 Everything is beautiful in its own way. Everybody is beautiful in their own way. Comedy and music legend Ray Stevens has spanned multi-generations with 60 years of fabulous music, including his Grammy Award-winning classics, Everything is Beautiful and Misty, as well as his comedic hits like the multi-million selling records, The Streak and Guitarzan. And through it all, he gives the Lord glory. This is his story. This is today's Nashville. This is faith. Ray Stevens, I cannot believe I am sitting at your piano at the cabaret. You know, my husband and I at Christmas time came to your show and we had so much fun. Everybody was having a great, great time. The gentleman next to us, I mean, he was laughing so hard. I was afraid. I mean, his face was so red. I thought, oh, I hope he doesn't pass out. Thank you so much for inviting me here. Well, thank you for being here. And this red piano has become kind of symbolic of this showroom. So did you design this? Yeah. I had it built and the guts are just a regular electric piano. It occurs a while, I think. And it just sits in this slot that was built when I built the piano. And it has worked pretty well. Well, Ray, you have been in entertainment for over 60 years. Yeah. I mean, take me back to where it all started. When did you know that music was going to be your life? I think I was about 17. When I knew that it was going to happen, I kind of felt like it would. Would a lot earlier than that. But, you know, when I was six years old, my mother insisted that I take piano lessons. And I didn't want to. I wanted to go out and play baseball with the rest of the guys in the neighborhood. But she insisted that I practice one hour a day, so I did. And I'm glad she insisted on that because pretty soon I started kind of understanding how the keyboard worked. And so I continued my piano lessons, started when I was six, and I continued for 15 years with those piano lessons. Classical music. It worked out pretty good. Did you learn to love the piano? Oh, yeah, sure. So where were you born? A little mill village, cotton mill village, Clarkdale, Georgia. Back in those days, there was the Clark Thread Company. And they had mills all over the southeast. Our mill, I think, was a spinning mill. They made thread. And my dad worked at the mill. And so everybody in the little village had a house that was supplied by the mill. All the houses sort of looked the same. They were all white clapboard with slate roofs. And they were nice little houses. A lot of kids in the neighborhood, we used to play ball and, you know, they had a swimming pool in that little mill village and learned to swim when I was six years old. It was a lot of fun. So you mentioned you were about 17 when you knew that music was going to be your career. Yeah. What happened then? Well, you know, I moved from Clarkdale when I was 10 years old down to Albany, Georgia. There was another mill down there. And my dad was transferred. So we moved to Albany, Georgia. I continued piano lessons down there. And I met a guy named Bill Lowry, who just started a music publishing company. Went to a little Baptist church down the street from my house in Atlanta. And my Sunday school teacher, I must have got up in church and played piano and sang or something. I don't know. He came to me in Sunday school and said, you need to meet Bill Lowry. And I said, who's Bill Lowry? And he said he started a music publishing company and he's looking for songs. You do write songs. And I said, well, I do now. So I met Bill Lowry. I wanted to see him the next day. And he said, well, write me a song. And so I was pumped up. I went home and wrote a song that night. And I took it to him the next day. And he liked it. And he was connected. He knew people in the music business, in the record business. He knew a producer in California who produced records for capital records. And named Ken Nilsen. And Ken came to Nashville quite often to record country singers in the Nashville studios. He sent my song to Ken Nilsen. And he liked it. And he said, well, why don't we sign him to capital records? And I'll come to Nashville and we'll produce a record. And so I was all for that, of course. I'm 17 years old. I'm still in high school. So we came up to Nashville. And I mean, Atlanta was a bigger city but didn't have any studios to speak of like Nashville did. And I came up and I made my first record in 1957. And... What was the song? It was called Silver Bracelet. It was about teenage jewelry. Back in those days they had what they called identification bracelets. And on one side you put the girl's name and on the other backside you put your name. And the guys would give them to their girls, you