By: Emily J Ramey

Kent Blazy and his company I Want to Hold Your Songs Publishing are onto something.  Kent has used his extensive knowledge of the music business and his wisdom as a songwriter to introduce a brilliant new dynamic to the songwriting process.

Blazy saw a need for collaboration and an opportunity for progress: “My target was to make it be like some of the great publishing companies in Nashville that I had heard about. [...] They worked with young writers, and somebody mentored them and helped them along, wrote with them, and that’s what I was attempting to do with this company,” he explains.

That’s where Cory Batten comes into the picture.  “Cory and I started this thing six years ago that we still do every Thursday, at least.  We get together, and we talk, and we write, and it ended up where it’s as much me receiving all the talent he has as it is me mentoring to him,” says Blazy.

As one might expect, each has his own respective songwriting accomplishments.  Blazy paved his way to the top with his natural good humor and kind heart.  He lays claim to Garth Brooks’ first #1 hit, “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” which happened to be Blazy’s first as well.  He followed it up with two more #1 songs with Brooks, “Ain’t Goin’ Down (’Til The Sun Comes Up)” and “Why Ain’t I Running.”  Kent Blazy’s songs have also been recorded since the early 80s by such key artists as Gary Morris, Mark Gray, LeRoy VanDyke, Moe Bandy, Kenny Rogers, George Jones, etc. and into the more current era with cuts by Diamond Rio, Clay Walker, John Michael Montgomery, and dozens more.

Batten has worked his way up with raw talent, and makes up for his lack of decades of experience with a youthful eagerness and sprightly fortitude.  Batten has recently achieved bragging rights with two of his songs – Blake Shelton’s “She Wouldn’t Be Gone” and Crystal Shawanda’s “You Can Let Go.”

They’re an interesting pair, Kent Blazy and Cory Batten – award-winning songwriters, ones who have an extraordinary knack for striking our common chord with poignancy and truth – and yet, surprisingly, their respective foundations were modest and minimal at best.  Blazy remembers his first experiences playing music:

“I learned [how to play] listening to records.  Remember what they were?” he laughs.  “But nobody ever told me that there was standard tuning.  I had this little guitar, I was trying to figure things out off the record, and I remember thinking, ‘Why are they playing in G minor?  Why are they playing in E flat?’”

“The only formal lessons I had were from this kid three streets over,” Blazy confesses.  “He was a really good guitar player, and if I bought him a pack of cigarettes, he'd show me a guitar lick.”

Batten turns out to have had little more proper training.  When asked, Batten argues that it just seemed to him like “a road somebody else has already gone down.”

“I had formal lessons for about a week. [...] I just remember dreading going to my lesson.  I learned enough to just get by,” he admits.  Although, we discover that Batten had encounters with a lesson or two a little later in life as well:

“I had a friend that taught me a couple of chords on the piano.  In between college classes, I would play around... I only knew four chords, but you know, I would move them up and move them down, and eventually I figured more out,” he says.

Cory Batten and Kent Blazy became uncommonly remarkable songwriters and musicians without any legitimate lessons.  It seems, instead, that they were driven to strive to succeed by their passion for music alone.

Batten thought his career in Nashville might be over when his first publishing deal ended short of his contract and moved back to his home in Tucson, Arizona.  But eight months later, he found himself drawn back to his dreams.  He packed his truck and headed back to Nashville.  Blazy’s magnetism appears to be just as irresistible:

“You know, it was like the minute I started [playing music], I knew that was what I wanted to do.  It's sort of an unexplainable [sic] thing – just like Cory talking about loading up the truck and moving here.  How crazy do you have to be to do that?  But everybody does, and you can't explain it.  That's kind of how it was when I first got the guitar and started playing.  I thought, ‘Boy, I'd like to do this the rest of my life,’” he recalls.

And it has been that enthusiasm, that eagerness to work for what they want to achieve that has stimulated their success.  A desire to have music surrounding them in every facet of their lives, and contentment with their individual accomplishments, together have made Kent Blazy and Cory Batten the songwriters they are today.

Both of these men have the most modest beginnings and the humblest of hearts, consistently proving to each other and to everyone in the industry that formality and training, guitar lessons and a music degree, though undeniably helpful and occasionally providing a paved road to success, are not the only way to the top.  These songwriters took the “road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference” (thank you, Mr. Frost).

Emily J Ramey is a burgeoning young music writer, living and working in Nashville, TN. Her background includes journalism classes at New York University and a Music Business degree from Belmont University. Check out her blog at listenerextraordinaire.wordpress.com.