It was never an easy road, but Milsap received plenty of encouragement along the way. He’s an R&B singer, he’s a rock-and-roll singer, but he’s not a country Milsap recalls, “Bradley said, ‘I know Ronnie Milsap. Jerry Bradley, the head of the label’s Nashville division, also heard those tunes, and he knew they had something. That’s all right, because it’s all right to cry when something that big is happening in your life.” “I had my tape recorder set up, put my tape on and started to listen to that stuff, and it just hit me: I’m finally doing what I’m supposed to do,” he says. Milsap remembers the joy of hearing his own first country sides. He moved to Nashville, found a manager and signed to RCA Records. His first single for the label, “Never Had It So Good,” authored by aspiring songwriters Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, actually scraped into the R&B Top 20 and, for several years, Milsap plugged away, trying his hand at rock-and-roll and anything else that might bring him a modicum of success.įinally, in the early-‘70s, he made up his mind to attempt to break into the country end of the business-as he’d wanted to do all along. Signed in 1965 to Scepter Records, the New York home of Dionne Warwick and The Shirelles, Milsap was initially groomed to sing R&B music. He gave it a try, and although executives at the record labels recognized his talent, they didn’t know what to do with him. “I said, ‘But I love music more than any of that.’” You need to go to college and study to be a teacher or a lawyer, where you’ll have a good career,’” Milsap says today. “All of my school counselors were telling me: ‘Don’t do that. The singer and multi-instrumentalist also placed some 18 LPs into the Top 10 of the trade publication’s Top Country Albums chart, four of which vaulted as high as possible.īefore all of that, though, he had to convince skeptics that a kid from North Carolina who’d been blind since birth even had a shot in the music business. 1 hits on the Billboard Country Singles chart-a bunch of others made it into the Top 10. From 1974 to 1989, Ronnie Milsap scored an astounding 35 No.