Craig Wiseman remembers his mother playing Walt Disney storybook albums during his naptime as a kid living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the music lulling him to sleep. He used to beat on garbage-can lids with sticks and spoons. His mother played piano a little, and she had a cousin who performed at the Grand Ole Opry, a staple country music venue in Nashville, Tenn.
Songwriting became a staple in his life around the age of 11 when he lost his father. Wiseman would go into the woods, sit, and write poetry and songs. In middle school, he became interested in instruments, like the guitar and drums. Guitar didn’t work out for him, but the drums did, so much so that he played first chair drums in his middle-school band.
“I was way into drums, and the reason why is I saw the high-school jazz band perform, and somebody was playing a drum set. And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I wanna do that,’” Wiseman told the Mississippi Free Press.
He joined the high-school jazz band, where he got his first taste of what touring is like, as the band would travel to other schools in the area to perform, sometimes going to multiple places a day.
“We would have days off from school where we had to set it up and tear it down, set it up and tear it down and do like three or four gigs a day at all these different schools,” he said. “That gave me my first little exposure to a road band.”
Craig graduated from Hattiesburg High School in 1981 and briefly attended the University of Southern Mississippi, majoring in psychology. Wiseman was juggling school, performing with a rock band and writing songs. College was his mother’s dream for him, but the more he wrote, he began to realize his focus needed to shift toward songwriting.
“I kind of realized later on that there’s a perfection of writing songs where that’s what you do,” he explained. “You’re not in bands and stuff because that’s a distraction of your time. … Songwriting is its own self-contained profession.”
Songwriting is what connected him to country music, which he wasn’t a huge fan of prior to doing a gig with Romeo Sullivan. One day, Sullivan called Wiseman to invite him to play drums with his country band.
“I went down there, and these guys were playing old-school country,” he said. “They would just start doing a song, and I’d pick up on what the beat was and play. It wasn’t really my music, but I figured out the lyrics to songs where the lyrics were cool. I liked the lyrics a lot.”
‘Time to Step Up’
At 21, Wiseman dropped out of college and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue songwriting full-time. The songwriter says the city isn’t just a country music town, but an epicenter for the music in general. Moving there made him not feel like such a weirdo for prioritizing writing over partying, he said.
“I’ll never forget the first time I got to Nashville and I was in a bar sitting with a band. By midnight, people started leaving. And I’m like, ‘Where are you going?’ and they’d say, ‘I gotta go home and work on this song, or I gotta play for somebody tomorrow morning,’” he remembered.
It was the first time he’d heard and been around other writers and artists who had a similar work ethic to his own. He knew then that he had found a home in Nashville, he said. He managed to land a job playing drums for Billy Bob Shane & The Overtime Band seven nights a week for $25 a day.
He met Wesley Orbison, the son of Roy Orbison, at a bar in Hendersonville, where they hit it off and became friends. Eventually, they started writing songs together at Orbison’s home for a few hours before Wiseman went to play drums at venues from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. His work days were 16 hours long, but the time was worthwhile, he said.
“One day, Wesley said, ‘Hey, my dad’s doing an album. He likes all our stuff.’ So, we wrote a couple of songs, and we actually got a song on the ‘Mystery Girl’ album,” Wiseman said.
The duo co-wrote “The Only One” for what would be Roy Orbison’s final album, which was released posthumously in January 1989. Wiseman remembers hearing the song for the first time in Wesley’s car and freaking out that Roy Orbison was singing something he helped write.
“It was kind of surreal. At the same time, I realized I got this cut because of politics. But that’s an important part of Nashville, too,” he reflected. “You start realizing it takes skill, it takes hard work, it takes practice, but it also takes politics. It takes knowing how to take advantage of opportunities around you.”
The song earned him a $20,000 royalty check that he used to buy a stereo, guitar and other items for his home. But then his home was broken into, and all those fancy items disappeared, just like that. Insurance offered him a $1,200 check to replace his items, but he used it to get an eight-track recorder and a microphone. He spent the next few months writing and recording songs with no distractions.
“It was really one of those tests, one of those tests where the demons have come along with Satan to try and get me off my path. And I was like, ‘No, man,’” Wiseman said. “By then, it was time to step up. Time to stop screwing around and get serious about sh*t. And that’s what I did.”
That batch of songs scored Craig his first publishing contract with Almo/Irving Music in 1990. Four years later, he got his first No. 1 hit with Tracy Lawrence’s “If the Good Die Young,” which Wiseman co-wrote with Paul Nelson. In 1997, he was named Nashville Songwriter Award and Music Row Magazine’s Songwriter of the Year.
‘Always a Mystery’
In 2000, he signed a deal with BMG Publishing, with whom more than 60 songs he wrote and co-wrote were recorded, and 22 of them became singles. Wiseman pinned “The Good Stuff” with Jim Collins for Kenny Chesney, which eventually won a 2004 ASCAP Country Song of the Year.
In 2003, he left BMG and started his own publishing company, Big Loud Shirt. In its first year, Wiseman and Tim Nichols co-wrote Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying.” The song earned a Grammy for Best Country Song, and it won Song of the Year at the Country Music Award and the Academy of Country Music Award shows. He co-wrote Brooks & Dunn’s “Believe” song with Ronnie Dunn, earning them Song of the Year awards at the CMA and ACM in 2006.
“I’m probably stronger lyrics-wise, but where it comes from is always a mystery. It could be the Babyface thing where I start singing the chorus and go from there,” he said. “Or sometimes, it could be a notion, and you just start singing this thing, and you know it’s a verse, but you don’t know where it’s coming from.”
“Therefore, I gotta figure out what the chorus is. I gotta figure out what the song’s about. I gotta figure out how the chorus is going to be melodically a companion and lift the verses,” he added.
Wiseman wrote a companion book to Tim McGraw’s song under the same title, which became a New York Times Bestseller in 2004. He won ASCAP Country Songwriter of the Year in 2005 and 2007.
He co-wrote the book “A Baby Changes Everything” in conjunction with Faith Hill’s single in 2008. In 2012, he co-founded Big Loud’s management division, which launched the career of Florida Georgia Line. Wiseman founded Big Loud Records in 2015, and he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame later that same year.
In March 2025, the state honored Craig Wiseman with a Mississippi Country Music Trail Marker in Midtown Green Park in Hattiesburg, his hometown. The marker stands next to Midtown Green Bandshell, an arts venue that Wiseman funded.
“I wanted to do something to give back to Hattiesburg, so it would make sense for me to make some kind of bandshell because they have some of those here in Nashville. It’s a free performance space,” the songwriter said.
He hopes to buy a property and bring a dog park to Hattiesburg in the midtown area due to he and his wife’s love for dogs. Craig and his high-school classmates began a group called 81 Angels to keep in communication and to look out for one another like guardian angels, he said.
“A classmate of ours had hit some hard times, and we were like, ‘Can we help them out? We should help look out for our friends.’ And so we started talking to other people, and we started this group,” he explained. “We decided to make it about a five-year span between the classes of ’78 all the way up to class of ’82.”
When Craig Wiseman moved to Nashville to pursue his dreams, he spent the first week sleeping in his van with a blue drum set. Now, he’s worked with artists such as Faith Hill, Dolly Parton, Nickelback and many others. He has a successful record label, a Grammy and is credited for 29 No. 1 records with 350 songs recorded. He’s blessed, he said.
“ I’m the luckiest guy you’ll ever meet. I really am. I’ve been so very, very blessed. And to know my dreams and to chase my dreams and to have caught my dreams, that is so much of a blessing,” Wiseman said.
For more information on Craig Wiseman’s career, visit bigloud.com.