look at it in more of a commercial way.  A guy once told me, ‘Don’t write a song about your grandpa. Write a song about everybody’s grandpa’. But, I could never really sell out all the way. I always feel like I still put a little tear in my songs, even the happy songs.”

The beginning was rocky. All his clothes were stolen out of his car after he arrived in Nashville. But soon he was hanging out in Printers Alley by the hot night spots with lots of players.  One introduced him to a guy that had a job on the road, fronted by Debbie Berry.  Dennis began playing bass guitar for them but they were somewhere different every week, so he was never actually in Nashville. 

In the mid 70’s he decided to go to California and stayed a few years, playing clubs with pick up bands.  There his brother taught him to just please the people by doing whatever they wanted.  He met some of Buck Owens’ writers in California and they piqued his interest.

“That’s when the song writing thing really hit me, so I moved back to Nashville in 1976.  I was never afforded the luxury or had guts to do strictly my own stuff.  I always had to make a living.  If you do covers you can make a living. If you do your original stuff you might make a living.  I never thought it was fair to ask others to play your material and starve to death with you.” he explained.

“If you’re going to be a writer, you’ve got to be in Nashville. That’s where the writers are.  So I started working clubs 5-7 nights a week doing cover songs and knocking on doors.  Hanging out on Music Row.  I thought I was a good writer already but now I look back at those songs and they’re not there.”

He continued, “I don’t know how you progress but all of a sudden you start learning these tricks from different guys.  On 16th Avenue some magic words roll off someone’s tongue one day.  Then, at some point you’ve written something you think is good and that if you play for other people they’ll think it’s good.  It’s enough commerical to be a hit, but still has heart and soul.  I lean more towards the heart and soul, I didn’t want to play the game. But, if I’m going to play the game, I’m going to play it on the edges.”

“Some of my songs now that people think are some of my better songs, at the time when I wrote them, I thought ‘Well, I probably wouldn’t even play this for anybody’.  They were just something I had to write.”

Adkins landed a job as a 9-5 songwriter with MCA.  He describes his experience, saying “You get some pretty cool songs and can make a living.  You can definately make a living like that if you want to sell your soul.  Then there are ideas that come to you and are really cool and must be written.  Most of the songs I had success with, I wrote by myself. I’ve teamed up with good people and written good songs and had success, but, I think the stuff you’re really proud of is the stuff you did by yourself.”

He went on to sign with Golden Opportunity, but spent his most productive years with Mel Tillis’ company, Cedarwood.  He recalls, “I had cuts and wrote with some good writers.  Ace in the Hole with George Strait was my first and only number one and I was the only credit.  I wrote several songs with Pam Tillis, Mel’s daughter and Russell Smith the lead of Amazing Rhythm Aces but I mostly did solo stuff.  Mel took a real interest in me, so I was really thankful to him because I learned a bunch from him and got a lot of opportunity.”  Dennis spent about five years traveling with Tillis and singing in his show.  “He was going to try to get me a record deal. We tried but couldn’t get the right people interested.  Mel was a great influence not only as a writer but he’d been in the business his whole life.  He was an entertainer and comedian and wrote some of the great country songs.  He was the first to give me freedom to stay in the studio all day and just make music, no pressure.”

“Every afternoon at Cedarwood people would start showing up. We had great big listening room and there would always be cold beverages and assorted other things there but people would bring over the latest thing they were working on and we would just have a good little listening party for a few hours almost every day. And he had a lot of success at that time publishing hits from artists like Alabama to George Strait.  It’s different now, kind of like going to the bank.  Even if you call them, you can’t get a human being.  It will be interesting to see what the internet does over next 20 years.” 

Several songs penned by Dennis Adkins made their way to movies and commercials including Ace in the Hole which was adopted by the restaurant mascot, Chucky Cheese, who performed it in Maid starring Vince Vaughn. The song also showed up on several TV shows and ran in a Budweiser commercial for two years. 

