Dr. Michael Cody might be a lot of things, including a professor in the English department at ETSU, a musician and an author. One thing he isn’t, however, is a sell-out.
“[The music business] is so much about image,” Cody said.
In the late ’80s, Cody and his band at the time, simply called “Cody,” recorded a song, “Thunder and Lightning,” for a radio station in Asheville, N.C., to put on a promotional tape.
“It really took off,” Cody said. “For a couple of months, my song was in the top five requests every day. When something like that happens, radio labels find out about it and come sniffing around.”
In fact, three or four of those record labels were looking at Cody and his band. At a showcase in Nashville, the record labels decided there was one thing wrong. “We didn’t look the part,” Cody said. “They liked the music but they couldn’t picture us on [music television].”
One label scout even told Cody that to fit the image they wanted, he either needed to lose 50 pounds or gain 200. “I said, ‘Forget it,'” Cody said.
Cody, who first began writing songs as a sophomore in high school, said that songwriting just seemed like the natural thing to do. He began writing songs for his band in high school so they could perform their own material.
His love of music was also expressed at Mars Hill College, where he was a flute major.
Not dexterous enough for a flute-playing career, Cody said, and not wanting to be a high school music teacher, the musician set his sights on a career as a songwriter.
His choices were New York, Los Angeles or Nashville. Deciding the latter was the safer choice, in part because it was closer to his home town of Walnut, N.C., Cody moved to Nashville, where he wrote songs for several small publishing companies.
“I could have made a decent living in Nashville had I worked for a larger company that put my nose to the grindstone,” Cody said.
Instead, those at the smaller companies he worked for mostly assumed Cody would one day be the one performing the songs he wrote. “When they learned I wasn’t going to sing them,” Cody said, “the songs were tailored so that it was actually difficult for others to perform them.
“I kept hearing that New York or L.A. would have been a better market for my songs.”
That’s just Cody’s songwriting style. “It’s very stylized, and I say [the things] I want to say,” he said.
“Somewhere up ahead lies a dream … Of how things ought to be … Somewhere plays a song … That tells the story of your life.”
– from “Fresh Horses” Copyright Gary Morris Music (ASCAP)
Cody’s trouble with the music industry continued. While in Nashville he secured two record deals for small recording labels associated with CBS/Columbia. Both times the material he recorded didn’t come to fruition. “I thought I was coming into good company [with Columbia], but they [my records] never saw the light of day,” he said.
A single, “Fiesta,” did get some airtime on country music radio in 1982 or ’83, he said.
The songs he wrote for country singer Gary Morris under a songwriting deal fared better than Cody’s ill-fated album deals. Cody has wondered, he said, about what would have happened if he hadn’t taken the job offer from Gary Morris. “At that time,” he said, “I was being courted by the powers that be in Mussel Shoals, Ala.”
Mussel Shoals, at the time, was a haven for artists such as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger and others. “In hindsight,” Cody said, “Mussel Shoals would have been a better decision to make for my music career.”
But, as it turns out, fate had more than music in store for Cody. During his time in Nashville he ran into his seventh-grade sweetheart, Leesa Harrell. They soon fell in love again, and Cody said after a year they decided to get married and move back to North Carolina.
Leesa was the motivation for Cody’s songwriting all along. “Many of the songs I wrote in high school, college and in Nashville were connected to her absence from my waking life – or her ghostly presence in my dreams,” Cody said.
“Though I can’t bridge the years and the miles laid in between, I have learned with every step that you are still the best I’ve ever seen.”
– from “The Best I’ve Ever Seen”
The songs he wrote were also just part of what Cody said were bigger stories. “It got to the point where I wanted to write other things, bigger things than were in the songs,” Cody said.
He knew he needed someone to make him write, he said, and that is why he went to the University of North Carolina at Asheville to study creative writing. He then went on to get his master’s at Western Carolina University and his Ph.D. in English at the University of South Carolina.
Cody said he is happy with the way his life turned out and he tries not to think about what would have happened had he stayed in the music business.
Short stories and literary works make up the largest part of what Cody writes today, and he only plays his guitar occasionally – when he’s not busy grading papers or working on his novel, tentatively titled Gabriel Tanner and based on his experiences with the Nashville music industry.
Cody has also been making some outings to places in Johnson City like Down Home for “Open Hoot,” and the Acoustic Coffeehouse for “open mic” night.
“I’ve toyed around with the idea of going out and letting the songs live a little bit,” Cody said.
“I followed that star. Not that I’m making any claims to wisdom. I just followed it, without question, through a great wilderness and some of my wildest dreams.”
– from Gabriel Tanner
Cody’s works are available for listening at his web site faculty.etsu.edu/CODYM/. He will also be offering a class this summer, titled “Words and Music.”

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