Sandy Lee Watkins Songfest starts Wednesday (see schedule at bottom of article)
(This article first appeared in the July print edition of the Hendersonian.)
Don Sampson can remember as far back as three years old looking at his father’s guitar standing in the corner of his bedroom and he was told not to touch it. Of course, he did. When no one was around, he’d run his fingers across the strings.
By six, Sampson had started playing guitar.
“I started playing at six and pretty much from that moment on I knew that was pretty much what I wanted to do,” he said.
His goal: Nashville.
His father played guitar, and his mother played piano and read music, and so he had an early base from which to work to get there.
He was first influenced by Hank Williams, mostly because he was the favorite of his father, who called him “The Master.” With age, Sampson found Merle Haggard, whom he looked up to. And later he tuned into singer-songwriter legends Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash—“of course.”
In high school, Sampson joined the garage bands that seem to be a rite of initiation for singers and songwriters. In one of the bands, Sampson said the rest of the group was intent on being the Beatles. Sampson, meanwhile, kept his focus on becoming the next Haggard.
Throughout his early years growing up in Virginia, Sampson planned to go to Nashville. When he turned of age, though, he first wanted to try another place—he wanted to play the honky tonks in Texas. At 21, he loaded up and landed in San Antonio. It was 1981 and the height of the urban cowboy craze.
“Texas is a different world,” Sampson said. “It was even more of a different world in 1981.”
He played the rough and tumble honky tonks and beer joints for a year, but didn’t get sucked in. He stuck to his plan.
“I held to my guns,” he said. “From the time I was five or six years old, Nashville it was.”
When he was 22, he moved to Nashville and almost immediately found work in a touring band. But like the classic story of so many bands, those fronting the band ran out of money and after eight months, Sampson was out of work.
Like a starving artist, Sampson took on a string of jobs—gas stations, construction work, maintenance—“anything to pay rent”—and he started to write songs.
“I remember being on a job and sitting on the top of a roof in 90-degree Nashville weather writing songs,” he said.
And at some point in his early life in Nashville it dawned on him that the bulk of his living would be made writing songs and not singing them. Sure, he still dreamed of being up on stage in front of thousands. But Nashville doesn’t always work that way. In fact, it rarely does.
“(The Nashville music industry) is looking for great songs but they’re looking for a lot of them,” he said. “Nashville is a co-writers kind of town.”
He’s written a lot of songs, and he’s written a lot of songs with other artists. In 1985, he signed his first contract with a publishing company. He learned that those companies require their songwriters to write a quota of songs each year, another piece of evidence that Nashville wants lots of songs. Reaching his quota was never easy.
“I had a publishing deal for 35 years,” Sampson said. “I don’t think there was one year where I didn’t struggle to meet my quota.” But, he said, he always did.
Sampson says a songwriter working in the business learns a lot—from other songwriters and musicians, from life, from the business side of things.
“The most important thing you can learn, as a songwriter, is who you are,” he said.
He can look back on his career and recall both the songs he had great success with and those he’s most proud of and see the thread that runs through them all—faith.
“That’s kind of who I think I am,” he said.
His songwriting credits include the #1 singles Brad Paisley’s “Waitin’ On A Woman,” Gary Allan’s “Tough Little Boys,” Alan Jackson’s “Midnight in Montgomery” and Bryan White’s “Rebecca Lynn,” according to his bio on the Songfest website. Huge-name singers like George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, Charlie Daniels and Kenny Rogers have sung his songs.
Sampson said success in Nashville is hard-earned. The first time he heard one of his hit songs on the radio, he still had a part-time job at a gas station. He was pumping gas and washing the windshield of a car as “The Gospel According to Luke” sung by Skip Ewing played on that car’s radio.
“My first hit song I was still pumping gas part-time,” Sampson said.
That’s the nature of the business in Nashville.
Does he have any regrets?
“Shoot yeah,” Sampson said. “But all of us got them.”
He said the great thing about Nashville, though, has been all the venues that have sprung up for the songwriters themselves to perform, like the Bluebird Café.
“It’s almost like guys like me have had the best of both worlds,” he said.
Then there are songwriter festivals, like the Sandy Lee Songfest, where Sampson has been able to don his performer hat for years.
“I consider myself blessed the way things turned out,” he said.
Of the songwriters’ festivals, he said he likes the Sandy Lee Songfest best. He said he and his wife make plans to come back to Henderson the day after they leave each year. The reason they love it is the people, he said.
This year, he said he’ll miss Terry Fuller, who was a volunteer that worked numerous Songfests. He died in May.
It’s a testament to the power of song and community that the Songfest—like other music festivals in Henderson—provides. Many musicians come to the festivals and connect with Hendersonians, returning year after year. That’s how it was for Sampson with Fuller.
“I’m proud to call him my friend,” Sampson said. “He was just a great guy.”
Sampson said the intimate gathering of the Songfest venues allows a give-and-take with the audience. Some ask to hear a song of his because it was the favorite song of a brother who has passed. Or, there are the moments, when a person requests a song of his that’s never been recorded, that he sang a couple years back and the person is asking to hear it based on that memory.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Sampson said. “You want to be able to touch somebody.”
