An Interview with Jill Block.
If you know anything about the music scene in Nashville for the last twenty years or so, you probably know the name Billy Block and his Western Beat. The Billy Block show was a staple in Nashville, known for helping up-and-coming artists get more exposure. What you may not know about is the energetic woman by his side, Jill Block. Billy passed away from cancer in 2015, and Jill sat down with me to share more about their life and work together, their interesting family dynamics, and music. But she also shared the life lessons she’s learned in staying resilient after Billy’s death, and how she’s continuing to write new chapters for herself. From hosting the Stillhouse Sessions at Leiper’s Fork Distillery, to her new Jill Block Presents venture, the Masters at Mockingbird, Jill carries on the Block way of creating platforms to feature singer/songwriters.
Tell me about the book you’re writing: The first question people asked me after Billy died (I don’t even think we’d had his funeral yet) was, “Do you think you’ll get married again?” I thought, wow, I hope I’m loved again, but as far as getting married again, I don’t know. The question came from more than one person, and I thought it was so interesting they didn’t ask, “What are you going to do now?” But they wondered about my getting remarried. Maybe they asked because they know I enjoyed being married.
So, I’m working on a book about being a widow. It started out being tongue in cheek, through my dating adventures and disasters and trying to understand life as a single human. I’d been with somebody whom I loved and adored for 25 years. I reached out to my friend Deidre who’s also a widow. What we realized is how cathartic and healing it was to share our experiences. Because even though they happened many years apart from each other, we had a lot of the same shame, guilt, and sadness in dealing with cancer and death.
I realized a lot of what I went through wasn’t so isolated. And I think there are a huge amount of widows in the same situation, and once we start finding each other, we’re going to find a lot of healing together. I think the book will help with that. We hate the word widow, it’s the worst word. Nobody can say it to me. We use the term WID-OH like “Oh God, what just happened?” No one plans for it. We’ll see what we come up with.
We’re trying to re-brand “Widowing.”
You were with Billy 25 years? He died about a week before our 23rd wedding anniversary, and we were together over 25 years. We worked together side by side, building a thriving company, and a family. We were great partners for many years. It wasn’t easy. I felt like I was in the shadows a lot working with him. Which is kind of a normal position I think for women my age to be a back-seat driver a lot. So when he passed, I had to figure out how to move into the light with what I was doing. Because I’d have people say, “I know you worked with Billy but I don’t really know what you do.” And that makes sense because I was raising the kids and kind of always in the background but we were definitely a great team.
How did you two meet? We almost met at a Paul Simon concert at the Forum in Los Angeles. I had just moved to L.A. My friend had free tickets to Paul Simon so we went to the concert and I was sitting right behind Billy. He was wearing this jacket said “Billy” and I thought, “Oh he’s a musician.” He had this big waft of curly hair. He kept turning around and looking at me the whole concert, even though he had a date. I kept thinking I was being too loud and obnoxious and turns out he thought I was cute. He kept trying to talk to me by borrowing my binoculars. His story is when he walked out of the Forum he thought, “Oh there goes my dream girl and I’ll never see her again.”
And I walked into the Palomino a week later to sing. Someone had told me to go there. They said that’s where I belonged as it was the Roots Rock and Country scene. And Billy was the house drummer. So he was playing drums up on stage and it was Valentine’s day or something crazy. He ran up to me on a break and said, “Hey! Do you remember me? I was sitting in front of you at the Paul Simon Concert! I’m Billy!”
He gave me his card and it turned out we lived on the same alley street at the beach. It wasn’t even a real street! It was just a little alley. So we were both beach rats and got to be friends and fell in love.
