Murder on Music Row: Predatory promoters bilk Nashville's singing newcomers

This is the fourth in an eight-part series exploring the 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes, a country music chart director who knew too much.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The music promoter kept a 12-gauge shotgun behind his office door.

If they wanted to try to kill him for talking to the police, then he wasn’t planning on going down without a fight.

Promoter Bill Wence remembers reading about Kevin Hughes’ death in The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network.

He believed immediately he knew who killed Hughes and why he did it.

“I saw that story and it just freaked me out,” Wence said. “My whole life changed … It made me really sick that he got killed that way. Somebody I knew got killed, and it (had) to do with the charts.”

In Wence’s world of country music promotion, it had become common knowledge that Hughes, the former Belmont student, was trying to stop the corruption at Cash Box Magazine, the home of the County Music Independent Chart.

Wence made two important calls in the days after Hughes’ murder. Wence had liked Hughes, who he called a “nice kid.” He played piano at Hughes’ memorial service at the Belmont Church on Music Row.

It was March 1989. In those days, Wence “drank a bit,” he said, a fact that may have boosted his courage.

He called the person he believed had pulled the trigger.

“Good thing,” he said, “they couldn’t trace that call.”

When he sobered up, Wence made the second call.

To the police.

Listen to the podcast

• Episode 1: There Ain't No Justice In It | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 2: Who Shot Sam? | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 3: Chasing That Neon Rainbow | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 4: Tell It Like It Is | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 5: It Ain't My Fault | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 6: If You Don't Know Me By Now | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 7: Life of Sin | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 8: Bury Me In Georgia | Apple | Spotify | iHeart

Not an honest man in the bunch

On Tuesday, March 14, 1989, (five days after the murder) lead Det. Bill Pridemore got a call from Bill Wence.

Pridemore and his partner Det. Pat Postiglione drove out to the office of Bill Wence Promotions in Nolensville.

What they heard was an amazing story of greed, fraud and despicable business practices. When Pridemore walked in Wence’s door that day, he was a fan of country music. He especially liked the Hank Williams Jr. song “All My Rowdy Friends.”

He didn't feel the same way after he left.

“Country music was what made Nashville tick,” Pridemore said. “I just believed it was elitist, status, something where not much crime was committed …

“When I discovered how it all worked, it totally took the air out of my balloon. I totally lost respect for country music and the entire industry. Everybody was a crook as far as I was concerned. There wasn’t an honest man in the bunch.”

Pridemore’s ire was especially high when it came to some music promoters.

“They were predators,” he said. “They get these poor innocent kids coming into town. They (would) take all their money and send them on their way, and not shed a tear. I don’t like any of them.”

Wence is an old-timer, dropping stories about Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Bare (he met both when he was a teenager). He played piano for Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner. He moved to Nashville permanently in 1973.

As a promoter, Wence worked with Jerry Jeff Walker, Collin Raye, Randy Travis, Mark Chesnutt and Tom T. Hall.

As a background source for the police, Wence was invaluable.

“I told them everything I knew,” Wence said.

How much would you pay to be a star?

For this series, The Tennessean talked to Wence and several promoters and performers who offered, in so many words, the same description:

Nashville has long been the home of predatory promoters who were waiting for people who arrived in town with no knowledge of how the music industry worked.

They all used the same pitch.

For a price, promoters could turn regular people into stars.

All those regular people had to do was hire the right promoters, who promised to get their songs played on country radio, and if they paid for advertising in Cash Box magazine, then their names would appear on the Cash Box charts.

Sometimes the promoter’s fee was $1,500 to $2,000 per record per month — sometimes more.

Sometimes, promoters were working on 10 or more records every month.

Sometimes, promoters floated a price as high as $50,000 for a No. 1 spot on the Cash Box chart.

The promoters’ potential income was, to say the least, higher than the roof at the Ryman Auditorium.

Unscrupulous promoters would offer kickbacks to chart directors. Often, promoters wouldn’t get paid until a song appeared on the charts.

Controlling chart positioning was a key piece of the livelihood of more than a few promoters.

What singers found out as their bank accounts drained was this:

Getting their names and songs on the Cash Box chart got them no closer to a music career than having a beer at a honky-tonk bar on Lower Broadway.

Dawn Dorminy came to Nashville in the mid-1980s. She was 17, lived with her parents in a motorhome and tried to become a star. Her father, Larry Palmer, had made it rich in Texas as a TV repairman. The Dorminys paid $5,000 to make her first single “Mama Didn't Raise No Fool.”

Then there were more fees for promotion.

“Thousands and thousands of dollars,” said Dorminy, who is now a barber in Texas.

Then she switched labels, and it cost another $10,000 to make another record. Dorminy believes her parents spent about $250,000 in the three years she was in Nashville.

Today, she doesn’t even know if her song got much radio play. Back then, radio stations were on the honor system to report airplay.

Dorminy said a music promoter told her he could put her on a major label if she paid him $150,000. That was the last straw. She and her family refused to pay and moved back to Texas, made bitter by the country music business.

