Paul Kennerley

Um, and then I realized, you know, a lot of my friends write songs that could, that could go under that umbrella.

Paul Kennerley wrote that song, Strange Desire, who's just o- one of my favorite people and songwriters.

Uh, he's, gosh, you go over his, his, uh, workroom in, in his house is just, the, the walls are covered with, um, all these awards and gold records and everything.

He wrote, I mean, Ray Charles, Waylon Jennings, um, uh, I don't remember how many singles he wrote th- th- that The Judds cut.

Um, we're letting-

Paul Kennerley?

We're letting Paul Kennerley down.

Sorry, Mr. Kennerley.

And we're s- I'm sorry, Paul.

My temperature's rising to 102.

This one, Strange Desire, is by the English songwriter Paul Kennerly, interpreted by Buddy Miller on his new self-titled album on New West Records.

We'll talk about this song and others in the second half of the show.

You're listening to The String from WMOT Roots Radio.

sometimes when i'm playing it's free and it's loose and it's wild and i love that so much but it didn't seem like um this re it seemed like this record was something else so i recorded the just guitar vocals and and could listen hard which is you know part of my job yeah and uh that's That's how we did that.

Take me

out of that, how that translates to Strange Desire, which is a Paul Kennerly song.

It's got that sort of shaky shaker thing.

When it came out, it went straight to number one in the US country charts as an album.

And it did well in the main chaps, but I phoned up the chap that I'd written it with, Paul Kennerley, and I hadn't spoken to him for years and years and years, and I said to him, you know... we've had that song recorded and he knew he'd recorded it, but it's released and it's going to number one on the album.

And he said, no, that's not, that's not, that's not possible.

No, it's not.

She was...

Married at the time of my band, the Planet Rockers was playing a lot here in Nashville to Paul Kennerly, who was a songwriter and he's a British guy.

The Planet Rockers had a mentor and Svengali type guy named Mike Smythe.

They ran a record store here in town called Phonolux.

He was actually instrumental in a lot of that band's repertoire because he had a super huge rock and roll collection.

record collection and he had these little gems that not a lot of people knew about these 45s and that was a lot of our songs but he was friends with kennerly because they were both from england and uh brought paul kennerly out to see the planet rockers and emilu came out a couple times and when we when the planet rockers were first playing in nashville we kind of we caused a bit of a stir there for a year or so you know and uh Paul Kennerly was sort of at the height of his Nashville songwriting fame.

He was writing those hits for Marty Stewart at the time.

So he had a studio at their house where he was making his demos.