It sounds like eventually, you were going to meet! Everything was conspiring for it to happen…I’ve learned that’s how God certainly works. All the forces were working in that direction. We married in 1993 in LA and moved to Nashville in 1995. We had started the Western Beat showcase in Los Angeles. Billy had wanted to bring the Bluebird Cafe to Los Angeles, essentially, and he’d gotten Amy Kurland’s blessing to do that. He wanted to start the resurgence of the singer/songwriter scene in Los Angeles because he was playing drums for Jim Lauderdale, Lucinda Williams, Jeffrey Steele. And he was frustrated that they weren’t getting more attention as songwriters.
So he started a songwriters show, and it was bridging the gap between Nashville and L.A. We had a lot of Nashville artists like Hal Ketchum come out and do our show in L.A. And so when we moved to Nashville we already had this really strong base and connection in working with record labels, and publishers and writers and artists in Nashville.
We came here and started a band showcase in 1996, the Barn Dance at the Sutler. It was a band showcase: John Cowan, Sam Bush and all these great people were finally able to bring a band to play. Because everything was acoustic at the time. We started this alt-country roots rock that helped birth the Americana format. That show went on for 18 years on Tuesday nights. It changed names and eventually became the Billy Block Show.
I like to say we got kicked out of every club in town.
Our longest run was at the Sutler which is where we did a CMT show. The first Americana TV show on CMT; it was called The Western Beat with Billy Block. I was one of the executive producers. We did a lot of radio. The whole focus of our career was always helping others get to an audience through live music, radio, TV, print, magazines. It was a lot of fun. A lot of supporting others’ desire to find an audience and have a career.
This was pre-internet. So it was all the more vital. There was no way to find each other. Billy was known as the Ellis Island of Nashville. If you landed in Nashville and you needed to find a community of people, you’d go to the Billy Block show. And if you made it onto the show, that meant you were super-talented because Billy was very particular about who he let on the show. He had a brand: he loved all different kinds of artists. He would say all the greats have their own style. Which is what Americana has become, right? Just a lot of bluegrass, blues, roots-rock, rockabilly, singer/songwriter. So he focused on a variety of talents and supporting that and building a community around that. And it’s what I helped him with all those years.
And he did the Billy Block Show until when? Well, when he was sick my son Rocky would step in and host for him. He was diagnosed with melanoma at Christmas of 2013 and he died in March of 2015. And all through 2014 he continued to put shows on because he literally lived for it. Our son Grady would fill in and play drums for him sometimes on the shows because he’d get so weak.
Rocky would host; he’d go to school all day and host and close the shows at night and get up at 5am and go to school again. It was definitely a family endeavor: all hands on deck when Billy was sick. We all did everything we could to keep everything going for him. He was so sure he was going to live, all these things helped him get through every day in fighting his cancer.
You’re a singer/songwriter yourself. You met because you were pursuing your own music? Yes, I was an artist. I’d moved to LA to be an artist. My entry into music was a late start because I took the “normal” path. I went to college in Northern California where I grew up. My degree was in Psychology and Finance, double major. I didn’t come from a creative background or an artistic family. I always wanted to do music but I didn’t have any knowledge about how to go about it.
But when I got out of college and started working, I hated my life. And I realized if I am going to be working this hard every day, I’ve got to do something I love. So I quit my job in the Bay Area at 28 years old and rented out my condo. I moved into a trailer with my grandparents in LA and started working temp jobs just so I could do music. My goal was to sing, write, and record, and to be around people who loved music as much as I did.
I didn’t feel whole at all not being around music.
So that’s why I started over. That’s why I walked into the Palomino that day and met Billy. And it’s where I found my people: I found Billy and I found Jim Lauderdale, Lucinda, Jeffrey Steele, Ronnie Mack, and Manuel the clothier. Delbert McClinton every Tuesday. Hoyt Axton. Buddy Miller. Buck Owens. It was like getting a doctorate in music education. I would go as much as possible and absorb it and learn so much. I became a part of the Country California music scene. Later, I won an award for Best New Female Country Vocalist one year. It was hard to leave that. Leaving Los Angeles was very difficult.