know, girlfriends. I wrote a song about that. It wasn't a hit, but it got me hooked. I knew right there that I wanted to be in the music business. And so I continued to write for Mr. Lowry. And in 1960 I wrote a song that was the first song... And I recorded it. And it was the first song that ever did anything at all for my career. It was taking all... It was going to be a hit. It was called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. And it was a novelty song, comedy song about Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his dog King. The record was going to be a hit. It was taken off. And in my exuberance I had neglected to get permission from the people that owned the character, Sergeant Preston, to use him in a song. And so their lawyers sent a letter, cease and desist. And so we had to pull the record off the market. But it gave me a clue. I knew what to do. And so in 1961 I wrote and recorded a song called Jeremiah Peabody's Polly Unsaturated, quick dissolving, fast-acting, pleasant-tasting, green and purple pills. And that was a small hit. I think it went to 35 on the National Chart, though. And I was pretty happy with that. But in 1962 I wrote a song and recorded it. It became my first big hit record. It's now considered to be politically incorrect. But I'll always sing it on the show anyway. And I'd like to point out that during Desert Storm when the U.S. tanks were chasing Saddam across the desert, the radio intercom and all those tanks was playing this song, Ahab the A-Rab. I recorded Ahab the A-Rab in Nashville 20 days after I moved to Nashville in 19... January 2nd, 1962. So how old were you then? I was 22. January 2nd, 1962. I wasn't quite 22. My birthday is January 24th. So I had a few days to go. But I had moved up here from Atlanta to play piano on sessions. I wanted to be a session musician. And I met all the great national session musicians that are pictured on the murals here in the showroom. I was very lucky to have moved up at that time because they were all very welcoming and very nice. And I played on a lot of sessions. And of course when Ahab was a hit after I had just moved up here it was a hit in the summer of 1962. I had to leave the session scene and kind of go on the road and milk the personal appearances from the hit records. But anyway, it all worked out pretty good. Well, Ray, we're going to talk about some of your hits. And I heard that Taylor Swift has been stalking you. And we're going to talk about that when we come back. Ray, you have a way of taking what's going on in our culture and creating songs. You've had amazing hits. Let's talk about some of your favorite Grammys. Well, the first Grammy I won was For Everything Is Beautiful. What inspired you with that? I was signed to host the Andy Williams summer show on NBC. I wanted to write a song that could be used as the theme song for that television show. And so I bounded and determined to do it. And I had a lot of failed attempts, but I finally hit on the song Everything Is Beautiful. And sure enough, it was a good enough song to be the theme for that television show. I recorded it before the television show was aired, though. And it won a Grammy for the... Can you play a little bit of it? Oh, yeah, I'll see. Everything is beautiful in its own way like a starry summer night or a snow-covered winter's day. Is that enough? Yes, beautiful. It's beautiful. What inspired you with that song? I hit on it. I think I read a little book of Chinese proverbs, and that was one of them. Struck a note, struck a chord, I should say. And so I just wrote the song from there. How is your faith, though, in the Lord? How does that inspire you with some of your songs? I gotta say that I have been blessed by help with my whole life. And I gotta give the Lord credit because when I was 12, I joined the Baptist Church. I was baptized in Albany, Georgia. And I think that's a good thing to do. I think that's a move that is very important in people's lives because you're saying that I believe. And if you say that in public, being baptized, I think it opens the door to get divine help. You have a way of making people laugh with your music and your songs. Both are very, you know, some are inspirational, some are fun. Let's talk about The Streak. The Streak, the idea came from, I was on an airplane flying from L.A. back to Nashville in 1969, I think. And I read a little article in a Newsweek magazine that was on the plane about a college student in UCLA that took off his clothes and ran through a crowd and they called it Streaky. And I thought, well, now there's an idea for a song. And I got back home and I wrote the song and went in the studio immediately