Special Appearance

 

Art green

Art Green is a native Santa Ynez Valley Singer/Songwriter. He has released two solo CD’s, “Ride For The Brand” & “Always Followed My Heart” and a CD with his brother Marv entitled “The Green Brothers-Yesterday’s Nights.” As an award-winning independent artist, Art has garnered awards such as “2001-02 Male Traditional Country Vocalist of the Year”  by both the North American Country Music Association and the California Country Music Association. In addition, Art’s CD “Ride For The Brand” was honored as 2001 “Album of the Year” by the California Country Music Association. Art lived in Nashville , Tennessee intermittently for five years and was employed by Kix Brooks ( of Brooks & Dunn) and Barbara Brooks on their cutting horse farm in Thompson’s Station, Tennessee. It was there that he tried to further his songwriting ability and was reintroduced to the beef cattle industry.

 Art now spends his time as the head foreman of the Alisal Cattle Ranch in Solvang and enjoys his music as a hobby. He continues to write new songs, plans on recording an additional CD and performs an occasional show now and then.

 Songwriters Performing 

 

Marv Green

Marv Green, a Southern California native, moved to Nashville in March of 1993.  Within 6 months,  Marv’s songwriting caught the attention of producer Scott Hendricks, who signed Marv to a publishing deal with Big Tractor and Warner Chappell music.  Marv is still published by Warner Chappell.  Artists including George Strait, Reba, Jewel, Lonestar, Faith Hill, Brooks And Dunn,Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood, Bon Jovi, Mark Chesnutt, Jo Dee Messina, Trent Willmon, Lee Ann Womack, Sara Evans, Martina McBride, Jessica Andrews, Kelly Pickler, Brad Paisley, Rodney Atkins, Billy Currington, Danny Gokey and Joe Diffie have recorded his songs.

 Marv captured his first number-one hit, ‘True’, recorded by George Strait in 1998. The following year he scored his second number-one with ‘Amazed’ recorded by Lonestar.  ‘Amazed’ spent a record breaking eight weeks at number one on Billboard.  Green was honered by BMI with their Song Of The Year Award in 2000.  Green was awarded the BMI Songwriter Of The Year in 2001.  Marv also claimed the ACM Song Of The Year for ‘Amazed’ as well as a Grammy nomination. Green collected his third number-one song with ‘It Just Comes Natural’ recorded by George Strait and his fourth number-one with the Carrie Underwood single ‘Wasted’.  His single with Brooks And Dunn titled ‘Proud Of The House We Built’ went top 5.  Marv recently scored his 5th number-one song with Reba and ‘Consider Me Gone’ and Rodney Atkins took his song ‘Farmer’s Daughter’ to the top 5.  He currently is on the charts with Billy Currington and ‘Love Done Gone’.

 

Leslie Satcher

“Leslie Satcher is a fifth generation Texan. The daughter of a strong hearted single mother and grand daughter of cotton sharecroppers and pioneers, she is no stranger to hard work and perseverance. Born in 1962 where the Chisolm Trail and the Red River cross, Leslie grew up singing in the churches and schools of Paris, Texas along side her baby sister Jeannie Winn.

  In 1989, during a short trip to Nashville, a friend prompted Leslie to record her voice over the tracks of country standards at The Barbara Mandrell Museum. That was all it took! Just four weeks later she was crossing her beloved Red River in a $1,000 Chevrolet dragging a U-Haul trailer with an ironing board strapped to the back. If her story sounds like the beginning of a country song, it was. After several “day jobs” in “Music City”, Leslie’s talent as a songwriter was recognized by a friend from church, Guy Penrod of the Gaither Vocal Band, who encouraged her to show her work to friends Larry Strickland and Naomi Judd. It was Naomi who helped her hone her skills into a more commercial form and then introduced her to guitarist Don Potter who was starting a new publishing company. The company never came about, but the prospect of writing for a living blossomed for Leslie. After a Sunday night show at the world famous Bluebird Café, Leslie teamed with accomplished father and son songwriters Max D. and Max T. Barnes. A writing contract with the then new publishing company Island Bound Music ensued.

