MURFREESBORO,
Tenn. — The multitalented harmonica player who’s left his inimitable stamp on decades
of country and rock recordings will visit MTSU Monday, Nov. 14, to discuss his
amazing career and perform in a free public event.
Charlie
McCoy will sit down at 7 p.m. Nov. 14 in the Tennessee Room inside MTSU’s
James Union Building with West Virginia University’s Travis Stimeling, a leading authority on Nashville’s classic era of
recording, to discuss McCoy’s adventures as one of the original “Nashville
Cats” session musicians and as a recording artist in his own right.
McCoy, 75, will follow the discussion with a
performance with his band of Nashville pros.
MTSU’s Center for Popular Music is presenting the
event. A printable campus parking map is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap.
McCoy, a native of Oak Hill, West Virginia, who was
raised in Miami, Florida, began his musical career on a 50-cent harmonica at
age 8. His talents ultimately led him to Nashville, where he played drums,
guitar and bass in bands and cut his own single before Chet Atkins first hired him as a session musician in 1961. Ann-Margret’s “I Just Don’t Understand”
and Roy Orbison’s “Candy Man” were
the first of hundreds to include McCoy’s harmonica.
By the mid-’60s, McCoy was a fixture on Elvis Presley’s records and movie
soundtracks, and after a chance meeting in New York City in 1965, he
collaborated regularly with Bob Dylan
on classics that included the “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Blonde on Blonde,” “John
Wesley Harding” and “Nashville Skyline” albums. His work with Dylan led to
sessions with other rock and folk artists, including Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Ringo Starr, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Johnny Cash.
McCoy, who also plays keyboards and several wind
and brass instruments, has contributed to thousands of records in the last
50-plus years, including Dolly Parton’s
“My Tennessee Mountain Home” and George
Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” He’s released more than two dozen of
his own albums, including the Grammy-winning “The Real McCoy” and the No. 1
“Good Time Charlie,” served as music director for the “Hee Haw” TV show for 19
years and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
You can learn more about McCoy at his website, http://charliemccoy.com.
The Center for Popular Music, part of MTSU’s
College of Media and Entertainment, is one of the nation’s largest and richest
repositories of research materials related to American vernacular music.
For more information on MTSU’s Center for Popular Music
and its projects and special events, visit http://www.mtsu.edu/popmusic.
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