From:   "Dik de Heer" 
Date:  Fri Jul 26, 2002  1:10 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You : Fred Foster

FRED FOSTER

Born 26 July 1931, Rutherford County, North Carolina

Producer / record company founder / songwriter / publisher.
Fred Foster left his southern home at the age of seventeen and
found a job at a fast food drive-in in Washington, D.C. By 1955
he was regional promotion director for ABC-Paramount, bringing
George Hamilton IV and Lloyd Price to the label. In September 1958,
he started his own label, Monument Records, in Nashville. The first
release on the new logo, Billy Grammer's "Gotta Travel On", was
an immediate hit (# 4 pop, # 5 country). Foster was a self-taught
producer who could hardly read music, but he knew what he liked
and wanted: bringing country and pop together in a manner acceptable
to an audience that might be biased against one or the other.
In 1959, Foster signed Roy Orbison to his fledgling label. Roy's first
Monument single, "Paper Boy", flopped, his second ("Uptown") went
to # 72 and then, in 1960, came "Only The Lonely". The rest is history.
Foster produced all Roy's hits for Monument and also produced hits
for Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson (with whom he co-wrote
"Me And Bobby McGhee"), Boots Randolph and Ray Stevens. His biggest
success in the seventies came with Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers,
who scored a dozen big country hits on Monument before they switched to
Columbia in 1978. Foster retired from the music business in 1983.
The Monument label was reactivated (by Sony, not by Foster) in the mid-
nineties and is now home to the successful female country trio The Dixie
Chicks, from Lubbock, TX.

More info on the Monument label: http://www.bsnpubs.com/monument.html