 Seven years of cuts by artists such as Joe Diffie, Sara Evans, Lee Ann Womack, Wade Hayes, Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, Pam Tillis, and Willie Nelson helped Leslie take the next step in her career. Jim Ed Norman of Warner Brothers Records Nashville saw something in the talent from Texas and gave her the chance to record her first project “Love Letters”. Leslie and her dear friend, producer Luke Wooten, turned in a critically acclaimed album that established her as one of the leading singer/songwriters in the country music industry today. Currently, Leslie is focusing on her second album as well as continuing to pen songs for other artists as a staff writer for Sony Tree ATV.

 Leslie performs all over the United States and is often found doing benefits with friends Vince Gill, Amy Grant, Paul Overstreet and others. In 2003 Leslie met the love her life, David Allen of Longview, Texas, while appearing at the annual benefit for the East Texas Angel Network founded by two-time Entertainer of the Year Neal McCoy. With David pursuing an acting career, the two artists stay busy between family and friends in Texas and Australia, going to church, and enjoying time together at home and the beach.

 Longtime hero Willie Nelson wrote Leslie’s heart when he put down the words “…on the road again…” for that truly is where this Texas singer/songwriter loves to be. Meeting the people who find something of meaning in the songs Leslie Satcher believes are nothing short of gifts from God.

 

Shawn camp

Some careers can be described with a couple of words, but Shawn Camp’s isn’t one of them. A bold and distinctive singer, a songwriter who’s provided material for artists ranging from Garth Brooks and Brooks & Dunn to Ralph Stanley, Del McCoury and Ricky Skaggs, and a multi-instrumentalist who’s played with everyone from Alan Jackson to the Osborne Brothers, his music sprawls across the lines that divide mainstream country, Americana and bluegrass—and if his songs have been recorded by more popular artists, his energetic new CD, Fireball, makes a compelling case that no one can do them better. From the hard-charging, country-rockin’ energy of the opening title track to the cheerfully mordant humor of the closing “Drank,” it’s a collection that showcases the thoroughly modern yet deeply rooted creations of one of Nashville’s most unique talents.

 “I dragged around a guitar from the time I was five,” Camp says with a chuckle, but it was with the fiddle that he first walked through the door to a career in music. Born and raised in Arkansas, he grew up surrounded by music—everything from his mother’s Elvis and his father’s Merle Haggard records to picking parties at his home to the sounds of living legends and local heroes at the bluegrass festivals his family regularly visited. “That’s kind of where I learned to play, under the shade trees,” he notes, and before he had finished high school he was playing for country dances around his home and hittingfestival stages around the midwest as a member of bands with names like the Grand Prairie Boys and Freddie Sanders & Signal Mountain.

 Spotted by the Grand Ole Opry’s Osborne Brothers at an Iowa festival when he was 20,  Shawn moved to Nashville in 1987 to play fiddle with the legendary bluegrass act, and over the next few years, he lived the life of a sideman, touring for short runs and long stretches alike with country stars and newcomers ranging from the Burch Sisters to Jerry Reed, Alan Jackson, Suzy Bogguss and Trisha Yearwood. Before long, he became a prolific songwriter, too—thanks to a fortuitous encounter at Nashville’s songwriting mecca, the Bluebird Café. “I’d always written little sketches of what I thought would be songs, but I’d never really thought enough of them to finish anything,” he recalls. “And then one night I was sitting at the bar at the Bluebird, and I got to talking with this guy, and kind of just said, ‘yeah, I’m a songwriter.’ It turned out to be Dean Miller, and before the night was through, we had written a song together—and after that, we just kept going, non-stop, and wound up with about 40 of them.”

 Shawn got his first cut in 1991 with “Fallin’ Never Felt So Good,” and though he claims that he began singing simply in order to pitch his songs—“ I think it just evolved from having to perform them in order for somebody to hear them,” he says with a grin—he was signed to Reprise Records the following year, and released his self-titled major label debut in 1993. But mainstream success proved elusive, especially when work on his second album ground to a halt over creative differences the following year. “Emory Gordy produced that album,” he says proudly. “And I had Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Quartet; Patty Loveless was singing a couple of songs; we had players like James Burton, Jerry Douglas and Bobby Hicks on it. Looking back on it today, every song on it might not play exactly the way I’d like it to, but mostly I was proud of and felt strongly about it. But the head of the label wanted me to take it all off and put electric guitars on it; he said it didn’t sound like the current John Michael Montgomery album. I told him I’d think about it, but I wound up calling him back and telling him that I couldn’t change anything—that he needed to give me a release date or a release from the record label.”

