Glenn Sutton was one of the funniest men I ever knew. It wasn't that he went around trying to be a comedian or anything, he was naturally funny with a highly developed sense of humor. We be...came friends when I first moved to Nashville in 1962. Sometime around then, Glenn moved to Nashville to pursue his music career and we met on the streets of Music Row and just clicked and became lifelong friends. When he first arrived in town, broke like we all were, he lived in his car in the alley behind 16th Avenue. He had an old car that he had fixed up with a mirror on the inside trunk lid that when he opened the trunk, the mirror would hang down from the trunk lid and he could see to shave and do his morning spiff up. After we became friends he came out to where I was living and slept on my couch for awhile (a common sleeping arrangement for starving musicians in the 60's) and I understood that need since I slept on Jimmy Gateley's couch the first week I got in town and Esther Gateley cooked some mighty fine meals that first couple of weeks while I got it all together, and she made sure I didn't starve to death. After I left the Gateley's couch, I slept on Leo Taylor's couch for awhile. Leo was the drummer for Johnny Wright and Kitty Wells Roadshow, and in fact was married to their daughter, Ruby, for awhile. I took this side road to explain that it was common in the 60's to share couches, meals, picking gigs and every other way to lend a helping hand to a friend trying to get a foot in the door of music in Nashville. The point of this round about way to tell a story is that Glenn arrived with nothing but a car, a guitar and the clothes on his back in the early 60's, just like most of the rest of us. In the 60's he almost immediately hooked up with Billy Sherrill, who was my producer at the time, on Epic Records, and together they wrote some classic music through the next few years. Glenn also became a staff producer for Epic in the 60's and he started producing my records, Bob Luman's, Tommy Cash and Jim and Jesse. He was with me one day rambling on Music Row and we went into the SESAC office to bum some coffee and he met the receptionist at the time, a nice young lady named Lynn Anderson, who he later married and also happened to produce "Rose Garden" for her, and a lovely daughter. In the next few years his name would be on great songs such as, "Almost Persuaded", "What Made Milwaukee Famous", "Your Good Girls Gonna Go Bad" "I Don't Want To Play House" and a slew of others that made him a legend as a songwriter and a producer. So from arriving with nothing to legend in a couple of decades was pretty awesome, but to his friends, he was "ol'Glenn" the character that could just naturally make you laugh when nothing else could. I asked him to come out to Wynnewood and do a Heart to Heart with me in 1994. The show was normally 30 minutes, but there was no way we could get all of Sutton in 30 minutes so it ended up being a two parter and ran for an hour. I love him and miss him as a man that had an important place in my life history. Yes, he was a very talented man and could sure write a song.....but, mostly....he was the funniest man I ever met.
-Stan
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