GRAMMY-winning songwriter Brett James, whose dozens of chart-topping hits included “Jesus, Take the Wheel” and “When the Sun Goes Down,” died Thursday afternoon in a single-engine airplane crash in North Carolina. He was 57. According to Nashville television station WSMV, James’ plane crashed near an elementary school in Macon County, NC, killing all three people aboard.
An Oklahoma native who dropped out of medical school to move to Nashville in the early 1990s, James had more than 500 of his songs recorded, with the albums on which they appeared selling more than 110 million copies. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020.
Brett’s string of No. 1 songs included Jessica Andrews’ “Who I Am,” Martina McBride’s “Blessed,” Jason Aldean’s “The Truth,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Mr. Know It All,” and Dierks Bentley’s “I Hold On.” Underwood returned to his work frequently, his hits for her including “Cowboy Casanova,” “Something in the Water,” and “Somethin’ Bad” with Miranda Lambert. He recorded for Career Records and Arista Nashville during the 90s and early 2000s, and he released an EP independently in 2020.
James also worked on behalf of the songwriting community, formerly chairing the Nashville Songwriters Association International’s legislative committee and pushing for copyright reform.
“As a songwriter, you don’t always get to make music you love,” he said in 2020. “You try to make music someone else loves. It’s wonderful when the two goals meet, but sometimes they don’t. You don’t really go into music to play a song for the one person in the room you’re writing with, then never play it again.”