 Undismayed, Camp remained in Nashville and plunged into a songwriting career supplemented by occasional forays as a sideman. His catalog grew steadily, and so did the list of his songs recorded by major country artists, including his first #1—Garth Brooks’ 1997 recording of “Two Piña Coladas.” Yet even as he was scoring hits with the mainstream, Shawn kept close to his roots, too, co-writing with friends like Guy Clark and another writer with a bluegrass background, Jim Lauderdale, and the commercial success of songs like “How Long Gone,” a #1 for Brooks & Dunn in 1998 was matched by critical acclaim for the likes of “Forever Ain’t No Trouble Now,” which appeared on the 2002 Grammy-winning Lauderdale-Ralph Stanley collaboration, Lost In The Lonesome Pines.

 Still, by the end of the 90s, Camp was growing intent on recording his songs in his own voice, and in 2001 he released Lucky Silver Dollar on his own Skeeterbit Records label. Combining his own versions of songs like “How Long Gone” and “Can’t Have One Without The Other” (previously recorded by Tracy Byrd) with new material like “Tune Of The Twenty Dollar Bill,” the Mark Miller-Allen Reynolds produced album earned rave reviews from publications like Country Standard Time, which called it “an album that should appeal to almost every country music fan.” Yet despite the enthusiastic reception it got from those who found it, Lucky Silver Dollar was stymied by a lack of exposure—“I had no airplay, and I had no booking agent to book me, so I had no shows,” Shawn recalls with a grin—and so he continued to focus on songwriting until early 2003, when a spur-of-the-moment decision to record a couple of bluegrass shows he’d booked at a favorite hang-out resulted in Live At The Station Inn, released the following year on John Prine’s Oh Boy Records.

Backing Shawn with an all-star bluegrass cast and showcasing a trio of fiddle-driven numbers he’d written with Guy Clark, favorites from the Lost In The Lonesome Pines album, originals that had already found their way into the Del McCoury Band’s repertoire along and others already or soon to be recorded by some of bluegrass’s biggest names, Live At The Station Inn, as Shawn puts it, jump-started his performing career by reintroducing him to the tightly-knit, supportive bluegrass community. Appearances followed at high-profile venues like Colorado’s famed Rockygrass festival, the

Northwest String Summit and the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual World of Bluegrass convention, while Prine invited Camp to open for him on an extended tour of the northwest. “I was so nervous, because he’s got such a great audience, and such an intelligent one—I was thinking, man, am I smart enough to sing for these people,” he laughs, but like the bluegrass audience, Prine’s fans embraced his music.

 Now, with the release of Fireball, Shawn Camp stands on the brink of still another phase of his career. Loaded with a fresh batch of songs written with friends like John Scott Sherrill, Mark D. Sanders and co-producer Billy Burnette, the album reveals his strengths as a rootsy yet modern country stylist—and, as always, a songwriter who memorably connects contemporary sensibilities to forms that evoke memories of classics that traverse the range of country music history. Witty, sardonic stories like “Hotwired” and “Just As Dead Today” are interspersed with rockabilly-flavored blues like “Waitin’ For The Day To Break” and “Beagle Hound,” the smooth-flowing, grassy “Would You Go With Me,” the glistening ballad “Love Ain’t Leavin’,” the easy groove of “Nothin’ To Do With You” and even more. Adding to the “listening amusement” Camp dedicates to his listeners, virtually all of his co-writers participate, too; “I love having them on there,” he says, “because to me, they have as much right to say how the song should sound as I do—we wrote it together, so we have to let it grow together, or it’s not ours any more.”

 The result of an organic process that found him “recording every song I wrote in the last year or so as if it were a master session,” Fireball has, despite its variety, a kind of seamless elegance that makes it a fitting capstone to a year that Camp counts among the best he’s had. “All my life I’d wanted to record a bluegrass record, so to get any kind of approval at all out of doing that has been a real honor. This last year has felt a lot different to me—getting to play some of those places again, and seeing some of the same people. Those bluegrass festival folks are strong, you know? So it’s been an amazingyear–it’s been a treat. And now it’s on to the next thing.”