And you kept doing your music when you guys moved to Nashville? When we moved here, I had just released my first record under a moniker of Pork Chop Kelly. It was kind of bluesy and separated me from country pop. because I was never a country pop artist. Then the next record I released was under Jill Block (album title: Tang the Hump). I had a lot of fun writing and working on it with Buddy Miller and Colin Linden, and Billy co-produced it with Dennis Belfield.
We were very happy we moved to Nashville; landing here and becoming a part of this community was the best thing we ever did. We got to have a beautiful family here. After releasing solo records we toured through the South and Carribbean with another band that Billy and I were in called The Big Happy. Then I toured with an all-girl punk band in the early 90’s called the Naughty Skookgirls. And that really set the town on its ear! Our motto was, “It’s not about the music.” Sure, it was really bad music but in the greatest, in-your-face, chick rock way. We had a lot of fun and broke down some more barriers and expanded the music scene in Nashville beyond country.
So you and Billy kept doing albums and writing, each working on your own music projects, but the whole time working on the Western Beat as well? Yes and we used that tool to promote things that we were doing ourselves. I’d get to play on the shows on occassion. The Naughty Skookgirls had their debut at the Exit/In on the Billy Block Show. The Billy Block show was the hub of a wheel. And from that wheel were all these spokes of radio, television, print, booking a live show. We started a record label, a publishing company. The record label was Western Beat Records, and it all started before the internet. A lot of investment of time and money to make sure artists we thought were really talented had a platform to release their music and play live.
And that’s what our lives revolved around in every way.
And you had two boys? Yes we had Rocky in 1997 and Grady in 1999 and they came out of the womb incredibly talented musicians. Grady’s a great drummer and he’s a great producer. Rocky is a multi-instrumentalist and writer. They’re both incredible writers and singers. It was funny because when you hear your kids being so talented at anything (ours just happened to be music), you want to encourage them as a parent. Because you recognize the gift that they have. And so it was hard because they got to high school and we were saving money a little bit at a time for them to go to college. But it became apparent that their paths were going to be very different. I really struggled with that as a mom because I thought they needed to go to college.
But then I thought, “well that didn’t work very well for me.” So I had to really give in and encourage them to follow their dreams. Rocky got through high school and now he’s very successful in the music industry. He has a publishing deal with Bob DiPiero’s company Being Bob Music, and he tours with different artists and plays bass sometimes. Grady dropped out of high school which I struggled with but both of my kids know themselves better than I ever did. Grady was on the road touring all last year but this year he decided he wanted to stay home more. He’s been focusing on producing and writing. Both boys knew what they needed to be successful so I just had to hold on.
I had to let go and hold on all at the same time because it’s been quite a ride.
And you have two more boys? Michael entered our life when he was in 7th grade. It’s kind of a crazy story. We went to see The Blind Side around Thanksgiving when Rocky was in 7th grade. Rocky and Grady both looked at Billy and me when we walked out and said “we need to do that.” And we’re like, “we need to do what?” And they said, “we need to help somebody like that.” We told them we help kids all the time. We were PTO presidents and very active at school. The boys dug in, and once they planted the seed, we followed our hearts. Micheal came into our home and our lives, and by the time he was in 8th grade he was living with us full time.
The boys were going to school at JT Moore and a large percentage of the kids at school were from the Edgehill projects. There was an emphasis with a lot of parents helping and being supportive. It was a very loving place where there’s a community involved in raising all the kids there. It was a real eye-opener for us how much love there was at that school. And how much of our love was needed there. Then when we saw the movie, the kids felt that’s what we needed to do, was to help one person have more of a future maybe. Rocky was playing center in 7th grade and his quarterback was Micheal Hughes. And they became very close friends because that’s a unique relationship.
So Rocky came to us and said, “I know this kid who I think would like to be around us more.” You know it’s funny when you do something you think you’re helping somebody else. But obviously you end up getting back so much more in situations that you put your heart into. And that was certainly the case with Micheal. Initially, we thought we were going to help him and add hopefully some joy and love to our family. And it wasn’t easy, there were a lot of struggles and ups and downs.