and cut the record. I was still writing a song in the studio while we were recording the song, but I finished it up and we recorded. That idea must have hit a lot of people because by the time I could get my record out, there were already 12 or so streaking records already on the market by other artists. Luckily, mine was the one that made it. It just came from a little story in a magazine. What about your other songs? Get Tarzan, what inspired you there? Friend of mine, Bill Justice, he was a musician here in Nashville and an arranger, a great musician. He was so good, he scored movies. He was in Hollywood in 69, scoring a movie. I happened to be out there. He heard I was in town, called me and came over to my hotel and we had lunch and he said, I wanted to see you because I have a song title and you're the only guy I know that can write it. I said, okay, I'm very flattered. What is it, Bill? And he said, Tarzan, man. And I thought, well, yeah, that is funny. So I wrote the song on the plane flying home, I think, and went in the studio and made the record. I got the record. I was recording on Monument Records at that time. Fred Foster's label. And Fred didn't like it. But I was friends with the head of promotion at Monument and he said, Fred, I think you're wrong. Let's put it out. I think it'll be a big hit. Fred said, well, all right. And so we put it out and sure enough, Fred was wrong. It was a pretty big hit. Well, you know, Ray, I look around your theater and I love how you just show everybody almost that you have worked with. Did you design? Yeah. I'm a frustrated architect, you know. So I built a theater in Branson, Missouri in the early 90s and I worked over there in my theater for three years and then sold it. I knew that owning a theater was a good thing because we filled up every, we had 2,000 seats in that theater in Branson. We filled them, had two shows a week, six days a week, and we filled that theater 12 shows a week. And so I figured, you know, maybe Nashville could use a smaller theater to get the overflow from the opera, so to speak. So we built this, gosh, I can't remember exactly when. So you were living in Branson and back and forth? No, I never moved from Nashville. I had a place to stay over there. But when I left Branson's theater, I moved back to my house here in Nashville. I must have built it in 2016 or 2017, something like that. The people I see on your walls, you've worked with so many. Any stories about any... Oh, gosh, well, yeah, there's a story behind every picture. Well, I saw Michael Douglas on the wall. Oh, yeah, I used to do his show up in Pennsylvania. He was in Pittsburgh, I think. He was a great guy, nice guy. And Robert Redford, Robert Redford's on the wall? Yeah, he came to Nashville to visit a friend of mine, Billy Sherrill, who was on the wall. He's a producer. He produced Tammy and George and a lot of people. Robert was in town trying to get some help with a charity that he was involved in. And I met him at Billy's house. And then, of course, I turned down the song Raindrops Falling on My Head that he was a big star in because I had just recorded one of Christofferson's first songs Sunday morning coming down and I had spent so much time in the studio making that Christofferson song into a record that I thought, well, if I take this song Raindrops Falling on My Head that's been offered, I'll pass. I'll mess up the Sunday morning. Somebody else will beat me out with Sunday morning coming down. So I passed on Raindrops, brilliant move. And my record of Sunday morning came out and didn't sell many. And so I had struck out on both songs. But I recovered when Andy called me Williams and said, I want to host the Andy Williams summer show on NBC. And I said, yes, thank you. Well, Ray, you did a video. If Jesus was a stranger, you're not in the right circle of friends. And we're going to talk about that when we get back. Ray, I saw your video. Funny. Taylor Swift is stalking me. It was hilarious. How did that all come about? Well, it was such a ludicrous statement and a ludicrous title for a song. I thought, well, you know, people might like this. And so I got, it was an idea sent to me by Chuck Redden, who lived down in Alabama and a friend of mine. And Buddy, I got Buddy Cav, another friend to help me fill in the blanks because the song wasn't finished. But the idea came from Chuck. So we wrote this song and, you know, made the record and then made a video to go with it. Did Taylor ever know about it? Oh, I'm sure she did. I never heard from her, but I'm sure she did. Tell me a little bit about Jesus. Would Jesus wear a Rolex? Well, Chad Atkins, a good buddy of mine, got with a girl named Margaret