early year

Jim McBride, the Grammy-nominated country songwriter who partnered with singer Alan Jackson on songs including “Chattahoochee” and “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow,” died Tuesday. He was 78.

“Jim was a good man and a great and genuine songwriter,” Jackson wrote on Thursday in an Instagram story. “He understood country music and touched many with his songs. Jim and I wrote some of my favorite songs together and I don’t know if my career would have ended up quite the same without his help, inspiration, and encouragement in my early years. Thank you Jim, rest in peace.”

Jackson’s photo showed him and McBride as younger men, smiling and holding ASCAP certificates. In 1994, “Chattahoochee” won the Country Music Assn.’s award for song of the year and they were nominated for the Grammy for country song of the year as well.

“I am in shock. I am devastatingly sad. My phone has been ringing and dinging all day, so I hope my friends will understand I’m just not able to talk right now,” songwriter and close friend Jerry Salley wrote Wednesday on Facebook, noting that McBride died after a fall on Monday. McBride had texted Salley just hours before falling, the latter said.

“I’ll never know why he took a chance to write with me” when they met in Nashville in the early 1980s, Salley wrote, “but man, we hit it off, became instant friends, and loved being in the writing room together. He always brought out the very best in me.”

Though best remembered for his Jackson collaborations, McBride’s songs were also recorded by artists including Conway Twitty, Johnny Lee, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Reba McEntire, Alabama, Willie Nelson, Charley Pride, Kris Kristofferson, Randy Travis, Toby Keith and Dwight Yoakam.

“We will greatly miss Mr. McBride — may his legacy live on forever,” the Alabama Music Hall of Fame said Wednesday on Instagram. The hall remembered the songwriter as a “beloved Alabamian, songwriter, friend, mentor, and so much more.”

Born Jimmy Ray McBride in Huntsville, Ala., on April 28, 1947, he began writing songs a child, but didn’t get one recorded until much later.

“The songs just started coming in my head and after a while I decided to try it,” he said in an interview published by American Songwriter at the end of 1997. “I just thought I’d write some songs and bring them to Nashville and see what happened.”

He said he was always drawn to anything about music and learned early on that “that little bitty name beneath the song was the person who wrote the song.”

McBride’s first bid sending songs to Nashville didn’t result in instant success. He knew only one guy in town, songwriter Curly Putman, who served as a mentor.

“Curly gave me good advice and he was always very honest. He told me, ‘Unless I’m honest I can’t help you,’” McBride told American Songwriter. “I’d play him a song and he’d tell me what was wrong with it and he was always right. But if there was something there, he would be sure and let me know that I had done something right. And he always encouraged me to get another opinion, but I never did; his opinion was always good enough for me.”

He saw several of his songs performed in the early 1970s on the show “Hee Haw,” but in the mid-’70s he wound up tucking his dreams away and staying at his job with the U.S. Postal Service. Even then, he kept writing songs with Roger Murrah, who would be a Grammy nominee in the early 1990s for “Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” recorded by Jackson.

He promised Murrah and others that he would return to Nashville if he got “that big lick.” Then came Conway Twitty, who wanted the song “A Bridge That Just Won’t Burn.”

“Roger called me one night and said, ‘I guess you need to pack your bags, we’ve got Conway’s next single,’” McBride told American Songwriter. “I quit the post office the day after Christmas, 1980, and then started work the first of January with Bill Rice and Jerry Foster. The only other writer they had was Roger Murrah.”

Events at that time were bittersweet for McBride, whose mother — his biggest musical influence growing up — died of cancer in 1981. She was buried the same day he was supposed to get his first music award, for “A Bridge That Just Won’t Burn.”

That September he had his first No. 1 hit, “Bet Your Heart On Me,” with singer Johnny Lee. And he fine-tuned his songwriting.