But ultimately, it’s been the best thing in the world for me and my family to have Micheal a part of our family.
How exactly did that happen? At first, he started just spending more time at our house. During the big flood in Nashville, he got stuck at our house for about a week. And then we started talking with his mom. She was very supportive of his having a life with more possibilities for his future. He started living with us full-time after 8th grade. He got a job as a life guard at 7 Hills which was a big accomplishment for him.
It gave him a lot of confidence to have a job. And then he ended up taking Hillsboro to state as quarterback and got a full ride to TSU. He graduated in December. He started his masters degree in January with one year left to play football (he redshirted his first year). He’s getting a masters with a health science degree that will allow him to coach. I’m so proud of him.
Shandon Mayes was Micheal’s best friend. His dad was moving to Chattanooga right before his senior year and he wanted to stay in Nashville and keep playing football at Hillsboro. So he moved in with us two months before Billy got diagnosed. He was a Godsend and an angel. He was such a sense of calm and peace and so helpful that we wouldn’t have made it through without him.
It was once again God intervening in all the right places.
It would have been great if Billy didn’t have cancer in the first place, but we had all this love with all these boys around us. But it was also difficult for all the boys to get along. They were all going through the typical growing up and high school stuff. Shandon is a student at MTSU and I am so proud of him. He’s supporting himself. He drives a forklift and puts himself through college. He’s getting a degree in exercise science and would like to be a physical therapist.
In general, people ask me how we got through that time because when Billy was diagnosed, Grady was only in 8th grade and his brothers were juniors in high school. I think what helped us get through it is that we all became so raw. We got real from the destruction that Billy’s cancer caused in our life. We all had different times when we fell apart over it but luckily not all at the same time. So we all held each other up and gave each other a lot of strength and support. What Billy’s cancer did is it took away a facade in our home of things being perfect.
What would you say about resilience in you and your family? I think there’s a crazy tendency, a wall between parents and children. It’s where we maintain a divide between our personal struggles as parents that we went through as children, as teenagers, as adults, as a married couple because we want to present this united front to our children. We want to show them that if you work hard, stay on track, and do the right thing, then you’re going to have a great life. And what happened is we came off the rails.
Our little family train that was on the track just absolutely came off the rails.
Consequently, that made us all dig very deep personally. We had to help each other get through the difficult times and the sacrifices we all had to make so that Billy could live another day. We’re all so close as a family now because we don’t have any barriers up of our struggles anymore. We’re all very honest. We’ve all bled a lot in front of each other. There were times when Billy had to leave in an ambulance in the middle of the night. And I would get in the ambulance and go to the hospital with him. I’d leave my four boys at 3am in the front yard with the dog.
They’d be watching the ambulance leave and I would think, “I don’t know when I’m coming back, I don’t know how they’re going to get to school tomorrow, I don’t know how they’re going to feed themselves.” Everyone just had to figure it out and love each other through the chaos that is the wake of such a devastating disease.
It all brought us closer. We learned to forgive quickly and wrestle our emotions and demons together. I showed my real personality as a mother and as a human more than I ever dreamed I would in front of my kids. It wasn’t always pretty. So, the fact that they could love me through it and as sons help me be the best person I can be right now, it means everything to me. I’m really lucky.
So out of all the tragedy those are the good things that come out of it.
We weathered the difficult time with the help of neighbors and community; I couldn’t have done it without them. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else other than Nashville and having the support we did, holding us up. We have a lot of gratitude for so many that stepped up to save us from complete destruction.
What do you think is the legacy that Billy left? I was kind of forcing Billy’s legacy upon people for a while because it was so important to me that people remember his work in the right light. It was his life’s work and he never got a chance to write the book he was going to someday. But I think it was taking a big toll on me that I didn’t realize; it wasn’t allowing me to step away from the grief very well as I was entrenched in it every day.