Archer. And Margaret was, you know, a music business through television. She was involved in TV production out at Opryland. And they wrote this song. I think Margaret came up with the idea from watching televangelists on TV with Jesus wear a Rolex. And so she and Chet wrote the song and called me and I said, of course I'll record that. And so I did. Did you have fun with it? Sure. Yeah, it was a lot of fun to record that. And I also saw the video and your song. We talked about it. If Jesus was a stranger. Yeah, that wasn't a video. That was a performance on the Larry Black TV show. Jesus is a stranger. Check your circle of friends. Don Cusick is the guy that wrote that, another buddy of mine. And, you know, I'm always being given great little songs to record. And I don't know if I ever recorded this one. I don't think I have yet, but I probably will when I get a chance. Well, what would you say to somebody that didn't know Jesus? I'm not a preacher, but I'd say you're missing out. And you had a huge hit with the gospel song Love Lifted Me. Yeah, I remember being in church and Sunday school and we would sing that. And in church everybody sang it. Love Lifted Me. Love Lifted Me. Like that. But when I recorded it, I recorded it like, Love Lifted Me. Oh, Love Lifted Me. Like that. Did you get a Grammy for that? I don't think so. No, I know I didn't get a Grammy for that. So tell me what it's like on Saturday evenings here. Well, that's a lot of fun. Everybody, people come and we, the piano bar is open. I think he opens at five or 5.30. And people come and they go to the piano bar and then if they want to eat, they come in and sit down and they're served dinner. And then at 7.30 I come out and we do a show for a couple hours. What's your favorite part of the evening? Well, I don't know. It's all, well, I don't really get involved until showtime. And then after the show, I go out usually to the piano bar and meet and greet the few people that have stayed over to enjoy John Jannethus in the piano bar. And, you know, that's a lot of fun. So did you raise your family here? Yeah. Yeah, I have two girls, two daughters. And you were married 60 years. Yeah, that's right. And when we moved up, we moved the baby with us because she was born in Atlanta. Of course, the second girl was born here. Ray, when you look back on your career, 60 years and the people that you've met and everything that you've done, were there any challenges? Were there any difficult times? Of course, yeah. Every life has difficult times. But you deal with it and move on, you know. What would you say to somebody that is getting into the music industry or today in Nashville? Music has changed so much since the internet. It's changed quite a bit and in my humble opinion, not for the better. But you can still, you know, have a good career in the music business. You just got to know that that's what you want to do and be bound and determined and, of course, be somewhat talented and stick it out, you know. Jump in and don't give up. Ray, are you still writing songs? Oh yeah, I started my publishing companies. I started the first one in 63. And then I added, that was a BMI company and then I added an ASCAP company and a CSAC company and another BMI company. So I've got, I think, four publishing companies and I've always liked to write songs and so I'm still writing and a lot of people, friends of mine over the years, send me songs from time to time and it's, you know, I've got just a plethora of songs that I'm waiting to record. I built a studio in the back of the cabaret here. I have to find the time to record some of these new songs that I have written and received from buddies of mine and I enjoy that. I look forward to doing that. What inspires you to write your songs? Just life or? I don't know. I love music and, you know, that's just part of it. From my perspective, that's how I got into the music business by writing a song. There's a slogan that I think it all begins with a song and I think that's from the National Songwriters Association of which I am a member. Once you get started as a songwriter you can't help but get ideas from time to time just from what somebody says or seeing something in a billboard or a magazine and so, you know, I still try to write. So what's next for you? Performing on stage and making records and seeing what I can do. Well, Ray, I just want to thank you so much for inviting me to the cabaret and I just pray that many, many blessings to you. Thank you. Thanks for coming. My friend, is Jesus a stranger to you? Take him in your circle of friends today. You won't be disappointed. Life will never be the same. This is today's Nashville. This is Faith.