Captain Joe Kent Has Triumphant Nashville Voyage;
Performs 2 Live Shows as Fan Base from across USA Grows;
Co-writes with His Honky-Tonk Hero Tony Stampley;
Has Several Key Meetings with Randy Matthews and NMG/TCM Teams;
Joe and Curtis Lyn Cook Open Publishing Company
By Phil Sweetland
Music and radio contributor, The New York Times
Publisher and editor, Country Insider
NASHVILLE – In late February, the Louisiana skipper and songwriter Captain Joe Kent made Nashville and Music Row his temporary port of call, and his fast-growing fan base from all over the country stopped by to see and hear the latest musical chapter in Captain Jocephus’s sensational songwriting journey.
It was just a few months ago that Jocephus’s autobiographical song and video “Son Of The Highway,” filmed on board a riverboat he was driving down on the Delta, caught the eye and ear of Nashville Music Guide co-editor Kymberly Matthews, and the NMG feature on Joe that resulted quickly made every part of his Web presence explode and sent his numbers of fans and followers skyrocketing.
A link to that video is at the end of this release.
The “Son Of The Highway” video was dedicated to the late, great Merle Kilgore, the Music Row legend who was the first in Nashville to recognize and encourage Captain Joe’s talent. Many years and many miles – both on land and water – have passed since then, but this latest trip to Kilgore’s old stomping grounds showed just how far the captain has come in his music and his life.
Millions of fans knew of Merle not just as the co-writer on Cash’s “Ring Of Fire” (with June Carter Cash), but also as the manager and mentor to Captain Joe’s ultimate musical mentor Hank Williams Jr., aka Bocephus.
Another Jocephus hero therefore has been Tony Stampley, himself a native Louisianan and member of a royal family of country music as Joe Stampley’s son. Captain Joe has followed Tony’s songwriting career closely, since Stampley has penned over a dozen Hank Jr. songs.
On this trip, Captain Joe at last got to co-write with Tony, something he’d dreamt of doing for years.
“Initially, I was a bit nervous because I knew this was the Tony Stampley,” said Captain Joe, who also was co-writing in Nashville for the first time after penning songs for decades on his own down home. “But Tony said, `son, just come up with some good lines.’ ”
Soon this new Dynamic Duo had done more than that. They had completed something very special called “The Party’s On.”
Country radio and Music Row will likely be paying very close attention to this new tempo number in the not too distant future.
“That song is already being pitched around Music Row, to a great response,” Jocephus said. “Everybody loves it, and they are billing `The Party’s On’ as a hit.”
Not only that, once Jocephus got over his nervousness, he and Stampley became fast friends.
“In between writing, we’d stop and swap stories. We’d talk about Merle Kilgore,” the captain says. “We found we had a whole lot in common. We spoke about God and our religious beliefs. I began to see that I was actually in my realm, I had found a friend and brother and shipmate in Tony Stampley.”
Meanwhile, Joe was very busy on the club and concert stage during his Nashville visit. His Feb. 23 performance at the Lyrics For Lyric monthly showcase at a jam-packed Pick’s is still being talked about, and the next night Tony invited Joe onstage at his own Songwriter’s Night.
Jocephus had family and friends and fans in town from nearly a dozen states, and countless more got to watch the Lyrics performance at NixaCountry.com. Very few songwriters bring such a large number of followers and fans in their early Nashville visits.
Capt. Jocephus’s legion of fans and followers is rapidly spreading around the world, with new listeners and fans in Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia – and new nations joining the crew every week.
“I have found a whole new family up there in Nashville,” he says. “Kymberly, Joe, and Randy Matthews all made me part of the family. So did the people at Pick’s.”
And so did Joe’s meetings during the trip with Artist to the Stars Corey Frizzell; with Internet wizard Bob Coan of New Media Edge, whose photos of Joe and real-world advice proved indispensable, and with the whole NMG/TCM Records team.
Not only that, the captain is now a music publisher, with the aptly named company of Boat Trash Music.
He and the ace Missouri tunesmith Curtis Lyn Cook, who met on Facebook, have partnered in the new venture – which has a name not unlike Randy Matthews’s own new publisher, Oil Trash Music.
Cook, whose song “Outlaws” has been a Web favorite for years, asked Captain Joe if they could make Boat Trash Music the publisher for all the original songs on Curtis Lyn Cook’s soon-to-be released album.
“That is the ultimate honor for me,” Jocephus said. “I was extremely surprised when he asked that.”
The captain also knows that publishing is a great deal of work, so he told Curtis Lyn that “I’ll be glad to publish your songs under Boat Trash Music under one condition, that you help manage and run the dang thing,” Jocephus says.
So Captain Joe sails into exciting new musical and music biz waters as summer comes, fresh off a hugely successful stop in Music City with many more Nashville visits on the horizon.