I had some really good friends who told me I just needed to step away and put it down for a while. They said I could pick it up another time but right now focus on seeing where Jill goes from here. And that was hard for me because I felt like I was giving up on what he might have done for me if the roles were reversed. But on the other hand, it was better for me and my children to just free myself. It was a heavy burden to carry that I didn’t realize was so heavy at the time.
My kids honor their dad’s legacy every day by living a life full of a lot of love.
Especially Grady and Rocky bringing joy to others and being a part of this community of successful talented 20-somethings that are the next wave of music success. And they care about each other and support each other and say I love you all the time. Instead of my making a movie about it, they’re carrying it on as a living breathing force. That’s the best thing and something of which their dad would be most proud.
And with Micheal and Shandon, Billy has impacted them in a way that a positive father figure does. They too carry on Billy’s joy and love for what he brought them which is teaching themselves how to have a lot of respect for living a great life. Taking care of themselves, getting a good education, working hard, being good to others: just the things that every father wants for his sons. So everyone is honoring the legacy by sharing a lot of love and working hard.
What about you going forward now as Jill Block? As for me personally, I was trying to figure out what to do when Billy passed. I wanted to take the relationships I’ve built in the music business and my love for it and use it in some way. Where I decided to turn my direction was into the songwriter market. With the lack of income for songwriters because of streaming and the like, I decided to make it my life’s work for the last four years to help develop a genre where songwriters could become artists again.
The plan was to offer a place they could go out and play music and get paid to play music. And start making records again. Because so many of the songwriters that I work with were artists on the Billy Block show over the years. And they’d become very successful songwriters.
And because of that Jill Block Presents emerged as a company where I produce and book concerts, work with venues on providing live entertainment, and that’s been very rewarding. It’s grown from just the singer/songwriter genre into the funk and soul scene, which I love. Once again, always taking the path of more resistance in Music City! Not going the straight country route. But that’s what we’ve done here: we’ve helped blow up this town into truly being Music City and not just Country Music City. I love Country Music as well, it’s just kind of where my career has ended up, which I’m grateful for.
With Jill Block Presents, my biggest thrill is I’m finally able to do my own show that I’ve always dreamed of. So I’m launching that this summer: The Masters at Mockingbird. It’s a take-off on the golf or tennis Masters but these are recording masters. I’m having 3 Saturday nights at the Mockingbird Theater in the Factory at Franklin starting June 22, July 13, and August 10. It’s going to be like a living room interview conversation with a super big star in the songwriting and production music world. And we’ll have spontaneous performances while we’re sitting there together in front of a live audience.
And we’ll have an audience Q&A. So It’s kind of like the Actor’s Studio meets producer’s chair vibe. Anthony Smith and Jeffrey Steele are upcoming guests. It takes a lot of my work I’ve done on radio interviewing others and I’ll do it in front of a live audience — I think it’ll be really special and I’m excited about it.
Tell me more about Jill Block Presents…The Still House Sessions has been an incredible opportunity for me to work with a venue that is such class act and know their brand so well. We’re able to bring in entertainment to the Leiper’s Fork Distillery. We’ve had so many incredible monthly shows over the last year and a half. I am grateful.
I get to work with a level of talent that I knew from the old days at the Billy Block show: We just had The World Famous Headliners which includes Pat McLaughlin, Shawn Camp, and Al Anderson (Big Al)… We’ve got the Waylon Jennings Band (Waymore’s Outlaws) coming up this Friday, May 31st. Kevin Welch is June 28— he’s had a big hit with Millionaire. So we have nonstop incredible talent. It’s such a cool venue to come play. The fans are loving it.
Your boys grew up in a music family, but for those who didn’t, if they want to break into music either on the artist or business side, what advice would you offer? This town is growing and changing so fast, there are people moving here every day to be in the music business, writers, artists, musicians. I think it’s still a matter that great talent will shine through but you have to be willing to pound the pavement.
