In Memory of
Dennis Yost, of the Classics IV
1943 - 2008

Bill Lowery’s career in the music business spans the latter half of the twentieth century and is unparalleled within the Georgia music scene. He was an obvious choice to be one of the original recipients, along with legendary singer Ray Charles, of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame’s very first Georgy® Award in 1979. His presence as a music publisher industry-wide has been immense with hit songs to compete with record labels and publishing firms in New York or Los Angeles. Among those songs, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” written by Lowery artist Joe South and made popular by Lynn Anderson, and “Traces” a hit for Atlanta’s Classics IV, are on the BMI list of 50 most-played songs. In fact, during 1971, “Rose Garden” was BMI’s most performed song.

While still a teenager, Lowery worked in radio markets around the southeast, including Shreveport, La., McComb, Miss., Hot Springs, Ark. and Elizabethon, Tenn., before coming to Atlanta. At just 21 years old, he had become the youngest station manager in American radio. In Atlanta he worked for WGST and WQXI. Together with associate Dennis "Boots" Woodall, Lowery formed Lowery Music Company and became involved in independent record production and promotion. Lowery Music Co. Inc. received its BMI license on October 1, 1952. With rock ’n roll still in its infancy in 1956, Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop-A-Lula” became the Lowery Music companies’ first million seller. The following year, another Lowery-published tune, “Young Love,” reached number one for both Tab Hunter and Sonny James. Since then the Lowery Music catalog has grown to more than 5,000 titles and encompasses nearly every type of music.

Lowery once explained his early motivation for working in the industry to an interviewer, “… I really felt the need of a music publisher in the city of Atlanta when I started and I was right. Nashville wasn’t really a very big thing except for country music and there was no place to go with pop music.”

Lowery also had strong ideas about the type of songs he wanted, “I always liked songs that had hope and dreams and aspirations and if it didn’t have that, then I didn’t really want them,” he commented.

Early in his career, he received offers to move his operation elsewhere and was told he really needed to be in Nashville or, even Chicago, if not New York or Los Angeles, to really be successful. But he never wavered from his belief that Atlanta could be a music city.

“Hubert Long wanted me to move to Nashville. Hubert [managed] Faron Young, Bill Anderson, Hank Snow and a number of big country acts and he wanted me to run the publishing and he would take care of the acts, because we had a number of acts that would have been good for Nashville at that time. But I told him…‘I just couldn’t leave Atlanta.’”

Over the years Bill Lowery wore many hats in and around the music industry. In addition to his publishing concerns, he owned the very successful Southern Tracks Recording. He was a record company president, an artist manager, an early ‘indie’ record producer, served (twice) as National President of NARAS, was a board member and director of the Country Music Association, president of the Country Music Foundation, and member of the board of the National Music Publishers Association. He was inducted into the Country Music DJ Hall of Fame in 1984.

Once asked what he felt his legacy would be Lowery commented, “…I hope it will be that I contributed…to making the music business a better music business.”

In 1999 Lowery Music was sold to the Sony Corporation. Bill Lowery passed away in 2004, and his son Butch continues to oversee Bill Lowery Music, a new publishing company; Southern Tracks, the recording studio he founded; Southern Tracks Records; and the Bill Lowery Foundation, which supports music education in Georgia.