Doak Turner began in Radio sales in 1982 with Beasley Broadcasting in his native West Virginia. His success in creating successful advertising copy and campaigns for his clients was a revelation. He told himself: “I can be creative. I started writing 90% of my clients’ ads. I loved the competition, I was motivated, and I began reading self-improvement books by folks like Norman Vincent Peale, Zig Ziglar, Og Mandingo, Dale Carnegie and Coach John Wooden. Those all helped shape my life. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to have fun.”
Turner moved to Charlotte in 1987 in the radio business, and by the mid-1990s he was working in Radio for one of North Carolina’s most famous exports – NASCAR. He syndicated NASCAR Country, building a network of more than 300 stations for the company, and selling sponsorships worth in excess of $300,000. Doak’s characteristic success helped rekindle his lifelong love for Country music and Radio. By this time, he had also been trying his hand at lyric writing for several years. He began going to meetings of the Charlotte chapter of the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI), where he first met North Carolina native Byron Hill. Hill’s 500-plus Nashville cuts include Tracy Byrd’s “Lifestyles Of The Not So Rich And Famous” and George Strait’s “Fool Hearted Memory.”
Doak was by now getting the itch to move to Nashville himself, which he at last did in October 2002. Three months later, a visitor to Turner’s house mentioned a weekly party of songwriters in Greenwich Village, New York, where spaghetti was served to every tunesmith who sang a new song. “That was a cold Sunday afternoon, and I remember thinking how much I missed having dinner with my family. So I invited 30 of my peers over for dinner on that Third Sunday of March 2003. The next month we ordered 50 pounds of barbecue and had the first Guitar-B-Q.” Nine years later (March 2012) they still come to the 3rd Sunday at 3:00,
Doak was visiting songwriting friends in San Diego when someone suggested, “why don’t you send out a newsletter? That seed of an idea grew into the Nashville Muse,” Turner says. The idea itself is simple, but the painstaking execution, and the growth into a fully-sponsored Enewsletter with 1000′s of readers a week, is pure Doak energy, enthusiasm, and work ethic. The Nashville Muse continues to be a weekly staple and one of Music Row’s most admired and powerful networking tools.
The years of tireless support Turner has given songwriters are finally translating into success for his own tunes. Indy artists have cut about six of them. A recording of an Alabama soldier singing Doak’s “Talkin’ Part” nationwide on Sirius Satellite Radio got spins at Country Radio stations around the USA in 2007. Warner Brothers artist Frankie Ballard cut a song, “That Look” on his Indie CD “Electric Hillbilly” that Doak wrote with Marc-Alan Barnette and Gary Dennis.
Visit Doak at his website, www.doakturner.com, or at his publication, The Nashville Muse.