Richard "Rick" Blackburn (16 November, 1942 – 30 November, 2012) was a Nashville music executive. He was a president of
Atlantic Records in Nashville and shared his skill with
Mercury Records
Mercury Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group. It had significant success as an independent operation in the 1940s and 1950s. Smash Records and Fontana Records were sub labels of Mercury. In the United States, it i ...
and
Epic Records. Blackburn was known for hiring top artists like Ricky Van Shelton and George Jones and for dropping
Johnny Cash off at
Nashville Records around 1985 or 1986. He retired from the music industry in the 1990s and died in his Tennessee home of kidney failure.
References
1942 births
2012 deaths
People from Nashville, Tennessee
American music industry executives
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