BILL RAMSEY

GRAPHIC DESIGNER & WRITER

Bill Ramsey is a graphic designer and writer living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, specializing in newspaper, magazine and book design.
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Author: Bill Ramsey

RAMSEY DESIGN + CONTENT / Articles posted by Bill Ramsey
Sep 29, 2020
in Appreciation
by Bill Ramsey
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Farewell to Hamill

Skint Julep | September 2020 Hamill was dead and there seemed nothing really to do about it except smoke a cigarette in the midnight heat. You don’t run across men like Pete Hamill often. The world lucks upon them once in only a great while. Not just a brilliant, crusading journalist, editor and celebrated writer and essayist, Hamill was a mensch. He was a man in full, of his time, and a chronicler of his era and the city he loved. He loved booze, women, song, cigarettes, too —  those “goddamned cigarettes” he took to referring to them after he had finally quit — amid the clattering hum of 1960s New York newspaper newsrooms before he found some of these vices inhibited his...

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Dec 09, 2020
in Appreciation, Entertainment, Music
by Bill Ramsey
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Scotty Moore: The Guitar Heard ‘Round the World

Lone Star Music Magazine | June 2016   In the nervous days that led up to what would become Elvis Presley’s 1968 Comeback Special — a televised affair Colonel Parker envisioned first as a Christmas card to fans — the King of Rock ’n’ Roll was confronted with a proposition that mortified him: “Walk down the street with me,” said Steve Binder, the man who would produce the special. In Hollywood. Elvis did. And not one person recognized him. It was a revelation.   His reaction was to return to his roots. He gathered his old band on a sound stage in Burbank to create what was, in effect, the first, greatest “unplugged” video of all time. The theme of the show, said Binder, was to...

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Jan 19, 2016
in Appreciation, Entertainment, Music
by Bill Ramsey
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Glenn Frey: Fly Like An Eagle

Lone Star Music Magazine | January 2016   Glenn Frey did anything but take it easy.   Beneath the veneer of the laid-back California stoner — an image that could cannily belie Frey’s intuitive musical and business instincts — lurked a Midwesterner’s determination and a Detroit work ethic that propelled his role as both musical craftsman and the chief operating officer behind the Eagles, whose mellow rock tinged with an ever-sharper edge distilled an era of excess in deceptively catchy, sun- and marijuana-baked SoCal soul and connected with a generation whose party had been stolen, or in the parlance of the day, whose mellow had been hashed. It was a formula Frey successfully returned to again and again, and with his passing marks the...

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Jan 27, 2015
in Entertainment, Profile
by Bill Ramsey
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Bill Oberst Jr. is Lewis Grizzard

Chattanooga Pulse | January 2013   If you’re a Southern male journalist of a certain age, you must retain a certain amount of respect and admiration for Lewis Grizzard. The Georgia writer, who died suddenly (if not surprisingly) at 47 in 1994 following his fourth open-heart surgery, was the legendary Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist, humorist and author of bestselling books with such titles as “Elvis Is Dead And I Don’t Feel So Good Myself.” Grizzard was also popular on the lecture circuit and was for a time the nation’s most popular syndicated columnist, appearing in 450 newspapers. He was also something of a playboy who played his button-down, redneck humor and lifestyle to the hilt. Grizzard was the South’s answer to Mike Royko,...

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Sep 30, 2020
in Entertainment, Profiles
by Bill Ramsey
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Gretchen Bonaduce: The Edge of Reality

Chattanooga Pulse | February 2012   If you have ever dreamed, or at least daydreamed, about becoming a star (and who hasn’t?), two direct routes can hasten your journey: Shamelessly audition repeatedly for any and every reality show and/or marry a current, former or marginal celebrity of any stripe.   Both paths are littered with landmines: The former is a cauldron of indignity, public humiliation and rejection, and you will likely resume your place in obscurity, cursing the competitor who dashed your dreams while you labor in minimum-wage drudgery; the latter, too, is also almost always a labyrinth paved with all manner of torment and abuse, and you will likely end up little more than a footnote, a mere mention in a dark, dusty...

