Making Tracks
Making Tracks
A Record Producer’s Southern Roots Music Journey
From the 1980s through the early 2000s, a golden era for southern roots music, producer and three-time Grammy winner Scott Billington recorded many of the period’s most iconic artists. Working primarily in Louisiana for Boston-based Rounder Records, Billington produced such giants as Irma Thomas, Charlie Rich, Buckwheat Zydeco, Johnny Adams, Bobby Rush, Ruth Brown, Beau Jocque, and Solomon Burke. The loving and sometimes irreverent profiles in Making Tracks reveal the triumphs and frustrations of the recording process, and that obsessive quest to capture a transcendent performance.
Billington’s long working relationships with the artists give him perspective to present them in their complexity—foibles, failures, and fabled feats—while providing a vivid look at the environs in which their music thrived. He tells about Boozoo Chavis’s early days as a musician, jockey, and bartender at his mother’s quarter horse track, and Ruth Brown’s reign as the most popular star in rhythm and blues, when the challenge of traveling on the “chitlin’ circuit” proved the antithesis of the glamour she exuded on stage.
In addition, Making Tracks provides a widely accessible study in the craft of recording. Details about the technology and psychology behind the sessions abound. Billington demonstrates varying ways of achieving the mutual goal of a great record. He also introduces the supporting cast of songwriters, musicians, and engineers crucial to the magic in each recording session. Making Tracks sings unforgettably like a "from the vault" discovery.
The book proves that he [Billington] has a great memory for details, is a terrific storyteller, and has worked with more than a few musicians of note over the past four-plus decades. . . . But the book isn’t just about music. Much of it passes as a beautifully written travelogue with detailed descriptions that give you a feeling of place and history.
Making Tracks: A Record Producer’s Southern Roots Music Journey warmly invites a reader along on a winding road less traveled with all of its bumps, as well as its cruisin’ pleasures. Like most journeys, it’s the people one meets along the way that really makes the trip memorable.
After reading this wonderful saga of Billington’s career, you are left with a deep appreciation for his vision and his remarkable ability to bring out the absolute best in a wide array of artist. He combined great artists with compelling material, and stellar backing bands, then skillfully brought all of the pieces together time after time. A marvelous book worth several reads, which makes it highly recommended!
As his career advances, [Billington] discusses evolving recording technology and imparts lessons he has learned about making good recordings, which culminates with the insight: 'The collective energy of a group of talented people makes for a socially dynamic experience that can result in music greater that any of the individuals involved could imagine creating on their own. When a recording can harness that kind of feeling listeners can feel it, too, and they will come back to it time and time again.' Making Tracks: A Record Producer’s Southern Roots Music Journey captures that feeling, and hopefully Scott Billington will continue to harness it on new recordings as he continues his extraordinary journey.
Get It While You Can should be the subtitle of MAKING TRACKS, and someone should be cranking up a unique award to give the producer-author.
I am honored to be a part of Making Tracks. Scott has a wonderful way of telling the story of our working together. The book reads like a song in print, and I love the beauty of his memory.
Making Tracks: A Record Producer’s Southern Roots Music Journey is a tour de force of interesting anecdotes on the record industry, driven by a relaxed and accessible style that engages the reader with detailed information while also providing valuable insight into the human relationships that make a successful recording possible. The sheer diversity of artists with whom the author has worked is in itself truly amazing. Anyone interested in American vernacular culture, New Orleans or zydeco music, or the workings of independent record labels will love this book.
Scott Billington has a wealth of experience to draw upon in American roots music and the music of New Orleans and Memphis, in particular. His intimate first-person accounts of the making of numerous valuable and historically important records make this book an essential resource for scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American music.
Scott Billington is a three-time Grammy-winning roots music producer who has worked with such artists as Irma Thomas, Charlie Rich, and Bobby Rush. For many decades, he balanced his roles of producer, art director, musician, and A&R executive at the highly regarded Rounder Records label, where he was responsible for hundreds of recordings. A former Recording Academy Trustee, he lives in New Orleans, where he teaches music production at Loyola University. He often performs with his wife, the children’s musician Johnette Downing.
