Frances
Preston

Called “one of the true powerhouses in the pop music business” by Fortune magazine, Frances Williams Preston could have ended up a schoolteacher.

From Summer Job to Life’s Calling

A summer job while a student at the George Peabody School for Teachers in Nashville changed Preston’s life. She briefly worked in the mailroom at the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, then at National Life’s subsidiary, Nashville radio station WSM, beginning as a receptionist while also taking charge of handling Hank Williams’s fan mail. She rapidly moved to the center of things at the station; for a period of time, she used her lunch hour to host a daily show about fashion that was broadcast on WSM-TV.

Because of her contacts and all-around ability, she was hired in 1958 by Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) executive Judge Robert J. Burton to open a BMI southern regional office in Nashville, to license performing rights for songwriters and music publishers. She quickly led BMI to a position of preeminence in the South, signing, mentoring, and nurturing countless country writers and publishers as well as those with roots in other idioms of popular music. Her leadership was vital in building Nashville as a music center.

The Songwriter’s Guardian Angel

In 1964, the year the Nashville BMI Building opened on Music Row, Preston became a vice president of BMI—reportedly, the first female executive of a major national corporation in Tennessee. Preston moved to BMI’s New York office in 1985 as senior vice president for performing rights, then became president and CEO the following year. She was responsible for the company’s growth in a variety of areas, including domestic licensing, foreign performing rights, legislation for fair compensation for writers and publishers, and copyright protection. Preston spent nearly fifty years with BMI, and upon her retirement in 2004, Variety named her “the highest ranking woman in the music industry.”

Art and Activism

Nationally prominent in business and political circles, Preston served on President Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal Study Committee, the commission for the White House Record Library, and Vice President Albert Gore Jr.’s National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. She also served as president of the T.J. Martell Foundation for Leukemia, Cancer, and AIDS Research.

Preston was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992.

-Burt Korall

-Adapted from the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum’s Encyclopedia of Country Music, published by Oxford University Press