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Jan 26, 2015
in Profile
by Bill Ramsey
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David Helton’s Buzzard Luck

Chattanooga Pulse | January 2013   When illustrator David Helton first sketched “The Buzzard,” the now-iconic cartoon mascot for Cleveland’s famed rock radio station WMMS-FM almost 40 years ago, he never thought the ugly bird would still be hovering over his career. But the character’s marketing star-power continues unabated and has become so ingrained in Cleveland lore it has become synonymous with the city’s claim as “The Rock ‘n’ Roll Capital of the World” and continues as a symbol of the station.   “I just thought it would be a one-off deal,” Helton said recently over coffee at Starbucks in Brainerd, where, incidentally, his talented lettering skills adorn the store’s chalkboard menus. “I remember getting paid in concert tickets and albums, which was cool...

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Jan 26, 2015
in Author interviews
by Bill Ramsey
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Meacham on Jefferson

Chattanooga Pulse | November 2012   “The only thing worse than winning a second term is not winning a second term.”  —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, political commentator, author of “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” and native Chattanoogan, discussing the prospects for President Obama’s second term on “The Today Show,” on Friday, Nov. 9, 2012.   Jon Meacham could have been talking about any American president when he offered his prognostications for President Obama’s second term following his decisive re-election last week. In particular, he might well be referring to Thomas Jefferson, who served as the nation’s first secretary of state, its second vice president and its third president for two terms from 1801 to 1809. But it is specifically Jefferson’s influence and legacy...

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Jan 26, 2015
in Profile
by Bill Ramsey
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Sandy Huffaker: An Illustrated Life

Chattanooga Pulse | March 2012   During one week at the peak of his career as an illustrator, Sandy Huffaker had assignments from Time, Sports Illustrated and Businessweek. He had to turn down a fourth assignment that week from Newsweek. “I just didn’t have time,” says the Chattanooga-born artist during a phone interview from his home in tiny Raphine, Va.   The 1970s were the “glory days,” Huffaker says, for himself and a stable of talented illustrators whose work routinely found their work on the covers of the nation’s premier newsmagazines and in the pages of The New York Times. For the better part of that decade, Huffaker was among an elite breed of commercial artists—his hero and fellow Southerner Jack Davis, the legendary Mad magazine...

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Jan 26, 2015
in Essays, Music
by Bill Ramsey
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Cult of the Record Bar

Chattanooga Pulse | December 2011   A couple of months ago an obscure music website posted a story under the headline “CD-format to be abandoned by major labels by the end of 2012.” Through the power of the Internet, the just-believable-enough story — which carried no byline and quoted no sources — reverberated across the web with the power of a New York Times blockbuster, at least to the music-buying public, who are so accustomed to downloading and streaming the article seemed altogether likely.   Though not true—while growing fast, digital downloading and streaming are not expected to outpace CD sales anytime soon, with one industry executive claiming 74 percent of all albums sales this year came from CDs—the article did spark a debate...

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Jan 26, 2015
in Entertainment, Music, Profile
by Bill Ramsey
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John Hiatt Drives South

Chattanooga Pulse | November 2011   Every two years or so, John Hiatt makes a record that gives music critics and DJs at those few radio stations worth listening to in America something to agree on. “John Hiatt is the best songwriter you’ve never heard of, but you’ve almost certainly heard his songs,” said WUTC-FM program director Richard Winham. It’s sadly true, but after 40 years Hiatt has long made peace with this bit of cruel irony.   Hiatt, as he will tell you, tells me, tells anyone, really, doesn’t write songs for anyone else. Never has, never will. John Hiatt writes John Hiatt songs—tough, gritty roadhouse-ready rock 'n' roll and poignant “this-is-what-I’ve-learned-about-love” relationship songs that give you pause and make you think out...

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