First Published in Country Music International – February 1999

Having travelled to Nashville from her Mississippi home, Tricia Walker has enjoyed songwriting success with the likes of Faith Hill, Alison Krauss, Patty Loveless and Shania Twain, yet still yearns for a record deal of her own.

Tricia Walker, respected Music Row songwriter, one of the original Women In The Round performers at the famed Bluebird Cafe, road musician and backing vocalist, record producer, label owner and music publisher, is very much an unassuming southern girl who grew up just wanting to make music.

Born and raised in Mississipi, Tricia has been in Nashville for the best part of 20 years, and though her initiapl writing success came with gospel acts like Kathy Troccoli, The Imperials, First Call and Kenny Marks, she has also penned hit songs for country artists, including Patty Loveless, Mel McDaniel, Moe Bandy, Faith Hill and Alison Krauss.

Though her mother learned to play piano when she was a little girl, neither of her parents were musicians, but both were music fans, who passed that love on to their two daughters. The family lived in Fayette, a small town near the Mississippi river about three hours north of New Orleans and just across the river from Louisiana. Tricia formed her first band at 13, supplementing formal piano training with the time-honoured tradition of copying guitar licks from records and radio.

“We were doing whatever was on the radio,” she recalls. “That was back in the day before FM; it was still very much AM radio. Oh, you could hear everybody back-to-back. When The Beatles came over in 1964 or so, everybody just went crazy. It was great, and I can remember wanting to be in a band and be just like The Beatles. We did Jimi Hendrix songs, Otis Redding songs, The Monkees, Gerry & The Pacemakers. Anything that was on the radio, we'd try and do it!”

She does admit that, though she was very serious about her music, sport, and more specifically athletics, jostled for much of her time. She had to make a decision in her mid-teens whether to study music or sport, in the hope of becoming a physical education teacher or coach. Music won out and she earned a degree in Music Education from Delta State University.

“That was back in an era, unlike today, where I think kids growing up would not set out to be a songwriter,” she explains. “I just wanted to study music and the music courses that I took were for classical musicians. I'm sure if I were able to try to see how it's played out in my songwriting career, I can see some places where it's certainly come in handy, but the worlds of commercial and classical music are very far apart. But it was a good foundation to have.”

Though studying classical music, it was pop, r&b and rock music that Tricia was playing for fun. While working on her master's degree in Jackson, she played in a couple of bands, One was a nine-piece showband doing a lot of Earth, Wind & Fire type material. Her growing interest in songwriting led to honours at the Mississippi and American Song Festivals in 1979, and she moved to Nashville in 1980 to further her writing aspirations.

“I just turned up cold,” she admits with a wry laugh. “I did come to Nashville twice before I moved here. I had made a couple of appointments and just tried to get my feet wet, so to speak. But when I moved here, I didn't have any contacts. I drove in one night to an apartment I had found and just started cold.”

Like so many aspiring singers, songwriters and musicians who come to Nashville, Tricia went through the usual round of waitressing jobs and knocking on doors. One door was opened just a little bit, and she was able to place a few of her songs with Word Music, the gospel giant that had recently opened a Music Row publishing company.

“I didn't necessarily intend for that to be the first road I took,” she says of her detour into gospel music, “but that was the first door that opened. Within the first year of being here I had made a little four-track, home-made demo tape and hawked it around town.”

Cuts on Grammy-nominated albums by Debby Boone, the Imperials and Kathy Troccoli and Tricia's frequent live performances in Nashville clubs brought her to the attention of producer Jerry Kennedy. She joined his Polygram stable of writers and had songs recorded by Mel McDaniel, Moe Bandy, Karen Staley, Patty Loveless, Faith Hill and others.

To supplement her writing royalties, she also landed lucrative road work with Connie Smith, Paul Overstreet and Shania Twain as a keyboard player and vocalist. “I worked in Connie's band for six years,” she says. “That really was my paycheck while I was writing, then again it gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of wonderful performers at the Grand Ole Opry. We came to England a couple of times during that period. That was six of the best years I've ever spent.”

It was while working with Connie that the famed Women In The Round was launched. Tricia had made her way around town performing at writer's nights and had become friendly with other fledging singer-songwriters, including Pam Tillis, Ashley Cleveland and Karen Staley. The focus for Nashville songwriters was the Bluebird Cafe, and four songwriters, Tom Schuyler, Don Schlitz, Paul Overstreet and Fred Knobloch, had started the 'in-the-round' concept at the Bluebird.

“That was a great time, too,” Tricia remembers. 'We formed this songwriting show that we called Women In The Round. I think what made it work was that it had a real voyeuristic kind of set up and the people in the outer circle really felt that they were in on something. We wanted to see if there were four women in town who could do the same thing, so we were the original Women In The Round. It was just one of the most enjoyable things I've done, and one of the most popular things around Nashville in the late 1980s. We got quite a following.”

It was before either Pam Tillis, Karen Staley or Ashley Cleveland had landed their record deals, and Tricia added that not only was it a lot of fun, but it also enabled all four women to pay their grocery bills for a while. Those three have all gone on to enjoy varying degrees of success on record, while Tricia has remained inconspicuously behind the scenes.

“That's kind of a disappointing spot for me,” she acknowledges. “I've always wanted to have a major recording contract, and for whatever reasons, and they're not very easily defined, I've never has the opportunity. I've done a couple of independent projects just on my own, and I've showcased for a lot of labels throughout the years, but for whatever reason, I just never had the opportunity to be signed to a major contract.”

Rather than wallowing in her bad luck in the recording arena, Trica has taken more control of the music that she creates. After her contract with Polygram Music expired she formed Crossfield Music with her business partner, Suzanne King, an all-encompassing publishing company, record label and artist development centre.

“Being a small company you have to wear a lot of different hats to keep the lights on,” she admits. “We had signed three or four writers that were artists in their own right. Suzanne and I both enjoy the studio process so much, so we have a good creative team and we wanted to sort of be in charge of creating our own music, whether it was demos or an independent album.”

Among the acts signed to Crossfield are singer-songwriter Davis Raines, who released his critically-acclaimed BIG SHINY CARS album last year, and Cowboy Dan, who won the Nashville Music Award for Best Children's recording last year and is on this year's initial Grammy ballot. As a songwriter herself, Tricia's reputation was lifted considerably when Alison Krauss won a Grammy for her performance of Tricia's song Looking In The Eyes Of Love and Faith Hill performed a soul-stirring rendition of her gospel song Keep Walkin' On at the CMA Awards a couple of years ago.

She still makes time to perform at writer's nights and also leads her acoustic trio, The Mudcats, around the Nashville clubs and occasionally plays further afield, like the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, the Vancouver Folk Festival, the South by Southwest Music festival in Austin and Crossroad Festival in Memphis. How one woman can balance such a varied life style is almost beyond comprehension.

“It drives me nuts, absolutely crazy,” she admits with a laugh. “I'm hoping to cut a few things away this year and focus a little bit better. I certainly enjoy getting out there and singing in front of folks, but there are times when I crave the solitude of a pencil and a black piece of paper. The toughest thing is just a lot of the day-to-day paperwork of running a publishing company. That is not what I am very good at, but it is necessary and has to be done.”