I’m out every night almost looking for new talent, supporting others that I want to support me. It’s tiring but it’s fun. I’d say if you want to move to Nashville and be in the music business, you have to show up. You have to go to Winners and Losers and meet people, join NSAI and other organizations that can support what you’re doing and make those friendships. The only way I know how to do it is to go make those friendships and support others.
This is a relationship town.
I’d also tell them, when I was coming up in the music business, there weren’t many women who were great musicians. We were singers, and we kind of let the boys play. And it’s really a shame because there are so many women today who are great musicians to look up to that we didn’t really have. And I always encourage girls and women today to get great at playing an instrument because it will help you earn the respect you need to play with anybody, to get up on stage with anybody, to lead a band so you can sing and do your own music.
You have got to put the time and work into it. And I never did that, and I regret that. I really was a hack on playing guitar, bass, drums. I’m really bad at a lot of instruments — but I wish I would have spent more time being a better musician. I think I would have been taken more seriously.
It looks like you’re writing an exciting new chapter in your life now. I think if Billy would have lived, the nest would have been empty and things would have been different because we had dreams and hopes for our future once we got the kids out of the house together… and we didn’t get to do that part of our relationship. But what we both did by having a family and kids is we both put a lot of our own career paths and desires into parenting instead, and into being good family people. I always knew I couldn’t be good at both.
I always knew I wasn’t the kind of person who could have children and still put 100% into my own career. Because I knew if I were dedicating myself to having kids I really wanted to enjoy that, and not miss out on stuff with them. I didn’t have nannies. I really worked as much as I could to be with my kids. Now that they’re grown and I’m on my own, putting myself on the front burner is okay. And I don’t regret any choices I’ve made. I’ve loved my life, it’s been great. But it is kind of an interesting time as a woman to step forward.
Would you say part of being resilient is reinvention? That’s the thing about being resilient. Life is going to throw you a lot of curve balls. You’re going to swing, you’re going to miss, and you’re going to hit a few. And you just have to realize that all those curveballs that you get thrown, there are reasons behind each of them. There are so many lessons to learn about yourself and others in this process of growing. I don’t know how I came up with a baseball analogy — obviously I have a lot of sons, right?
But I think, to me, what I’ve learned to do is just say yes.
When I was in my haziest, foggiest, post-burying Billy weeks and people started coming to me and asking me if I wanted to do something, I just started staying yes. And I didn’t know why I was saying yes other than I didn’t know what else am I going to do, say no? I don’t know where my life is going, I don’t know what I’m doing next. I needed to start saying yes, kind of like jumping into the well and figuring out how to swim for at least two years.
And a lot of things I said yes to have since fallen by the wayside, but they all mattered. Because they helped me develop a relationship or take one step forward out of being stuck, and that step led to another step. So I would say if anyone’s in a hard place where they’re trying to be resilient, just say yes to people around you. If they want to bring you to lunch, or they want to bring by a flower or offer you a job. I just started saying yes.
I agree. We can’t map everything out. It’s the stepping stones that matter. When people ask me for advice, I tell them to say yes to get unstuck. You’ve got to get unstuck. It may be going to a Pilates class with a friend, going to a movie, it may be going on a vacation. Just start getting unstuck. It’s a lot to come out of. Burying a husband, raising kids all at the same time. I was so exhausted when it was all over. But I also had the fear that I wasn’t going to find my path. I knew I was good at a lot of stuff but I had no idea how I was going to support my family and financially get through a household on my own— it was daunting. And I just had to start saying yes. I came up with this motto:
I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyway.
It gets me through every day. No fear of failure. There’s only fear of not trying.
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Tickets are available for the Still House Sessions May 31st, featuring the Waylon Jennings band Waymore’s Outlaws in tribute to Waylon Jennings. For tickets or more information, visit The Leiper’s Fork Distillery website, or click here.
Tickets for the Masters at Mockingbird are also available. To book tickets or for more information, visit Jill Block Presents.