DiPiero To Be Featured at CMHOF’s ‘Poets and Prophets’

Bob DiPiero

Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member Bob DiPiero will be honored at the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum on Saturday, Feb. 15, as the latest subject of the quarterly program series Poets and Prophets: Legendary Country Songwriters. The 1:30 p.m. in-depth interview and performance, held in the museum’s Ford Theater, is included with museum admission and free to museum members. The program will be streamed live at countrymusichalloffame.org/streaming.

The 90-minute program, hosted by Museum Editor Michael Gray, will include recordings, photos and film clips from the museum’s Frist Library and Archive. Seating for the program is limited, and program passes are required for admittance. Immediately following, DiPiero will sign limited edition, commemorative Hatch Show Print® posters.

DiPiero has penned Country hits for more than three decades, providing the life-long soundtrack for a generation of Country listeners. In that time, he has written hits for John Anderson, Easton Corbin, Neal McCoy, Reba McEntire, Tim McGraw, the Oak Ridge Boys, Shenandoah, George Strait, Pam Tillis and others.

Robert John DiPiero was born in Youngstown, Ohio, on March 3, 1951. He learned to play guitar and joined his first band at age 14. Later, he put himself through college playing in a rock & roll band and graduated with a music degree from Youngstown State University’s Dana School of Music. He moved to Nashville in the 1970s, and later signed a publishing contract with Combine Music. His first Country cut came in the 1980s courtesy of McEntire, who recorded “I Can See Forever In Your Eyes.” Three years later, DiPiero’s “American Made,” recorded by the Oak Ridge Boys, ascended to the pinnacle of the Country charts, and was featured in a major ad campaign for Miller Beer.

More hit songs followed, including McEntire’s “Little Rock,” Restless Heart’s “That Rock Won’t Roll,” Shenandoah’s “The Church on Cumberland Road” and John Anderson’s “Money in the Bank.” In 1995, DiPiero earned the Country Music Association’s Triple Play Award for writing three No. 1 hits in a 12-month period: “Wink” (Neal McCoy), “Take Me As I Am” (Faith Hill) and “Till You Love Me” (McEntire). He repeated the feat the next year with “Blue Clear Sky” (George Strait), “Daddy’s Money” (Ricochet) and “Worlds Apart” (Vince Gill).

DiPiero teamed with Woody Bomar and Kerry O’Neil to establish independent publisher Little Big Town Music in 1987. When Sony/ATV Tree bought the company in 1998, DiPiero formed Love Monkey Music as a co-venture with Sony.

Over the last decade, DiPiero has continued penning hits. Among them are “Cowboys Like Us” (Strait), “If You Ever Stop Loving Me” (Montgomery Gentry, #1), “You Can’t Take the Honky Tonk Out of the Girl” (Brooks & Dunn) and “Southern Voice” (Tim McGraw, No. 1).

In 2007, DiPiero, with fellow songwriters Tony Mullins, Jeffrey Steele and Craig Wiseman, gave viewers an inside look at the music business on the reality series The Hitmen of Music Row on Great American Country. In 2010, “Coming Home,” co-written by DiPiero and performed by Gwyneth Paltrow for the movie Country Strong, earned Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for Best Original Song.

DiPiero has written hundreds of songs, earned dozens of awards and served in various leadership positions in the industry. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007.

The Poets and Prophets series honors songwriters who have made significant contributions to Country music history. Previous subjects include Bill Anderson, Matraca Berg, Bobby Braddock, Wayne Carson, Jerry Chesnut, Hank Cochran, Roger Cook, Sonny Curtis, Dean Dillon, Tom Douglas, Kye Fleming, Jerry Foster, Dallas Frazier, Red Lane, John D. Loudermilk, Bob McDill, Roger Murrah, Dan Penn, Curly Putman, Allen Reynolds, Mark D. Sanders, Don Schlitz, Whitey Shafer, Red Simpson, Jeffrey Steele, Sonny Throckmorton, Norro Wilson and Craig Wiseman.

The Poets and Prophets series is made possible, in part, by grants from the Metropolitan Nashville Arts Commission and by an agreement between the Tennessee Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts.