Bill Porter (sound engineer)
| Billy Rhodes Porter | |
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Porter in June 1977, wearing a lightning bolt pendant given to him by Elvis Presley as a mark of friendship.
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| Born |
June 15, 1931 St. Louis, Missouri |
| Died | July 7, 2010 (aged 79) Ogden, Utah |
| Occupation | Audio engineer |
| Employer | WLAC-TV, RCA Records, Columbia Records, Monument Records, Elvis Presley |
| Known for | helping shape the Nashville sound |
| Children | 3 |
Bill Porter (June 15, 1931 – July 7, 2010) was an American audio engineer who helped shape the Nashville sound and recorded such stars as Chet Atkins, the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison from the late 1950s through the 1970s. In one week of 1960, his recordings accounted for 15 of Billboard Magazine's "Top 100," a feat none have matched.
Porter mixed concert sound for Presley from 1970 until the singer's death in 1977. At the University of Miami, he helped create the first college program in audio engineering, and he taught similar courses at the University of Colorado Denver, and at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. Porter, said to have a golden ear, was inducted into the TEC Awards Hall of Fame in 1992.
Porter was born Billy Rhodes Porter in St. Louis, Missouri on June 15, 1931. His family moved to Tennessee when he was 10. He grew up loving jazz music and baseball, and for a time considered an athletic career starting with the minor leagues. He graduated from East Nashville High School in 1949, then served in the U.S. Army Reserves for a few years while he made a living as a television repairman, learning electronics at a University of Tennessee extension program in Nashville.
Porter began his engineering career in 1954 at WLAC-TV in Nashville, Tennessee, where he wished to be a cameraman—nobody wanted to mix sound, though, and that job was assigned to him, the guy with the least seniority. He mixed up to four microphones for television broadcast for $92 per week, equivalent to $756 today. At nearby RCA Records in 1959, the chief engineer was transferred after angering Chet Atkins, and Porter applied for the position. He was told by an RCA executive from New York that the job would ruin his marriage, but Porter said "I can handle that"—he was hired at $148 per week, and given two weeks to learn all the equipment and how to mix up to 12 microphones for music recordings. Shortly after starting with RCA on March 31, 1959, Porter mixed the single "Lonesome Old House" for Don Gibson; it was a crossover success in both the country music and the pop music charts, and Porter began to be requested by name. In June 1959, he mixed "The Three Bells" for the Browns, with Atkins producing and Anita Kerr arranging. While editing the master to be sent to New York for pressing, Porter accidentally hit the wrong controls on the tape recorder and stretched the tape at the beginning of the song, distorting the pitch. Without telling anyone, he spliced a different take with a good intro onto the beginning, and sent that version instead. Four decades later, Porter recalled his quick fix: "this was a need-to-know situation and I figured nobody needed to know. I had been in the business three months or something like that. You're not a good engineer until you destroy a master and hopefully live to talk about it." In July, the song went to number one on the U.S. country and pop charts, and Porter's reputation rose.
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