Rising World Entertainment

Mary Ellen Bickford and Don Robertson:
Sharing Their Joy of Music, Film, and Writing
With Nashville's Music Row

By Phil Sweetland
Country music and radio contributor, The New York Times

When Mary Ellen and Don Robertson were married on May 10, 1999, they became a dream team of two of the most motivated, creative thinkers anywhere. When they relocated to Nashville a few years later, Mary and Don brought the Music City intellectual and artistic community something entirely fresh and new.

Their names were already familiar to many along Music Row. Mary Ellen, under her maiden name Mary Ellen Bickford, had co-written the indispensable 2002 book Songwriting For Dummies with Jim Peterik and Dave Austin, while Don had long been a legendary figure in New Age and instrumental music, beginning with his 1969 Mercury album Dawn, considered by many to be the first-ever New Age record.

Spending time with this remarkable couple, one is struck by the passion they share for creativity in many areas, by the eclectic nature of their work (Don, for instance, is a Julliard-trained keyboard wizard and classical composer who also has devoted years to studying the tabla, a mysteriously beautiful percussion instrument from India), and by the love they share for each other and for their art.

"Mary Ellen always has a smile on her face and a magnetic heart," an earlier story about her stated. "She loves sewing, gardening, hiking, and keeping simple. Mary Ellen is unique."

So is the musical journey of her husband. In the liner notes to Don's retrospective 1999 CD Favorites, he remembers the often traumatic process of recording Dawn 30 years earlier: "It was during this period that my quest to understand the spiritual purpose of music unfolded. From the darkness of the abyss, I turned to focus on music as a spiritual and healing force. Throughout the 1970s, I brought home records, (musical) scores and books, searching for music's holy grail . . . (By 1988) I had become dissatisfied with the direction that New Age music was taking, so I dropped out of recording music altogether and dismantled my recording studio."

Happily, the studio has long since been rebuilt and Don's musical magic is being discovered by an entirely new generation of listeners. His home studio in Nashville, a stone's throw from Capitol Records Nashville and a few miles from Music Row, is lined with bookcases filled with thick notebooks Don has assembled himself, each containing detailed analyses of the songs of a particular artist or songwriter; other books contain complete scores of operas and classical works by often obscure composers whose albums he has been hired to write liner notes on; still other volumes focus on the creative process itself.

Mary Ellen was born in California's Wine Country in 1948. There is a great deal of the Golden State's sunshine, sense of discovery (the state motto is, of course, "Eureka"), and love of many artistic genres in her writing. Her vast body of work includes nearly 40 years of writing personal journals, poetry and books, including her book of poems called Eloquence. As an independent film producer, she has done writing, filming, editing, sound production, marketing, and promotion. She worked for several years with the pioneering giant-format IMAX producer Greg MacGillivray on projects including The Living Sea and Hands Across America. Mary Ellen has three grown children, all of whom support her and Don in their work, and Don has three very supportive girls of his own.

Don and Mary Ellen joined forces first as business associates in 1997, when she joined him in Virginia to found DoveSong.com, a website dedicated to spiritual blossoming through music. Don's recordings are now released on the DoveSong imprint through their company Rising World Entertainment. Back in '97, he was working as a highly paid computer consultant for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. He even wrote a highly technical McGraw-Hill computer book, Accessing Transport Networks.

The money was great in computers but the passion and love Don felt for music and composition were sorely missing. So he left that lucrative business to focus entirely on music, and it's appropriate that in 1999 two life-changing events took place: He and Mary Ellen got married, and he released his first new music in over ten years.

After all, to paraphrase the classic waltz in the Lerner & Loewe show "My Fair Lady," music and Mary Ellen are Don's favorite things.

And the work and creative energy of Mary Ellen and Don Robertson are fast becoming some of Nashville's favorite things.