JMI Records
American record label
JMI Records (Jack Music International) was an American record label founded in 1971 by Jack Clement, and was primarily active until 1974, when the catalog was sold to ABC-Dot Records. It was notable for having been the record label that first signed several country music singers and songwriters that would come to dominate the American country music charts of the 1970s, including singer Don Williams, and songwriters Bob McDill and Allen Reynolds.
History
Background (1964-1971)
Jack Clement was an American singer, songwriter and record producer active between 1954-2013. Clement rose to prominence in the country music scene in the 1950s and 1970s collaborating with such stars as Johnny Cash, Charley Pride, Bobby Bare, Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings and Ray Charles. His success allowed him to build his own state of the art recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee in the mid-1960s, and eventually he was able to fulfill his ambition of having his own recording label, J-M-I Records, in 1971.
Active Years (1971-1974)
At the record labels' inception, the goal was to create an atmosphere centered around the inventive talents of a variety of highly skilled Nashville studio musicians and songwriters. In the distribution announcement for the new company, it was noted that the releases would not be marketed under any specific categories. This meant that artists would be free to record whatever styles they wanted, regardless of how the recordings would fit into the existing commercial formats of the early 1970s country music scene.
The first two albums released on the record label were "Short Stories" by Bob McDill and "Finally Getting Home" by Susan Taylor (formerly of the Pozo Seco Singers) in 1972.
Allen Reynolds was brought on as vice-president from the outset, and he can be credited with bringing on Don Williams to J-M-I records in 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “JMI Records” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.