Mac McAnally

country · country pop · tropical rock

Mac McAnally is an American singer-songwriter, session musician and record producer, born Lyman Corbitt McAnally Jr. in Red Bay, Alabama in 1957 and raised across the state line in Belmont, Mississippi, where he began playing piano and singing in church. He started out as a teenage session player at Wishbone Studios in Muscle Shoals, and made the first four albums under his own name there. His self-titled 1977 debut for Ariola America produced It's a Crazy World, which reached number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100; Back Where I Come From, in 1990, became his best-known country single, peaking at number 14. He has released ten studio albums, the most recent of them, Once in a Lifetime, arranged largely around guitar and percussion to match the intimacy of his solo concerts. As a songwriter he wrote Alabama's number-one Old Flame and Sawyer Brown's Thank God for You, and Down the Road, which topped the country chart in 2009 as a duet between Kenny Chesney and McAnally himself. His session credits include recordings by Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Amy Grant, and he has produced Sawyer Brown, Ricky Skaggs, Restless Heart and Little Feat. McAnally was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007. He has won the Country Music Association's Musician of the Year award ten times, eight of them consecutively from 2008 to 2015 and then again in 2017 and 2018, a record for the category. A member of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band for more than three decades, he has led the band since Buffett's death in 2023, and in 2024 he contributed voice work to the rebuilt Country Bear Musical Jamboree at Walt Disney World.

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