Dickey Lee, a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member, shares stories and performs during this Poets and Prophets interview. Lee’s sixty-year career is also explored through recordings, photos, and film clips.

By the age of twenty-five, Lee had formed a band, began writing songs, won talent shows, earned a welterweight boxing title, and recorded pop songs. A Memphis native, Lee released some of his earliest pop singles on Sam Phillips’s Sun Records label. In the early ’60s, Lee moved to Beaumont, Texas, to work with Sun alumnus “Cowboy” Jack Clement, who produced Lee’s Top Ten hit, “Patches,” which Lee performs during the program. Clement also published Lee’s first hit as a songwriter, “She Thinks I Still Care,” an instant classic, recorded by George Jones and then hundreds of times by others. Lee also recounts writing with Bob McDill and performs “I’ve Been Around Enough to Know” and “The Door is Always Open,” which they wrote together.

Dickey Lee wrote or co-wrote “Let’s Fall to Pieces Together” (George Strait), “You’re the First Time I’ve Thought about Leaving” (Reba McEntire), “The Door Is Always Open” (Dave & Sugar, Jamey Johnson), “In a Different Light” (Doug Stone), and “The Keeper of the Stars” (Tracy Byrd). As a performer, after an early string of pop hits, Lee worked with Chet Atkins and charted dozens of country songs including the hits, “Rocky,” “Never Ending Song of Love,” “Angels, Roses and Rain,” and “9,999,999 Tears.”

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