“I don’t think I’d ever had a bridge in a song until I moved here,” he told American Songwriter. “Another thing I had to unlearn was that I wasn’t Kristofferson. I cut back on the poetic stuff. I was writing a lot of stuff where every line had to be brilliant. Through the years, I learned to write conversational lines.”

McBride didn’t have a hit single again for six years, until Waylon Jennings recorded “Rose in Paradise,” his last No. 1 track, in 1987.

“I had songs on 14 albums and couldn’t get a single,” McBride told Huntsville’s News19 in 2023. “Randy Travis kinda kicked the door open and Waylon.” After that, McBride said, “Things started picking up.”

That’s when he met Alan Jackson, with whom he would have four No. 1 hits, “Chattahoochee” being the biggest of them.

“He said, ‘Will you write with me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, let’s get together,’” McBride told News19. “So, we got together and hit it off just like that. It was like writing with myself, really.”

McBride was inducted into both the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 2017 and was a past president of the Nashville Songwriters Assn. International.

But for more than 30 years, that hit song “Chattahoochee” was a part of his life — especially the one line at the beginning where it talks about it getting “hotter than a hoochie coochie” down on the Chattahoochee River, which borders Alabama and Georgia. Everyone wanted to know what that meant, apparently.

“Alan got tired of everyone asking him,” McBride told News19. “He told everybody to call me, and they did. When the county fair would come to town, there was always a side show with the hoochie coochie girls. So that’s what I was thinking. And the deal was if you were a young man, you’d try to get in there before you were 18.”

And why, pray tell?

“They’ll show you a little bit,” he said, “but you’re going to have to pay if you see any more.”

McBride is survived by his second wife, Jeanne Ivey, and sons Brent and Wes from a previous marriage.

Rob Reiner was a movie director who began as an actor who wanted to direct movies. The bridge between these careers was “This Is Spinal Tap” in 1984, his first proper film, in which he also acted. His original inclination, based on the music documentaries he had studied, had been not to appear onscreen, but he decided there was practical value in greeting the audience with a face familiar from eight seasons of “All in the Family” as Archie Bunker’s left-wing son-in-law, Michael “Meathead” Stivic.

Reiner’s television career began at 21, partnered with Steve Martin, writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” As an actor, his early years were characterized by the small parts and guest shots that describe the early career of many performers we come to know well. He played multiple characters on episodes of “That Girl” and “Gomer Pyle, USMC,” a delivery boy on “Batman,” and appeared on “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Room 222.” His last such role, in 1971, the same year “All in the Family” premiered, was on “The Partridge Family” as a tender-hearted, poetry-writing, tattooed biker who becomes attached to Susan Dey‘s character and somewhat improbably takes her to a school dance. It’s a performance that prefigures the tenderness and humanity that would become a signature of his work as a writer, director and performer — and, seemingly, a person.

On “All in the Family,” in his jeans and work shirt, with a drooping mustache that seemed to accentuate a note of sadness, Reiner largely played the straight man, an irritant to Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker, teeing up the issue-oriented dialectic. Once in a while he’d be given a broad comic meal to chew, as when wife Gloria (Sally Struthers) goes into labor while they’re out for dinner, and he accelerates into classic expectant-father sitcom panic. But minus the “Meathead” material, “All in the Family” is as much a social drama as it is a comedy, with Mike and Gloria struggling with money, living with her parents, new parenthood, and a relationship that blows hot and cold until it finally blows out for good. He’s not a Comic Creation, like Archie or Edith with their malaprops and mispronunciations, or even Gloria, but his importance to the storytelling was certified by two supporting actor Emmys.

Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton in a scene from Norman Lear’s television series “All in the Family.”