 

Wynn Varble

Wynn Varble admits he must have been destined for a career in country music. Wynn was raised in the small town of Ellenwood, Georgia, where music was a central part of his life. He recalls his father’s collection of country LP’s and the hours he spent listening to the legends: Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Bob Wills, and Jimmie Rodgers, whom Wynn credits as being his primary musical influences. He says he did just about anything to hear the newest country record – even if it meant trading in his big brother’s rock albums and catching trouble for it afterwards!

Wynn picked up a guitar for the first time when he was 15 and taught himself to play. He remembers picking out his first original melodies soon after he mastered basic chord progressions. The creative sparks started flying, and Wynn formed a bluegrass band when he turned 16. After graduating high school, Wynn started on the path to musical success playing the club circuit. His talent playing bluegrass landed him gigs from Austin to Ft. Lauderdale; during this time he was perfecting his style, not only as a country artist but also as a songwriter.

In 1982, Wynn visited some friends in Nashville. He spent several months writing with an up-and-coming singer/songwriter named Dave Gibson. It was this collaboration that proved to be Wynn’s ticket out of the club scene and into the Nashville music community. Varble completely relocated to Nashville in 1992. Gibson introduced him to Cliff Williamson, then-director of Starstruck Writers Group, and Wynn was signed to the publisher in 1994. After Starstruck was sold to Warner/Chappell Music, Wynn joined the Warner/Chappell writing staff.Wynn had his first #1 song “Have You Forgotten” with Darryl Worley in 2003. The song was nominated for SONG OF THE YEAR by the CMA. In 2008, Waitin’ on a Woman, which Wynn co-wrote with Don Sampson was nominated by the CMA for SONG OF THE YEAR. His most recent #1, I’m a Little More Country recorded by Easton Corbin, was also nominated by the ACM for SONG OF THE YEAR.

Wynn’s songs have been cut by a range of great artists, including Easton Corbin, Garth Brooks, Lee Ann Womack, Brad Paisley, Darryl Worley, Kellie Pickler, Montgomery Gentry, Jason Sellers, Gary Allan, Trace Adkins, Clint Daniels, Kevin Denney, Tracy Byrd, The Kinleys, Chris LeDoux, Danni Leigh, Mark Chesnutt and Sammy Kershaw.

 

Rivers Rutherford

After moving to Nashville in 1993, Rivers quickly found his place in the world as an entertainer, studio guitar player and songwriter. In 1996, Rivers signed with Universal Music Publishing and remains with the company today. Rutherford’s songs have been recorded by many different artists, including Gretchen Wilson, Gary Allan, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Carrie Underwood, Brooks & Dunn, Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Lady Antebellum, LeAnn Rimes, Keith Urban, Trick Pony, Blake Shelton, Deana Carter, Montgomery Gentry, Clay Davidson, Chuck Wicks, Jamie O’Neal and Andy Griggs.

 Rutherford claimed his first number-one hit, “Ain’t Nothin’ ‘Bout You”, in 2001. The song spent six weeks at Number One and is to date the most successful single ever recorded by Brooks & Dunn. Rutherford was honored by ASCAP and received their Song of the Year Award in 2002. Since the smash hit with Brooks & Dunn, Rivers has accomplished seven more number-one singles: Tim McGraw’s “Real Good Man”; Montgomery Gentry’s first number-one, “If You Ever Stop Loving Me” (which he also produced); Gretchen Wilson’s “Homewrecker”; Brad Paisley’s duet with Dolly Parton, “When I Get Where I’m Going” (which received both the ACM and CMA nomination for Song of the Year); Kenny Chesney’s “Livin’ In Fast Forward”; Rodney Atkins’ “These Are My People”; and Trace Adkins’ “Ladies Love Country Boys”.

 ASCAP’s Songwriter of the Year award for 2006 was shared between Brett James and Rivers Rutherford. While Rivers continues to enjoy songwriting success, he plans to expand performing and recording. “I’m trying not to look back, Rutherford said. “I try to look forward. When I’m happy is when I know I’ve written something I really love.” There’s certainly a lot for Rivers to look forward to this upcoming year. He wrote Toby Keith’s title track “Bullets In A Gun”, Lady Antebellum’s “When You Got A Good Thing”, and several other songs that have been recorded by Frankie Ballard, Reba, Tim McGraw, Trace Adkins, LeAnn Rimes, BJ Thomas, Bill Anderson, Jamie Lee Thurston, Chasing Dixie and Jimmy Wayne.