“It was all a fraud,” Dorminy said. “I’m kind of hurt (because of) what they did to me. It’s always been a real sore subject … I never had the opportunity.”

Singer Tim Malchak, one of the most successful independent Nashville singers in the 1980s and 90s, agreed getting songs on the Cash Box charts cost “thousands and thousands of dollars.”

Singer Holly Lipton said she doesn’t know how much her rich ex-husband paid to get her songs on the charts, but he never figured out that he was being scammed.

“He was a cash cow,” said Lipton, who left town without the career she had dreamed about. “He was being used, and I’m not sure he ever got that.”

Jerry Duncan is a promoter in Nashville and he was never interviewed by police in the Hughes homicide. He opened Jerry Duncan Promotions in 1982 and stopped promoting to Cash Box magazine in 1988 (about a year before Hughes’ murder) because he believed it was corrupt.

Duncan said the fraud was obvious.

Radio stations weren’t reporting their playlists accurately. Cash Box wasn’t compiling the charts accurately. He became particularly upset about songs that got “bullets,” meaning they were fast-rising or hot records.

“Certain people’s records were getting bullets all the time and others weren’t,” Duncan said. “All they were doing was going to the radio (station) and saying give me a favor on this record so it can get charted. The fact that the (Cash Box) chart had lost its real prestige in most of the industry, it was still a big money game when people were charged $100,000 to promote a record.”

Duncan said the height of the corruption came in the late 80s when he was nominated as Independent Producer of the Year for an unfamiliar awards show. He had questions about the nomination, so he tried to call the company that was running the show. No one ever answered.

He determined that the whole show was simply a money-making scam.

He went to the show anyway. When he got there, he had to buy a ticket to get in.

Then, he didn’t win the award.

A promoter named Chuck Dixon won.

The secrets of Chuck Dixon

Pridemore and Postiglione began to hear that name often.

Chuck Dixon.

It wasn’t his real name. Chuck Dixon was his Nashville name. He was born John Blayne Detterline Jr. in Pennsylvania and came to Music City to try to make it as a singer/songwriter/promoter.

He is credited for writing 29 songs (as co-writer) and singing on seven others as “Chuckie D.”

His best known song was called “The Ride,” for which JB Detterline Jr. had a co-writing credit with Gary Gentry. The song turned into a hit for David Allan Coe.

Dixon eventually dropped singing and became an independent promoter.

Several people said Dixon appeared to be a good guy, a family man. Duncan, for example, said for many years, he considered Dixon a friend. They had been out to dinner a couple of times.

Duncan said Dixon had the demeanor that would fit in Dixon’s favorite movie, “The Godfather.” 

(More than a few people said they believed Dixon was connected to the Mafia, including a law enforcement official who worked in Nashville. Author Fred Dannen, who wrote the seminal book “Hit Men: Powerbrokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business,” said he had never heard of Dixon. He said it was highly unlikely the mob would be involved with a few thousand dollars changing hands over a corrupt little country music chart.)

Kyle Hughes visited Kevin the summer before he died. Kevin introduced him to Dixon.

“He was overly jovial when I met Chuck,” Kyle Hughes said. “He said a lot of nice things about Kevin when I was there. For some reason, when I came home to Carmi, I said that Chuck Dixon guy just doesn’t go well with me for some reason. He was really fake. That’s how I felt when I left the office. He was over-the-top fake.”

Tom Roland, a 1980s writer for Cash Box magazine who later became a Tennessean music reporter in the 1990s, described Dixon this way: “Chuck Dixon was probably the ugliest man I ever met in my life.”

He meant inside and out.

Not everyone agreed with that assessment.

Audre Medlock, who worked at a tiny industry magazine called Indie Bullet, said she met Dixon at one of those shady awards shows in Knoxville.

“I remember Dixon showing up in a limo with two other men in black suits,” she wrote in an email. “The men appeared to be bodyguards … I was new to the business and didn’t know anyone. Within a group of people I innocently asked him ‘What is your name?’ Everyone got quiet.

“After a long stare he told me his name: Chuck Dixon. I was later told that I shouldn’t have asked Dixon anything (because) everyone knows who he is.”

Medlock gave birth to a child fathered by Dixon that was kept secret from his wife and daughters in Nashville. His name was Blayne (his name is his father’s middle name), who is now 32. Dixon paid child support for a boy he never met.

Blayne Medlock (he uses his mother’s last name) learned about his father from his mother.

“He was just very like a mafia kinda guy, always rolled around in limos, wore a lot of gold,” Blayne Medlock said. “Real flashy, expensive suits … Underground artists would come out to Nashville and want to create a career in music and stuff like that. From what I've got — this is all like a legend — he was doing these fake charts and basically getting fake radio plays, and having these people convinced they're on track to becoming successful in music.”

Wence told the police about the fake-ness of Chuck Dixon.

“I think he was a crook,” Wence said. “He would work records and get money for that, and then he could manipulate the chart.”

In the 1980s, many people had a nickname for Cash Box magazine: Chuck Box.

