CHASING THAT NEON RAINBOW: CAPE COUNTY NATIVE JOHN RAMEY CO-WRITES TY HERDON'S NEW HIT

When country music star Ty Herndon sings his new hit "A Man Holdin' On" Friday night at Casino Aztar in Caruthersville, John Ramey will be in the audience listening. But he already knows the words by heart.

The Cape Girardeau County native, now a resident of Nashville, co-wrote the song.

The tune is both the first single and video off a new album to be released in June. The song follows a man through a lifetime of trying to hold onto women.

The 31-year-old Ramey is a staff writer for HoriPro Entertainment Group in Nashville. He performs as well and is frequently spotlighted at the Bluebird Cafe, one of Nashville's premiere venues for songwriting talent.

Ramey was a baseball player and all-state football player at Jackson High School in the mid-'80s and played quarterback for Southeast for three years. He dreamed about a professional football career but music was always important to him, too.

His grandfather, Homer Gilbert, is a well-known local musician who taught him the trumpet. Gilbert had a dance band and let his grandson play from the time he was 12.

Ramey's father, Southeast Missourian news editor John Ramey, also taught him to play the guitar.

"Dad was a big Bob Dylan fan," he says. "And he listened to a lot of country music. Maybe that's what got me playing country."

The guitar gathered dust when he began playing college football, but eventually he began singing in local clubs like Bill & Chas and playing with a band called Country Touch. "The bug got me," he says.

He quit the football team and went to Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., on a vocal scholarship.

Ramey met his wife, Mischon, at an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1989. Both of them were singing in shows.

They moved to Nashville in 1990. Ramey had decided he wanted to be a songwriter. "I think songwriting's always been my passion," he says.

But he wound up working at Baptist Hospital, drawing blood for four years.

A break came when his mother, Jan, sent a tape of his songs to Harold Bradley, then the president of the musicians union in Nashville. Bradley's brother had produced Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.

Bradley encouraged him to keep writing. Ramey started singing at Nashville clubs and passed an audition at the highly-sought Bluebird Cafe.

In 1994 he signed as a staff writer at HoriPro. Four days a week, he goes into the office and collaborates with nine other writers in the hope that their song will become someone else's hit.

"I treat it like a job," he says. "I work from 8 a.m. to 4 or 5 o'clock and I make myself write."

Last year he collaborated on 56 songs, contributing both melodies and lyrics. The company picks five to 10 songs a month to distribute to artists.

He says the song pluggers are good at matching songs with artists.

His name appears as a co-writer on the Doug Supernaw song "Daddy Made the Dollars," Neal McCoy's "Betcha Can't Do That Again," and Rick Trevino's "Mary's Just a Plain Jane." None of those became singles, though thousands of copies of "Mary's Just a Plain Jane" were pressed before a last-minute decision was made to release a different song.

Having a single is a big break for a Nashville songwriter. Ramey thought "A Man Holdin' On" was a bit too country for the middle-of-the-road Herndon but says, "He did a wonderful job on it."

Ramey's co-writers on "A Man Holdin' On" were Bobby Taylor and Gene Dobbins. His primary writing partner is George McCorkle, formerly of the Marshall Tucker Band.

Making a living in Nashville is hard, he says. "It's getting turned down time after time. I feel very fortunate to have a job writing for a company."

The Rameys have two children, Hannah, 7, and Jack, 3. Mischon is now a telecommunications consultant.

He says he's still learning what works and what doesn't in a country song.

"When I started I was just trying to learn the craft," he says. "I'm finding out that if you write about things you've been through it's more real to people."