(Bettmann Archive via Getty Image)

What Reiner carried from “Family” into his later appearances was a sort of bigness. He could seem loud — and loudness is something Norman Lear’s shows reveled in — even when he’s speaking quietly. Physically he occupied a lot of space, more as time went on, and beginning perhaps with “Spinal Tap,” in which he played director Marty DiBergi, he transformed tonally into a sort of gentle Jewish Buddha. In the 2020 miniseries “Hollywood,” Ryan Murphy’s alternate history of the 1930s picture business, the studio head he plays is not the desk-banger of cliche, but he is a man with an appetite. (“Get me some brisket and some of those cheesy potatoes and a lemon meringue pie,” he tells a commissary waiter — against doctor’s orders, having just emerged from a heart attack-induced coma. “One meal’s not going to kill me.”) He’s the boss, but, in a scene as lovely as it is historically unlikely, he allows his wife (Patti LuPone), who has been running things during his absence, to also be the boss.

Reiner left “All in the Family” in 1978, after its eighth season to explore life outside Michael Stivic. (In 1976, while still starring on “Family,” he tested those waters, appearing on an episode of “The Rockford Files” as a narcissistic third-rate football player.) “Free Country,” which he co-created with frequent writing partner Phil Mishkin, about a family of Lithuanian immigrants in the early 1900s, aired five episodes that summer. The same year, ABC broadcast the Reiner-Mishkin-penned TV movie “More Than Friends” (available on Apple TV) in which Reiner co-starred with then-wife Penny Marshall. Directed by James Burrows, whose dance card would fill up with “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “3rd Rock From the Sun,” it’s in some respects a dry run for Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally…,” tracking a not-quite-romantic but ultimately destined relationship across time.

Future Spinal Tap lead singer Michael McKean appears there as a protest singer, while the 1982 CBS TV movie “Million Dollar Infield,” written again with Mishkin, features Reiner alongside future Spinal Tap lead guitarist Christopher Guest and bassist Harry Shearer; it’s a story of baseball, families and therapy. Co-star Bruno Kirby the year before had co-written and starred in Reiner’s directorial debut, “Tommy Rispoli: A Man and His Music,” a short film that aired on the long-gone subscription service On TV as part of the “Likely Stories” anthology. Kirby’s character, a Frank Sinatra-loving limo driver (driving Reiner as himself), found its way into “This Is Spinal Tap,” though here he is the center of a Reineresque love story.

After “Spinal Tap,” as Reiner’s directing career went from strength to strength, he continued to act in other people’s pictures (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “Primary Colors,” “Bullets Over Broadway” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” to name but a few) and some of his his own, up to this year’s “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.” On television, he mostly played himself, which is to say versions of himself, on shows including “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and, of all things, “Hannah Montana,” with a few notable exceptions.

Rob Reiner and Jamie Lee Curtis play the divorced parents of Jess (Zooey Deschanel) in Fox’s “New Girl.”

(Ray Mickshaw / Fox)

The most notable of these, to my mind, is “New Girl,” in which Reiner appeared in 10 episodes threaded through five of the series’ seven seasons, as Bob Day, the father of Zooey Deschanel’s Jess. Jamie Lee Curtis, married to Guest in the real world, played his ex-wife, Joan, with Kaitlin Olson as his new, much younger partner, Ashley, who had been in high school with Jess. He’s positively delightful here, whether being overprotective of Deschanel or suffering her ministrations, dancing around Curtis, or fencing with Jake Johnson’s Nick. Improvisational rhythms characterize his performance, whether he’s sticking to the script or not. Most recently, he recurred in the fourth season of “The Bear,” which has also featured Curtis, mentoring sandwich genius Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson); their scenes feel very much like what taking a meeting with Reiner might be like.

Coincidentally, I have had Reiner in my ear over the past couple of weeks, listening to the audiobook version of “A Fine Line: Between Stupid and Clever,” which he narrates with contributions from McKean, Shearer and Guest. A story of friendship and creativity and ridiculousness, all around a wonderful thing that grew bigger over the years, Reiner’s happy reading throws this tragedy into sharper relief. I have a DVD on the way, though I don’t know when I’ll be up to watching it. I only know I will.