Country Music Hall of Famer Don Schlitz at ‘Bama Aug. 1

Country Music Hall of Famer Don Schlitz at ‘Bama Aug. 1
Resume includes 24 No. 1 songs, 2 grammys, 50 hits, Broadway musical
Country Music Hall of Fame Songwriter Don Schlitz will be at the Flora-Bama for a one-of-a-kind performance on Wednesday, August 1 at 7 p.m. in the Main Room. Tickets can be purchased in advance for $20 on florabama.com/ concerts or at the door subject to availability.
Schlitz has an amazing 24 number one songs, two Grammys, and three CMA Songs of the Year and more than 50 hits during his amazing career.
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in 2012 with Bob Segar, Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Steinman, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, and last year played during the Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival just days after being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame with Alan Jackson and Jerry Reed.
His hit songs include “The Gambler,” “On the Other Hand,” “One Promise Too Late,” “40 Hour Week,” “Houston Solution,” “I Feel Lucky,” “When You Say Nothing at All,” “Forever and Ever, Amen,” and “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.”
The Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival Foundation for Music is the concert co-sponsor. In it’s 34th year, the festival is the oldest of its kind in the United States and has consistently been named a “Top 20 Event” by the Southeast Tourism Society. The mission of the foundation is to bring the authors of original music out of the shadows and into the spotlight; to reach into schools to enrich lives and encourage creativity through music; and to support businesses by increasing tourism in the Gulf Coast region.
Partnering with Flora-Bama on this exciting evening to showcase legendary Don Schlitz will be a magical memory that will continue the mission of the foundation and festival.
Born Donald Alan Schlitz, Jr. on Aug. 29, 1952, and raised in Durham, N.C., Schlitz briefly attended Duke University before coming to Nashville at the age of twenty.
His talent was recognized and fostered early on by greats including Bob McDill and Bobby Bare, and he emerged as an empathetic and intelligent chronicler of the human spirit.
When Rogers recorded “The Gambler,” (Don’s first recorded song!) Schlitz’s ascent was assured, and the success of that enduring story-song allowed him the ways and means to spend a lifetime writing words and music that articulated the extraordinary emotions inherent in common experience.
Schlitz and his co-writers penned “Rockin’ with the Rhythm of the Rain,” “Forty Hour Week (for a Livin’), “Houston Solution,” “Deeper Than the Holler,” “One Promise Too Late,” “I Feel Lucky,” “Old School,” “Give Me Wings,” “Strong Enough To Bend,” and scores of other songs that underscore the depth and breadth of modern-era country music.
One of the first performers at Amy Kurland’s iconic songwriter club, The Bluebird Café, Schlitz and friends Thom Schuyler, J. Fred Knobloch, and Paul Overstreet, originated the now-ubiquitous songwriter “in the round” format in 1985. He continues to regularly perform his hits and new material at The Bluebird, interspersed with his wry wit and unique comic timing.
The Don Schlitz songbook even includes the 2001 Broadway musical, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. Though he could have hung up his ambitions and his songwriting pen after having written “The Gambler,” Schlitz lives in enduring commonality with Tom Sawyer’s creator, Mark Twain, who once wrote, “I am hard at work… merely for the love of it.”
And perhaps Kenny Rogers, when inducting Don into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, said it best: “Don doesn’t just write songs, he writes careers.”