12/17/2025
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Today, Broadcast Music Inc. runs its Nashville operations from a large building at the head of Music Row. But back in 1958, when 29-year-old Frances Williams began working for the performing rights organization, she handled it all from the garage of her parents’ house at 220 Robin Hill Road.
Frances — who would become Frances Preston when she married in 1962 — had already begun developing a name for herself as a receptionist at WSM-AM who was much more than a receptionist. When BMI Vice President Robert J. Burton hired her to open the Nashville office of the performing rights organization, she came home to the house in West Meade and told her father, Baumann Williams, "I got a job working for BMI!"
He asked what she'd do. She didn't know. He asked what they'd pay. She didn't know that either. "But it's a New York company!" she recalled in an interview shortly before her death in 2012.
After spending her first weeks with BMI in New York, she asked Burton, “What do you want me to do when I get back to Nashville?”
"The job is whatever you make of it,” Burton told her.
"That was all the instruction I had," she told John Lomax in a 1983 interview.
From her parents’ garage, Frances and an assistant signed Nashville's songwriters and collected performance royalties at a time when, as her son would later put it, "songwriting wasn't considered a real job in Nashville."
That November, Williams organized BMI's first Nashville awards as part of the seventh annual Country Music Dee-Jay Convention at the War Memorial Building. BMI gave their awards at a breakfast gathering, as did several other organizations.
Don Gibson won big that for "Oh Lonesome Me," which had spent eight weeks as a country No. 1, and for "I Can't Stop Loving You" and "Blue Blue Day."
But Williams had a problem. "People were only interested in the artists and not the writers," she told Lomax. And in those days, few artists wrote their own songs. "So the audience would get restless after Carl Smith had gotten his awards and George Morgan had gotten his. They were not too interested in watching a writer."
Williams convinced BMI to split their awards from the others. In 1959, BMI moved the breakfast to Belle Meade Country Club with a live band—Bob Moore, Grady Martin, Murray Harman, Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins—playing the winning songs.
By then, BMI had moved Williams from the garage to an office in the Life and Casualty Tower downtown. An October 1963 story in The Tennessean, reporting on BMI breaking ground for its own building at 710 16th Avenue South, noted the company had maintained offices in the Life and Casualty Tower for the last six years.
On July 27, 1964, BMI’s Music Row building opened. The building anchored what was becoming known as Music Row. Frances became a vice president that year, reportedly the state’s first female executive of a major national corporation.
Twenty-two years later, she was named president and CEO of BMI, a position she held until 2004. Under her leadership, the company's revenues tripled. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992.
