Dear Ray,

For years, I’ve wanted to get in touch with you to thank you for what you’ve done for me and my family. It’s rare that you can trace back so many fruitful careers to a single source.

After you connected me with Billboard, I corresponded for the magazine for the next several years, seldom making more than three or four hundred dollars annually. In the late ‘70s, the editors there began hiring me to write for specials, particularly the music publishing and country music editions. Then, in the summers of 1979 and 1980, they invited me to Nashville (I was living in Bowling Green, Ohio, at the time) to fill in during staff vacations. When Gerry Wood, the Nashville bureau chief was made editor-in-chief in 1981, I was brought in as a full-time reporter. The family remained in Ohio.

After our daughter Erin’s first year at Bowling Green State University, she moved to Nashville to live with me and to finish her degree at Belmont College. She was hired as an editorial assistant at Billboard during this period and wrote a few articles for it and other music magazines. People at RCA noticed her talents and hired her in the publicity department, where she worked for the next 10 years.

After our son Jason graduated from high school, he also moved to Nashville. He worked for a long time as a waiter and bartender until he discovered what he really wanted to be was a songplugger. He’s been one since the early ‘90s and is now co-partner in his own music publishing company.

My wife Norma wrote college textbooks while she was still in Ohio and stayed with that racket until the beginning of the ‘90s, when she too decamped to Music City. Our youngest daughter, Rachel, who is married and has four children, is the only member of the family not working in the music business. But she’s living in Nashville, as well, working as a surgery scheduler at a local hospital. Her husband is a songwriter.

Erin is now married to Pete Huttlinger, the former lead guitar player for John Denver and a standout performer and recording artist in his own right. You sparked Erin’s interest in a music career when she was in the _______ grade by giving her front row tickets to a John Denver concert in Charleston. She and Norma have their own entertainment publicity company now, with a client list that includes Vince Gill, Ralph Stanley, Exile and The Time Jumpers. Erin has two kids.

I finally rose to the post of country music editor at Billboard in 1990 and remained there until 1995. Since then, I have been a music writer for CMT.com. Had you not given me that first connection to put this family train in motion, we might still have had happy and prosperous lives, but I’m certain they would not have been in the music business. So we all thank you. Be well and bring me up to date on what you’re doing these days.

Ed