Nashville Songwriter

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Lonnie Ratliff Bio.



. . . . I was raised up in Southeastern Oklahoma around Antlers, Hugo & Atoka and graduated in 1966 as 1 of 13 seniors at Moyers, Oklahoma. My roots are so deep in that area that it has influenced everything I have done in my life. I was the oldest of 7 kids in a sharecropper's family and ended up all over the state of Oklahoma wherever we could make a living. Places like Carnegie, Porter Hill, Lawton, Roff, Duncan, and Cloudy Oklahoma pretty much established a setting for the songs that would come along many years later.
. . . .I started playing music with my best buddy Ralph Spears in 1965 and I remember we would sneak into the Texoma Club on the Red River just North of Paris, Texas where Gary Dial had a band and they would overlook the fact that we were underage and let us get up and sit in with the band. I never was much of a musician but Ralph was very good and he ended up playing in the clubs in Lawton, Oklahoma and as far as I know he is still there today.



. . . . I was in and out of the music business for years and for a while I even played on a paddle wheeler called the "Cherokee Queen" on Grand Lake at Langley/Disney, Oklahoma. All during this time I was trying to write songs and not having a lot of luck until 1978 when I pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville for the first time.
. . . . I didn't know a soul in Nashville but I had worked as a bass player for Jerry Haddock in Texas and his brother Durwood Haddock was in music business in Nashville and was a pretty well known songwriter, having written the country standard "There She Goes". I guess Durwood felt sorry for me or who knows maybe he saw some talent underneath all my scribbling because he took me under his wing and showed me what I was doing wrong with my songwriting.
. . . . It was during this first stay in Nashville that I met Ron Kimbro & Jack Brown from Macomb, Illinois. They were also trying to break into the songwriting business in Nashville so we kicked around Music Row for a while until one day we got the bright idea that we should form a band and go up to Illinois and have some fun playing in the local bars. That was how the Rainbow Riders was formed and the next seven years are pretty much a drunken drug induced haze as we terrorized the midwest along with other bands like Ken Carlysle & The Cadillac Cowboys, Pork & The Havana Ducks, & Timothy P. & The Rural Route 3. It was a blast I gotta admit but eventually you have to either sober up or just lay back down in the gutter and die as old Porter Wagoner said so one day I just cleaned up my act and moved back to Nashville and I have been here ever since.