We’ve been writing, though not entirely specifically, about songwriter Dennis Linde so far this week.
Joe Diffie’s 1994 smash “John Deere Green” was just one of Linde’s hits.
The tale continues today…
Dennis Linde had a rather itinerant childhood. Born in 1943 in Abilene, Texas, he grew up in San Angelo, Miami, and St. Louis. At age 24, after getting his driver license suspended for too many speeding tickets, Linde asked himself, “How much time can you kill when you can’t drive around?”
So, he started writing songs.
The inspiration to get into music started with a 14-dollar guitar his grandmother bought him as a teenager.
In the late 1960s, Linde moved to Nashville and started working as a staff writer at Combine Music. His upstairs neighbor was a fellow by the name of Kris Kristofferson who was also a fellow Combine songwriter.
Linde cut 5 solo albums (one was never released) in the early part of his career, but he was better known as a songwriter.
His most famous early hit was the last Elvis Presley tune to chart in the Top Ten, “Burning Love.” Linde said he wrote it “on a lark,” after having just bought a drum set and “sort of learning to play them.” The song just came to him.
In 1972, fellow Combine writer Arthur Alexander was making a comeback album of sorts and used 4 Linde-penned songs for the new album. While the album failed commercially, Elvis dug Linde’s “Burning Love,” and it became a staple of a couple Elvis concert films and his last major hit.
Elvis cut two more Linde-penned tunes, while Dennis himself even did some guitar work with The King at the Stax studios in Memphis.
Linde wanted to make it as a recording artist as well. While in Nashville, he wrote mostly country music, but during the mid-1970s, he focused on his own experimental music. Earlier, we mentioned his avant-garde album, Under the Eye, where he used “backmasking” to achieve a result like what drove the “Paul is dead” rumor and phenomenon (which lives on to this day).
Strangely, not many people ever knew about Linde outside of his closest friends and collaborators. He hardly ever attended events attached to the music industry and avoided both photographs and interviews of himself.
Chicago Tribune writer Jack Hurst noted that Linde “is no morose, unkempt hermit inhabiting some artistic garret,” but cheerful and well-dressed.
But he did the work.
It’s unknown why, but perhaps to cure “writer’s block,” Linde challenged himself to write a series of songs starting with each letter of the alphabet. Look at his discography on Wikipedia for the evidence. Impressive.
Yet, most people know Linde only through the intricate world and characters he created—all of which emerged most notably during the 1990s country music scene/craze.
As for the “world,” he had a map of a fictional town on his office wall where most of the characters in his songs lived or spent time in.
In 1994, amid that country music revival of sorts, Linde won the BMI Top Writer Award as 4 of his songs—from Mark Chestnutt, Shenandoah, Joe Diffie, and Sammy Kershaw—also won awards as the most-performed titles of the year.
More on the rest of the Linde tale later in the week, and we will have the story in its entirety available soon after completion.
As for our own world, you can explore that in further detail at the archives of our Substack page. More premium content will be available as the summer clips along. I was content to give most of it away for free, but some of my readers have been telling me they want “exclusive” content. So, I’ll make that happen.
As always,
Brian
