Country songwriter Varble to perform at Jackson County Fair
County songwriter and musician Wynn Varble, known for writing such hits as “Waitin’ On A Woman” and “I’m A Little More Country Than That,” will perform a free concert next Wednesday, July 27, at the Jackson County fairgrounds.
Varble will perform from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. that evening at the outdoor amphitheater at the Northeast Kansas Heritage Complex.
Varble, who grew up in the small town of Ellenwood, Ga. in the 1960s and 1970s, said his father had an extensive record collection of music.
“I got my love of music from him,” Varble said of his father. “Rock and roll sounded scary to me back then so I just gravitated to country music. Through the years, I got to looking at the records and saw the names under the title of the songs, and I found out that was the songwriter’s name.”
He started playing guitar when he was 14 and began writing songs.
“They were horrible,” he said. “I didn’t know you could make a living at it. I saw an ‘Austin City Limits’ episode one time that had Hank Cochran, Floyd Tillman, Whitey Shafer and bunch of other guys passing the guitar back and forth. They were playing songs they’d written for other people – big hits. And they were having so much fun. I just thought that’s what I want to do.”
Varble moved to Nashville in the early 1980s and spent some time with up-and-coming country artists and a cousin who worked for a music publishing company.
“I thought I wasn’t good enough yet,” he said of his first time in Nashville. “I hadn’t done enough living.”
He left the country scene in Nashville for a while and traveled across the country doing various jobs, playing in “honky tonks” and clubs and forming bands.
In 1992, he returned to Nashville and signed to the Starstruck Writers Group in 1994. After Starstruck was sold to Warner/Chappell Music, Varble joined the Warner/Chappell writing staff. In 2013, he signed to BMG Music Publishing.
For more on this story, please log in to your holtonrecorder.net account and select “July 20, 2022” under “E-Editions.”
