Magic Moments: A Music Industry Journey with Jim Beavers
By Deborah Evans Price
It’s not unusual for a person to enter the music industry, pick a lane, hit the gas on their ambitions and build a career in one area. CMA Board President Jim Beavers took a different road. In fact, he took two very different roads that led to success both as a record company executive and a hit songwriter with nine No. 1 songs to his credit.
Beavers spent a decade working at record labels, trying his hand at artist management and hitting the road as a guitarist and tour manager before finally settling into his groove as a songwriter. His lengthy list of hits includes Gary Allan’s “Watching Airplanes,” Dierks Bentley’s “Sideways,” “5-1-5-0” and “Am I the Only One,” Luke Bryan’s “Drink a Beer,” Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup” and Josh Turner’s “Why Don’t We Just Dance.”
“My goal when I moved to Nashville was to someday run a record label,” says the Texas native, who holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baylor University and a master’s in business administration from Vanderbilt University. “I played in bands in college. I played guitar and banjo, and I wrote songs. Nashville just always had an allure to me. I didn’t know anybody. I just knew I wanted to be in the business.”
Beavers landed a job in the mailroom at Capitol Records Nashville. “I got to learn how a label worked,” he recalls. “It was the early ’90s and Country Music was exploding. I just couldn’t believe I got to work for the label with Garth Brooks and all these other great artists on it.”
Beavers’ business degree earned him a ticket out of the mailroom and into the finance department. “It was an amazing place to see everything,” he says. “If you know where the money is going then you are going to get exposed to every facet of the label and the business itself. At that point, we were selling tons of records; [there was] lots of revenue, lots of activity and a big staff. I moved to the finance department and stayed there for maybe four or five years. Then the Deryl Dodd chapter opened.”
Beavers had been friends with the Dallas native since his Baylor days, and Dodd was a rising star with a deal on Columbia Records. “We took it through recording the record, the radio tour and his second single, ‘That’s How I Got to Memphis.’ After that, he ended up getting sick and everything stopped,” Beavers says of managing Dodd’s career, which got derailed when the artist developed viral encephalitis. (Dodd is currently a successful Texas-based artist.)
Beavers realized that management wasn’t for him and took a job with an old friend from high school. “I played guitar for Lee Ann Womack for several years,” says Beavers, who also worked as Womack’s tour manager. “The experience of playing to and watching real Country fans in the real world was invaluable to my songwriting. I was lucky as a writer to have this experience and be able to combine it with my label experience, especially as it related to radio. I believe these experiences really helped accelerate my success in songwriting.”
Beavers left the road and took another label gig. “Scott Hendricks had started Virgin Records and I got hired in the marketing department,” he says, “which I felt was more creative.”
When Virgin shuttered after two years, Beavers returned to Capitol as director of marketing. He lost that gig in a round of layoffs two years later. “Looking back, I can tell all of these wrong turns were leading me to the right road,” Beavers says of becoming a songwriter.
His new path was validated with a song he wrote with Dierks Bentley. “‘How Am I Doin’’’ was my first single,” says Beavers, who is currently signed to Big Yellow Dog Music. “I got a couple of other cuts, but the Dierks thing was the turning point. That’s when everything changed. I felt like I gave it up to God. It was in His hands and I felt like it was a big, ‘Here you go! This is the reason why you went through those 10 years of not knowing what was going on.’ I was very happy.”
As one of Music City’s most successful songwriters, Beavers has done his share of songwriter rounds, but when Bob DiPiero invited him to perform in a 2013 CMA Songwriter Series show, it led him to become more involved with CMA. Beavers was elected to the CMA Board of Directors in 2015. He’s passionate about the work CMA does and is especially proud of the way the organization has helped people during the pandemic.
“Most people have no idea what CMA is doing behind the scenes to support people in the live music industry,” he says. “I’m talking about financially, helping with resources, feeding them, helping them find new jobs and get healthcare and mental health resources. At the end of the day, that’s going to be the thing that I’ve been the most proud to be associated with. This is in addition to what they do for music education. There’s also a lot of meaningful work promoting diversity for our format. I’ve never met anybody that wants to be exclusionary. CMA is doing a lot of great stuff in that area. I’m proud of that too.”
As for the future of the format, Beavers agrees with Music Row’s longtime mantra. “I do believe it all begins with a song,” he smiles. “The combination of a magic melody and lyric saying something still drives me as a writer, and that should drive our whole business. The longer I do it, the more I realize how hard it is now to find those magic, magic moments. But those are the things that stand the test of time, and those are the things that, in my mind, make Country Music different.”
Check out more about Jim Beavers songwriting journey on CMA’s YouTube channel HERE. Also, be sure to watch Beavers’ 2013 CMA Songwriters Series performance at the U.S. Library of Congress HERE.
