BY HOLLY GLEASON

When you start with Reba McEntire singing “How Great Though Art,” you know you have something (or someone) very special being celebrated. And it was not about the star-power, or the hit records, or even the larger than life humanity that took center stage at Westminster Presbyterian Church for a Service of Witness to the Resurrection of Norris Denton “Norro” Wilson; it was the magic.

Anyone who knew Norro—a single moniker, like Cher or Madonna—knew he liked shiny things, jokes, lifting people up. As the Reverend Dr. Donovan Drake told the packed to the choir loft assembly, which included Mac Davis, Ralph Emery, Kenny Chesney, Joe Galante, John Conley, Tim DuBois, Steve Wariner, uber-producer Tony Brown, Jerry Bradley, Buddy Cannon and Country Music Hall of Fame chief Kyle Young, “Norro loved to marvel.”

The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member could find the wonderful in almost anything, and knew how to revel in what he saw. Just look at a few of the songs: George Jones’ “The Grand Tour,” “The Door” and “A Picture of Me (Without You),” Tammy Wynette’s “My Man (Understands),” “Another Lonely Song” and “He Loves Me All The Way,” Joe Stampley’s “Soul Song” and Charley Pride’s 29th and final #1, “Night Games.”

Asking him about how to create a hit song like “The Most Beautiful Girl,” Reverend Drake marveled, would elicit a response from the Kentucky-born Wilson that wouldn’t cover chord progression or hooks. “He’d say, ‘Well, you get some people in a room—and then, some magic happens…’”

That magic guided the Songwriter Hall of Famer into the studio to produce or co-produce Jones, Chesney, McEntire, Shania Twain, Charley Pride, Keith Whitley, Sara Evans, John Anderson and the Jones/Wynette reunion, One. He understood soul, he believed in emotion and he wasn’t afraid of songs that laid open the heart or the happy.

In 1975, Wilson won the Best Country Song Grammy for co-writing Charlie Rich’s “A Very Special Love Song.” Between “The Most Beautiful Girl,” “Love Song” and “I Love My Friend,” Norro and the Silver Fox created a blend that merged Southern soul with jazz and a hint of confession that elevated something deemed country into the same polymath sound Elvis inhabited in his later years.

Almost 30 years later, Wilson ascended the Mandalay Bay stage in Las Vegas to accept the Academy of Country Music Single of the Year Award for Kenny Chesney’s “The Good Stuff.”

That was the versatile beauty of the man who signed to Acuff-Rose Publishing in 1962. After spending four weeks at #1 with David Houston’s 1969 “Baby, Baby (I Know You’re A Lady),” Wilson helped (as a plugger and writer) make red-hot Al Gallico Music ever hotter. The BMI Country Songwriter of the Year in 1973, 1974 and 1975, the always humble Wilson, considered himself a collaborator.

Whether writing, pitching, producing, serving as an A&R man, running a publishing company or—yes—being an artist, Wilson loved it all. A series of singles in the late ’60 and early ‘70s—on Monument, Smash, Mercury, Warner Bros. and RCA—peaked with the Top 20 “Do It To Someone You Love.”

Rare is the memorial service where people laugh more than they cry, where they remember a man who loved to eat out, had a witty response to everything and an unfailing desire to make himself smaller and the people in his company magnified. Beyond celebrating an era of great characters and intense creativity, the service focused on how much Wilson cared about all who entered his circle.

His grown daughter Christy Wilson Myers read a poem about her father to close the ceremony. The truest moment coming from Wilson’s seven-year-old granddaughter, who punctuated the poem’s finish with a spontaneous “I love you, PopPop.”

Walking to the car, former ASCAP Nashville chief Connie Bradley paused looking at the several hundred attendees and said, “You know I started to put a black top on. I had it all laid out. Then I went, ‘NO! That’s not Norro!’ And I put on this yellow one. It’s bright and it’s happy, just like him.”

"Norro Wilson was one of the great music men, not just of our time, but all time,” Chesney, earlier in the week, said. “He taught me so much about soul, and songs, and what it means to touch someone's life with music."

Truer words were not uttered.