Chris Gantry

Chris Gantry built a singular reputation as a composer, vocalist, dramatist, novelist, and iconoclastic recording figure whose independent streak in 1960s Nashville aligned him with contemporaries such as Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash. While issuing his own stylistically varied folk, pop, and country projects, he achieved breakthrough success as a writer when Glen Campbell cut “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,” establishing Gantry as a sought-after Music Row talent. After departing Nashville in the late 1970s, he redirected his energies toward literature, producing multiple novels, stage works, poetry collections, and children’s books. He reentered the music arena in the 2010s, resuming his recording path with the 2015 album Gantry Rises Again and the 2019 set Nashlantis.

Born in New York, Gantry already possessed substantial industry experience upon arriving in Music City at age twenty-one, including an early, brief recording contract secured with a peer during his mid-teens. In Nashville he honed his craft performing at venues such as Skull’s Rainbow Room, the Printers Alley burlesque house where he encountered fellow rising figures including Kristofferson and Shel Silverstein.

Following years of songwriting and live work, Gantry obtained a Monument Records agreement that yielded his first full-length release, Introspection, in 1968. The album’s blend of folk, pop, and country elements featured “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,” which Glen Campbell turned into a major hit the same year and which earned Gantry the Nashville Songwriter Award. Throughout the ensuing decade he supplied material to numerous country artists while maintaining an intermittent solo recording schedule that included the aggressive 1970 album Motor Mouth and a self-titled 1975 collection. Between those projects he tracked a stylistically adventurous album at Johnny Cash’s House of Cash studio; the resulting uncompromising and visionary outlaw statement proved too unconventional for release, prompting Gantry to set the unreleased work aside.

Disillusioned by the intensifying commercial pressures of Nashville by the close of the 1970s, he relocated to Key West in pursuit of a less pressured life. There he reconnected with Shel Silverstein in a local bar; inspired by Silverstein’s playwriting, Gantry launched a parallel literary career that encompassed novels, dramas, poems, short fiction, and children’s literature across three decades. His volume of one-act plays Teeth and Nails received the Tennessee Williams Playwriting Contest prize. After issuing the 2013 memoir Gypsy Dreamers in the Alley, Gantry returned to recording with the live set Live at the Filling Station in 2014 and the studio albums Gantry Rises Again in 2015 and Nashville Rhapsody in 2016. In 2017, more than forty years after its recording, Drag City issued the previously unreleased At the House of Cash; two years later the same Chicago independent label released his new collection Nashlantis.