David Ray Skinner was born and raised in Nashville, and he developed an interest in both art and music at an early age. He played in several garage bands in the mid-\u201960s and later appeared on local Nashville TV shows performing original songs. His Christmas song, \u201cHe Slept On\u201d was published by Broadman (publishers of the Baptist Hymnal), when he was a high school senior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early \u201970s, Skinner attended Carson-Newman, a small Baptist college in East Tennessee, where he studied art and journalism. His junior and senior years, he served as editor-in-chief of the college\u2019s newspaper, The Orange and Blue<\/em> and won two Southeastern College Newspaper Competition<\/em> awards his senior year. In addition to his cartoons for CN\u2019s paper, he also drew editorial cartoons for the Morristown Citizen-Tribune<\/em>, an East Tennessee daily newspaper. As a summer job during college, Skinner drew caricatures for Opryland, USA; this would prove to be an invaluable experience that would help him with his later cartoons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After graduating cum laude from Carson-Newman in 1974, Skinner served as writer, reporter, and artist for The Sevier County Times<\/em>, a weekly paper in the Smoky Mountains. At night and on weekends, he wrote music and played guitar and banjo for a variety of bluegrass bands that played in the clubs in and around Gatlinburg, Tennessee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mid-\u201970s found Skinner back in Nashville, writing and recording songs and freelancing at various ad agencies. However in 1977, his love for art, design and music landed him in New York City, where he became the cartoonist and paste-up artist, and, eventually, the Art Director, for the now-defunct international music trade magazine, Record World<\/em>. During his tenure at RW<\/em>, he did custom illustrations and caricatures for such notables as Elton John, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Led Zeppelin, Kenny Rogers and Billy Joel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After five years at Record World<\/em>, Skinner went to work for Doubleday, art directing their prestigious Literary Guild Magazine<\/em>. At Doubleday, he created marketing treatments for books by writers such as James Michener, Bob Woodward, Peter Maas, Stephen King, and celebrities such as Candice Bergen, Dinah Shore and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1984, Skinner moved back south, this time to Atlanta. In the early 90\u2019s, he became involved in various music projects, including Johnny Cash\u2019s gospel video and CD, Return to the Promised Land<\/em>, for which he designed the logo and co-wrote the title track with Cash and Cash\u2019s manager, Hugh Waddell. He also renewed a lifelong interest in Civil War General John Hunt Morgan and began writing songs, which eventually took the form of a concept album. The album, John Hunt Morgan: A Southern Legend<\/em>, was a novel-in-music circle of songs (beginning and ending with Morgan\u2019s death) and ranged in musical styles from folk and bluegrass to rock and gospel. In 1997, it was nominated for Gettysburg College\u2019s famed Lincoln Prize<\/em>, an award given annually to a literary work focusing on the American Civil War. Skinner\u2019s next musical project, Jolly Roger Tailgunner<\/em>, chronicled his father\u2019s experiences in World War II as a tail gunner for The Jolly Rogers, a heavy bomb group stationed in the South Pacific. Recently, Skinner re-released the John Hunt Morgan album as Morgan’s War-Song<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since 2001, he has produced an online literary magazine called SouthernReader.com<\/em>. He has also continued to do advertising, marketing, illustration and design for a number of clients, including Home Depot, Target, Glock, HanesBrands and Citibank, as well as colleges such as Bluefield College, Truett-McConnell, GBCN at Mercer University and his alma mater, Carson-Newman. His projects included the creation and design of a bobblehead character, Mr. Extreme<\/em>, for Travel Centers of America; the concept and illustration of an 20-foot, 3-dimensional bronze bas-relief for the University of West Georgia\u2019s football stadium; a barbecue sauce radio jingle that ran on the Grand Ole Opry for several months; and a watercolor painting commissioned for Justice Clarence Thomas, which now hangs in his office at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In November 2022, Skinner was awarded the 2022 Carson-Newman Triumph Award in the field of Arts and Social Sciences by his alma mater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" David Ray Skinner was born and raised in Nashville, and he developed an interest in both art and music at an early age. He played in several garage bands in the mid-\u201960s and later appeared on local Nashville TV shows performing original songs. His Christmas song, \u201cHe Slept On\u201d was published by Broadman (publishers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-16","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notedstories.com\/Homepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}