James Dunn B.S. '96
College Alumn Featured in Performing Songwriter Magazine
March 10, 2009
Thirteen years ago, James Dunn was known for writing a business plan that earned him first prize in the NC State College of Management’s first-ever business plan competition.
These days, Dunn is recognized for writing soulful ballads and rocking anthems that are winning him critical acclaim. With the release of his second CD last fall, Country Music Television called him one of the country’s top unsigned musical artists, and his CD, “The Long Ride Home,” was featured in the January/February 2009 issue of Performing Songwriter Magazine.
Dunn’s journey from the college’s ‘Class of ‘96’ business management graduate and pharmaceutical/medical sales rep to recording artist is the stuff of an ‘American Idol’ background story.
About four years after graduation, while working as a sales rep for Merck in Nashville, Tenn., Dunn started strumming an old steel guitar his grandfather had given him. He soon learned three things about himself: 1) He could play the guitar. 2) He could sing. 3) He could write songs.
Credit Dunn’s genes with his talent, late-blooming as it may be. The grandfather who gave him the guitar, Henry J. Dunn, was a coalminer whose passion was music. Henry played many instruments, including the guitar, mandolin and banjo, and performed in big bands during the ‘30s and ‘40s. He passed away in 2001, but not before hearing “Valley Road,” the first song his grandson penned using that old steel guitar.
Within five years of writing his first song, Dunn had accumulated enough material and saved enough money to produce his first CD, “Lonely American Dream.”
Dunn was back in Raleigh by then, selling imaging equipment for GE, so the album has a distinctly Oak City pedigree: Dunn wrote most of the music while living in an apartment on Fairview Road in Raleigh, and he and his band recorded it at Crewcuts Recording Studio in Raleigh’s historic Oakwood district.
Both “Lonely American Dream” and Dunn’s latest album, “The Long Ride Home,” are also sold in Raleigh, something that never ceases to amaze him.
“Back in school, I never imagined that I’d have a career in music,” he said. “Now I can’t tell you the thrill of walking into Schoolkids Records, which is still there (on Hillsborough Street), with my friends and seeing my name on one of those plastic CD case dividers.”
If things go according to plan, those dividers will contain more than two James Dunn CDs.
“I would hope that I can continue to produce new songs that people will enjoy, and that somehow those songs can weave their way into people’s lives and experiences,” he said. “One of things I’ve always thought was great about music is that ability to remember a certain song, where you were when you heard it and every detail about that moment in time. I would hope that I could write a few songs that people could carry with them throughout their days.”
Dunn’s music is now his full-time job, but that doesn’t mean he’s left the business world behind. As anyone who has struggled to make it in the industry knows, music is big business. And in addition to promoting his art, Dunn has also started a music distribution and publishing company called JMD Holdings based in Raleigh, to sell his music and that of other artists. The business brings him back to town several times a year.
About that business plan competition, he said, “It was a valuable opportunity for me to present my plan to local bank representatives and get some ‘real world’ feedback, which I thought was very valuable at the time and helped me integrate what I learned in the College of Management with the reality of the business world,” Dunn said.
His business plan was for a Backstreets Coffee Shop, a name that came from a 1975 Bruce Springsteen song. “I just thought it was a good name,” he said. “I would have liked to have opened something if I had the financing at the time.”
Dunn now divides his time between Raleigh – “a good area for music, with a lot of talented musicians” – and Nashville, the epicenter of “Americana’” music, the genre that best describes his work, as Dunn has been compared with Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp.
Other NC State alumni have helped inspire and support Dunn, especially when he was launching his distribution company. “I’ve been amazed at the loyalty of people that I’ve met through NC State’s networking, and their willingness to help,” he said.
Dunn lived in Cary, N.C., for most of his youth and attended Apex High School, in Apex, N.C.
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James Dunn B.S. '96
"Singer-Songwriter"
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