ODIE BLACKMON

Odie Blackmon is one of Nashville's most talented and diversified creative forces. On Music Row, he is a Grammy-nominated songwriter with more than 20 million in sales and CMA Single of the Year to his credit, as well as a successful producer and publisher. Within the halls of two renowned universities, he is a popular teacher whose innovative approach is helping to launch a new generation of songwriters and musicians toward their own careers. Blackmon’s success has been lauded in publications ranging from CMT to The New York Times, where he has been cited by American Songwriter magazine as "not only a great song craftsman and hit writer, but also an accurate, understandable communicator of the songwriting process and its flow." At the core of everything he does is the songwriting that has intrigued him since he was a boy in Arkansas, studying idols including country's Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson, rock's Beatles, Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry, and blues greats Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters. Drawn to Los Angeles by his admiration for the West Coast country of Haggard, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam and Gram Parsons, he later followed a friend's recommendation that he move to Nashville, where he enrolled at MTSU. Songwriting success wasn’t far behind. While he was still earning his degree in Mass Communication with a focus on Recording Industry Management Odie had his first cut on MCA records. He jokes that we was negotiating his first publishing deal while in summer school retaking algebra.

He would go on to become one of Nashville's most successful tunesmiths, with a catalog that includes Lee Ann Womack's "I May Hate Myself in the Morning," which earned a Grammy nomination and was named the CMA's 2005 Single of the Year; "She'll Leave You With a Smile," Hall of Famer George Strait's 50th #1 hit; the chart-topping Gary Allan smash "Nothing On But the Radio"; and cuts by Martina McBride, John Legend, Del McCoury, Tracy Lawrence, Aaron Tippin, Striking Matches and many others. His "Tough All Over" was featured on ABC-TV's "Nashville," and "I Believe" in the Mel Gibson film "We Were Soldiers," and he wrote the theme song for the CMT series "Working Class."

He was named Billboard magazine's #1 Hot Country Songwriter in 2005 and has earned three ASCAP Performance Awards, two CMA Performance Awards and three NSAI Achievement Awards. In 2014, he became Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Commercial Songwriting Concentration for the Recording Industry Program at MTSU, and was named the program's "Faculty Member of the Month" during his first semester.