Dixon was friends with Cash Box owner George Albert. In the mid-1980s, when Dixon’s close friend Richard “Tony” D’Antonio took over as chart director, people inside the industry said Dixon, through D’Antonio, was controlling the independent music chart.

Duncan said he promoted artists who were told they needed to hire Chuck Dixon as promoter and producer if they wanted to see their songs on the Cash Box chart.

“Tony was apparently getting a kickback from Chuck,” Duncan said. “It became corrupt.”

Who was paying Sammy's way?

Pridemore and Postiglione began to look into promoters like Chuck Dixon to see if they were taking advantage of inexperienced singers, and manipulating the Cash Box chart.

Sammy Sadler seemed to be vulnerable — rich family, independent records, several songs on the charts.

And the promoter of Sadler’s records was Chuck Dixon.

Sadler even sang one of the songs Dixon wrote under the name JB Detterline Jr. It was called “Mississippi Burning Tonight.”

Sadler, however, said there was a huge difference between him and other newcomers to Nashville.

He said he had never been bilked out of money.

And that he barely knew Dixon.

Sadler said Evergreen and its owner Johnny Morris, a former disc jockey at KWOC in Southwest Missouri, paid for all Sadler’s music expenses — the studio time, the vinyl records, the promotion and the advertising. 

According to court records and Sadler himself, in his four-plus years in Nashville before the homicide, he never sold one single record and never played a single show.

He said he never made a penny from his music career.

“We never paid for any of my recordings,” Sadler said. “There is no money that my dad gave to him to do anything.”

When Pridemore heard about Sadler’s statement, his reaction was incredulous.

“There’s no question that I think that he paid money to have his records put on Cash Box,” Pridemore said. 

In 1986, Sadler recorded his first single, “You Don’t Have to be Lonely” on the Evergreen label.

On Nov. 1, 1986, Sadler’s single debuted at No. 88 on the Cash Box chart. It appeared on the chart for four weeks (rising to No. 78) before disappearing at the end of November.

Strangely, the song appeared again at No. 77 on July 25, 1987, with a note saying this was Sadler’s “debut” on the chart.

In that issue of Cash Box magazine an advertisement appeared with a picture of Sadler. It said, “My sincere thanks to all Cash Box radio reporters for my #77 debut position – Sammy Sadler.”

Sadler said neither he nor his family paid for that advertisement.

He said he doesn’t know how he got two “debuts.”

His highest charting song was “Tell It Like It Is,” which first appeared at No. 8 on the Cash Box Independent chart on Dec. 24, 1988. It appeared on the chart every week through March 4, 1989.

In Hughes’ last edition at Cash Box before he was shot, he dropped Sadler’s “Tell It Like It Is” off the chart.

Performing major surgery on a music chart

Sadler began dropping by the Cash Box offices and became friendly with Hughes near the end of 1988. He said they met to play racquetball a couple of times.

His presence began to get noticed. Steve Hess, who worked as a chart researcher, said it didn’t seem right when Sadler, with songs on the chart, would come into Cash Box for visits.

“It was not a good idea when he (Hughes) was the chart director,” Hess said. “It looked like a conflict of interest.”

Hughes had told Hess he planned to go to a job fair in the next couple of weeks to look for a new job. And he told his childhood friend Marilyn Conwell he thought he was going to be fired from Cash Box.

Also, in late 1988, Hughes had become irate when Cash Box owner George Albert ordered him to change the chart to accommodate an artist who had paid money.

Cash Box intern Kim Buckley told Pridemore that an unnamed artist had paid former Cash Box chart director Tony D’Antonio for upcoming chart positions. Hughes didn’t want to honor that old agreement, but he was forced to.

As 1988 turned to 1989, it appeared Kevin Hughes had plans for an overhaul of the charts. 

Duncan met with Hughes at the Country Radio Seminar, a yearly conference at the Opryland hotel for music industry honchos, disc jockeys, journalists and performers, the weekend before he died.

“We’re making big changes,” Duncan said Hughes told him. “It was major surgery he was performing.”

That was the last time they talked.

On the day he died, Hughes was working on the chart for the March 11 edition of Cash Box. He had decided to start dropping the radio stations that appeared to be involved in manipulating the charts.

Four stations, all promoted by Chuck Dixon, dropped off the last chart on which Hughes worked.

One of the four songs that dropped off the newly cleaned up chart had been recorded by his new friend.

That song was “Tell It Like It Is” by Sammy Sadler.

Phone call to a suspected killer

After reading the story of the murder in the newspaper, Bill Wence was very upset.

He was still drinking at the time, and the murder only exacerbated his reliance on alcohol.

He had a clear idea of who pulled the trigger.

He looked in his rolodex for the number of a guy he knew from his many years promoting to Cash Box magazine. 

It was the number of Tony D’Antonio, the former Cash Box chart director.

He left five words on his answering machine.

“We know you did it,” Wence said.

READ PART 5:Murder on Music Row: Could Kevin Hughes death be mistaken identity over a spurned lover?