In recent years there was also resurgence in royalties for his song Make Believin’ which appeared in a Farrah Fawcett vehicle rereleased in foreign markets upon her illness and subsequent death.    

Other songs written by Dennis Adkins were recorded by Brenda Lee, Randy Travis, Roy Clark, Mel Tillis, Highway 101 and others.  In total, about twenty songs have generated income for Adkins.  In all he’s written between 200 and 300 songs. He says, “I’m not real prolific.  I wrote a lot in the early days to learn the craft. As the years go on I’m more selective on my ideas.  At first you write about any idea you have.”

His personal favorite is I Give You Music which was written during his Cedarwood days in the late 80’s.  “It’s more of a personal song about what I do.  I was thinking about the musical connection from generation to generation. Music is what I have to give to the world.”

He also tried to produce a few other acts.  But he says he learned “You find lots of people that want or need help but usually either they have money and no talent or talent and no money.  You’ve got to have a little money. I’d love to find somebody to produce, any young budding stars.  I like to listen to people.”

Dennis Adkins left the hustle and bustle of Nashville by the 80’s, settling just outside of Bowling Green and commuting to work.  By 1993 he decided to go independent and he formed a small publishing company he dubbed TToT after an old street singer in Montgomery that Hank Williams listened to as little boy. He had read about him in an obscure article, “I thought I was being so original and then Hank JR had a song about TToT.” he laughed. 

He began actively pitching songs. “You don’t just pitch it once, you pitch it 100 times to the same guy.  Anyone can write, it’s a matter of getting someone to record,  because they have every writer in the world shooting at ‘em, especially big artists.  You just hope it gets in right hands.” TToT’s catalog is all Adkins’ material, though some is cowritten with others.  He recently inked a distribution deal with Airplay Direct and some of his songs can be heard at www.myspacecom/dennisadkinssongsmith.

He has a CD entitled Ace in the Hole that is a collection of eleven of his songs for promotional purposes, but he would like to some day create a fully produced album.

Dennis Adkins continued to perform throughout the years as a rotating player in a variety of cover bands, but songwriting remains his focus. Though he continues to take houseband gigs, he’s slowed way down.  “It’s somebody’s birthday every night and if you’re the entertainment they expect you to be in the party with them.” he said. 

“I have a pretty leisurely pace.  I don’t have a band. I have a group of guys I play with sometimes and do classic rock.”  He prefers jamboree type shows or touring over seas.  He finds that in other countries people pay more attention to the liner notes and songwriters are held in more esteem, so he is a recognized performer. 

He also still plays and listens at Nashville songwriter’s nights.  But he does not always connect with the new styles of music.  “It’s just a whole different world.  I’m not opposed to it, it’s just not me.” he explains.

“I’m just not that interested in performing anymore.  I’m interested mostly in writing and producing.  I stay home more.  I think everybody gets to be a homebody at a certain age, even an old vagabond like me.”

His writing has also slowed.  “I concentrate more on quality than quantity.  I haven’t fallen out of love with it, but it just takes a really good challenging idea to get me excited about it.  In the old days I’d write something everyday. I probably write 4 or 5 songs a year now.”

Adkins has found that songwriters are in less demand in recent years as artists struggle to write their own material;  Largely he thinks, for business reasons.  He said, “That’s okay other than the music suffers.  I don’t know many great writers that could write an album a year.  So you need to be looking other places.”

He believes “It’s not in the writing it’s in the rewriting. Most of the good ones come fast but might take a year or two tweaking, cleaning them up. You hear a lot of songs that have four or five great lines and some not so great.  I hate to see ideas wasted like that.  I’ll put my songs up against anybody’s.  My goal is to write songs that I would show to anyone in the world.”

Kim Mason is the Content Manager of the Amplifier which was founded by her in 1995. She serves as Executive Director for the BG International Festival and designs websites. www.kimmason.ky.net