Lonnie Ratliff
Lonnie Ratliff (born January 29, 1948) in Antlers, Oklahoma is a record producer and songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee. Lonnie Ratliff is also co-owner of Okie Acres Music Company, a BMI Music Publishing Company.
Country Artists Produced by Lonnie Ratliff
Songwriter Demos or Music Tracks
Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney, Stephanie Davis, Shawn Camp, Tara Lyn Hart, Lindsey Cardinale
CD's and Artist Demos
Erin Hay, Dick Damron, Ernie Ashworth, Jack Greene, Brent McAthey, Brit Lyng, Tim Chesney, Susie Hopman, Ron Wayne Atwood, Joni Compretta, Bengt Pedersen, Timmy G, Mike Anderson, Peggy Lynn, B.Thomas, Dani Ashworth, THORNBIRDS, Britni Hendrickson, Eric Richards
Biography
Country music has always been a music steeped in rural America, and her values as evidenced in the song, "The Roots Of My Raisin’ Run Deep," which was written by Tommy Collins and sung by Merle Haggard, continue today even in the more rock oriented sounds that have infiltrated country music. A legitimate claim to those rural roots is getting harder and harder to find in the participants of the country music genre as those few blocks in Nashville, Tennessee known as Music Row continue to try to move uptown. Lonnie Ratliff came to Nashville in 1978, and the fact that he is still here today watching and listening as one music fad follows another is all the proof we need that there will always be room for the real thing in country music.
Lonnie's story has taken some odd turns, as most people's stories have, and because of his background, he has actually lived through a lot of things that most people today have only read about or seen in movies. The oldest of seven children to a Pushmataha County, Oklahoma sharecropper family in the Little Dixie area of Oklahoma, he grew up with a unique first hand experience of what William Faulkner was talking about. The geography of where he was raised kept him and his neighbors at least twenty five years behind the rest of America. We are talking about one room schools heated by wood stoves, no running water or inside toilets and the knowledge that the rest of the world didn't necessarily live like you were living.
The first few years spent in Nashville Lonnie followed the typical songwriter's path of NSAI meetings, learning to cowrite and getting to know other new songwriters who had moved to Music City to chase the same dream as he had. Understanding there would be a need to make a living while chasing the songwriter dream and not inclined to follow the "starving artist" pathway Lonnie started a painting contractor business which fit in very well with the building boom going on in and around Nashville. This business allowed the freedom of schedule sometimes needed in the music business and paid a lot better than some deadend job most songwriters choose to go into.