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Jenny Hudson (Photo courtesy of Readers Digest Music )

Jenny Hudson's dreams were more modest than most. A scholarship sponsored by the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company that she won in the Miss Alabama contest in 1960 enabled Hudson (Postgraduate Diploma '62, voice) to attend Juilliard after she graduated from the University of Alabama. "I was going to go back to Birmingham to teach voice after two years," Hudson explains. "But I fell in love with New York!" Little did she dream that it would be 46 years until she finally headed home, a groundbreaking career as a record producer behind her.

"Juilliard was an eye-opener," says Hudson, who "learned so much in those two years," including some 23 mezzo roles. She recalls one particular coaching session with Bertha Melnik: "We were working on Carmen. And I just wasn't getting it. Bertha banged down a chord on the piano and said, 'You haven't lived enough to sing Carmen!' Scared me to death! But anyway, it taught me a lesson: I worked a little harder on those roles before I went into the coaching sessions with her!" Hudson says Juilliard taught her "that you have to work hard; you can't just depend on your talent—which maybe I had, up until that point. And that was good for me later in life, in my career. It was a wonderful tool."

Fresh out of Juilliard, Hudson "sang all over the place," including with the Robert Shaw Chorale in its historic tour of the Soviet Union in 1962 (during which one performance of the Bach B-Minor Mass drew a half-hour of applause). "It was awesome. We did, I think, 30 concerts in two months," she recalls. "We started in Berlin, then went to Yugoslavia the second week—landing on dirt fields and everything! Then we were picked up by Aeroflot and brought to Moscow, and in the six weeks we were there, we toured 10 cities, from Leningrad to Yalta." She also sang as an apprentice with the Santa Fe Opera Company.

Hudson began recording children's songs for Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1962 and was asked if she would edit a new school music series. "I learned a lot in that job," she says, "and got caught up in the music-business side of music." While editing the listening-appreciation recordings in the CBS Studios, Hudson had come to the attention of studio personnel, and when a producer was needed for Columbia Special Products at CBS Records, she nabbed the job. She was put in charge of the Reader's Digest account, compiling albums from the Columbia and Epic catalogs. "I must have done a pretty good job," she laughs, "because after six months into a new job as executive producer/director of recordings at Columbia House, Reader's Digest hired me away! That was 1977."

Her new job drew on all her talents, says Hudson. "I loved the challenge of coming up with concepts for albums, doing A&R [developing talent and selecting repertoire] and so forth." A number of the albums she worked on "went gold," but her favorite, perhaps not surprisingly, was The Four Great Tenors. "That was Domingo, Pavarotti, Carreras and—of all things—Mario Lanza, who ranks very high with the Reader's Digest audience," she explains. "But I did everything from Willie Nelson to Beethoven's Greatest Hits." Putting tapes together, Hudson also worked closely with the engineers and production staff in the recording studio. "I think, at last count, Reader's Digest owns 18,000 masters," she says. "And those were mostly recorded in London. I did a lot of the recordings during those years, so that was very exciting. I would set up the recording sessions; work with the arrangers, the fixer [contractor] who hires the musicians, the conductor; and then oversee all of the recording sessions, as well as the final mastering." And Hudson kept singing—she was a soloist at Park Avenue Methodist Church for 22 years.

When she started out, Hudson was the sole woman in the studio—"but I didn't think of myself as the only woman there; I just thought of it as doing my job," she says. She recently mentored one young performer starting a career, and has talked to "a lot of people interested in the music business who were coming out of college and trying to figure out what to do. I tell them that there are different ways you can enter the music business; it doesn't have to be just through performance." The opportunity to work on everything from country to classical within one company was rare back in the '70s, she says, but things are changing today.

Now back in Birmingham, Hudson is a freelance music consultant and is visiting churches to see where she wants to sing. "In the meantime," she laughs, "I get a lot of attention in the pews when they hear this mezzo-soprano roar on the hymns!"

—Jane Rubinsky

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