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Frances Preston

A pioneering Nashville business woman has died.

Frances Preston was one of Tennessee’s first female corporate executives. The former president of music royalties company BMI was known as a champion for songwriters.

Preston’s roughly five-decade career was fueled by a keen sense of perception. In an interview with writer Craig Havighurst, Preston spoke of her first job, delivering mail in a downtown Nashville office tower, where she honed in on a certain detail: “I noticed that the receptionist at WSM was pregnant, and you couldn’t work then if you were pregnant.”

She talked the radio station’s manager into hiring her for the position, but he had to get approval for her transfer. “So he called and the human resources manager said ‘you can have her, she’s not worth a damn!’”

Preston quickly moved up the ranks at what was then one of the nation’s most prominent radio stations. As part of her job, Preston attended music awards presentations where she noticed another quiet detail: all of the stars got the big prizes, while “this little guy sits here and he wrote it, gets no recognition.”

LOOKING OUT FOR SONGWRITERS

In 1958, Preston created an award for songwriters, the first of which were given out to then-little known names like Harlan Howard and Buck Owens. She began hammering out royalty agreements for songwriters, too, working out of her home as BMI’s first full-time representative in the South. Just six years later, she was a Vice President with enough staff to require a building on Music Row.

That success meant a brighter spotlight on people like Kris Kristofferson, who presented her with an award from BMI in 2004, saying, “back when I came here to town the songwriters were at the bottom of the food chain, but the perception has changed because Frances fought for us.”

CARING FOR HER FLOCK

Songwriters tell of Preston calling out of the blue to offer monetary advances when times were tough. And journalist Kay West, who started out in Nashville as a publicist, remembers being one of many taken under Preston’s wing: “There’s a legion, a legion of women in the music industry today, both here and in New York that watched what Frances did and you know, you would think to yourself many, many, many times ‘what would Frances do.’”

What Preston did was find her way into meetings at men-only clubs and successfully push Congress to expand copyright laws. She chaired the board of the Country Music Association and ended up in the Country Music, Gospel Music and Broadcasting and Cable Halls of Fame.

Frances Williams Preston died of congestive heart failure yesterday. She was 83 years old.

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