Lyman Corbitt “Mac” McAnally, Jr., born July 15, 1957, in Red Bay, Alabama, grew up in Belmont, where he sang gospel and played piano at First Baptist Church before becoming a session musician and songwriter at fifteen. Writing poetry by age nine and soon turning stories and poems into songs, he left high school in his junior year to pursue music, worked at Wishbone Production and Publishing in Muscle Shoals, turned to guitar, and placed “I Need You Tonight” with Hank Williams, Jr., on the first session he played. By nineteen he had his first record and the pop hit “It’s a Crazy World,” showing a jazz- and R&B-influenced vocal style and observant writing that led him to dedicate his first album to William Faulkner. Although his future was not obviously in Nashville or country music, within a few years Alabama took his “Old Flame” to No. 1 on the country charts, and singers including Randy Travis, John Anderson, Ricky Skaggs, Ricky Van Shelton, and Charley Pride recorded his songs while he also became a regular songwriter and guitarist for Jimmy Buffett. From the 1970s into the twenty-first century he wrote and recorded hit songs whose insightful lyrics expanded the range of country music and vividly evoked southern life, while also building a career as a producer, guitarist, and performer. By the 1990s he had become a notable country music quadruple threat, producing and sometimes engineering recordings by Marty Stuart, Sawyer Brown, Chris LeDoux, and others, operating a recording studio in Muscle Shoals, appearing as a guitarist on recordings by George Jones, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton, Keith Whitley, and Reba McEntire, and winning the Country Music Association’s Musician of the Year award multiple times. He continued recording acclaimed albums decades after his debut, entered the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007, and was inducted into The Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame in 2008.
