James Albert Bowen (born November 30, 1937) is an American record producer and former rockabilly singer. Since the 1970s, Jimmy Bowen has been a powerful executive in the record industry; he's worked for several labels, but has stayed with MCA since 1986, and is acknowledged as one of the most influential figures in Nashville.
Bowen was born in Santa Rita, New Mexico. His family moved to Dumas, Texas, when he was eight years old. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and holds an MBA with honours from Belmont University. He entered the business as a teenage rockabilly singer, landing a Top 20 hit in 1957 with "I'm Stickin' With You." The song was basic in the extreme, built around a thwacking bass riff, a singsong melody, and Bowen's own nervous, boyish vocals, suggesting that it may have been intended as nothing more than a demo. That indeed may have been close to the truth, as it was first released as a B-side to a song that made number one, Buddy Knox's "Party Doll."
Bowen and Knox's careers were bound together in an unusually close fashion that makes thumbnail sketches of their recording activities rather cumbersome and tangled. Knox (guitar, vocals) and Bowen (bass, vocals) met in the '50s and became the front men of a rockabilly combo, the Orchids. They were directed to Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, NM, by Roy Orbison. There the Orchids cut "Party Doll" (with Knox on vocals) and "I'm Stickin' With You" (with Bowen on bass).
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| The Rhythm Orchids |
Bowen and Knox embarked on simultaneous solo careers for Roulette, although each continued to use the Rhythm Orchids as his backup band for quite a while. That accounts for the similar mild rockabilly-pop sound of each artist, but Knox was a far better singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist than Bowen; for that matter, he was far more successful, landing a string of smaller follow-up hits to "Party Doll." Bowen never entered the Top 20 again, although he did quite a bit of recording for Roulette in the late '50s. He found it hard to recapture the unforced bounce of "I'm Stickin' With You" and ultimately he abandoned a singing career, choosing to stay in the production end of the music industry.
In the early 1960s, in Los Angeles, California, he bucked the decade's rock phenomenon when Frank Sinatra hired him as a record producer for Reprise Records, and Bowen showed a strong knack for production, generating chart hits for Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bert Kaempfert and Sammy Davis, Jr., regarded as too old-fashioned for the market at the time. Among the songs Bowen produced for Sinatra was the 1966 "Strangers in the Night", which went to No. 1 in the US and UK, and won three Grammy Awards in 1967, including Record of the Year for Bowen.
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| Bowen with Keely Smith |
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| Bowen with George Strait |
Bowen produced his first movie soundtrack in 1970, for Vanishing Point, which was released in 1971 Other soundtracks include the movies Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), The Slugger's Wife (1985) and the soundtrack of the theater play Big River (1988). In 1988, Bowen founded a label named Universal Records (not to be confused with the much more famous Universal Records of 1995 to 2005), which he sold to Capitol Records a year later.
During 2016 the former staffers of the Capitol Records office of the 1990s gathered to celebrate Jimmy Bowen at Cabana restaurant in Hillsboro Village.The party was titled “Capitol Nashville During the Jimmy Bowen Years (1989-1995).” It was a nostalgic look back at what many of the attendees viewed as the most rewarding experience of their careers.
Jimmy lives with his wife Ginger in Longmont, Colorado but other sources state a move to Arizona (*)
(Edited from AllMusic, Wikipedia & Radaris*)
Please note there is another Jimmy Bowen who is a bluegrass mandolin player who played with the Country gentlemen and his photographs are wrongly included in many of producer Bowen’s biographies. So beware!