Murder on Music Row: Corrupt independent record chart might hold key to Nashville homicide

This is the third in an eight-part series exploring the 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes, a country music chart director who knew too much.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The bullet lodged permanently in Sammy Sadler’s shoulder.

When he began to regain his wits after surgery, his arm was as swollen as a river after a storm, his guitar-picking career was in jeopardy and two Murder Squad detectives were standing over his bed.

Dets. Bill Pridemore and Pat Postiglione interviewed Sadler for the first time at 9:30 a.m. on March 10, 1989. Pridemore compiled his report, on Supplemental Form 104, using an old-fashioned typewriter and all capital letters.

He ended each page with italics and punctuation: INVESTIGATION CONTINUED! 

Sadler’s narrative was straightforward, and it hasn’t changed an inch in 34 years.

On the night of March 9, the 22-year-old country music dreamer phoned his friend Kevin Hughes, who worked as the chart director at Cash Box magazine.

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• Episode 1: There Ain't No Justice In It | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 2: Who Shot Sam? | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 3: Chasing That Neon Rainbow | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 4: Tell It Like It Is | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 5: It Ain't My Fault | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
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• Episode 7: Life of Sin | Apple | Spotify | iHeart
• Episode 8: Bury Me In Georgia | Apple | Spotify | iHeart

Sadler met Hughes in the Cash Box office in the Faron Young building on Division Street sometime before 8:30 p.m. Hughes drove them to the Captain D’s restaurant on West End where they talked about sports and girls and nothing important until between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.

As Hughes was driving back toward Cash Box, Sadler said he got an idea. Why not stop at Evergreen Records, where Sadler recorded his songs and worked as a promoter? Sadler wanted to call his parents in Texas, and he wanted his record label to pay for the long-distance call.

Hughes parked his car across the street from the Evergreen office, a little green and white craftsman house on 16th Avenue South.

About 10 p.m., Sadler said he called his parents. Hughes had never met Jerry and Juanita, so Sadler said he gave the phone to Hughes, who introduced himself.

When Hughes gave the phone back to Sadler, they heard a rattling noise they thought was coming from the Evergreen front door.

Sadler said Hughes peeked out the windows and saw “a Black guy” walking on the street out front.

It was about 10:25 p.m. when Sadler and Hughes decided to leave Evergreen. Hughes needed to drive Sadler back to the Young building to pick up his car. They were a bit spooked by the noises they had heard, so they stood on the Evergreen porch and looked around to make sure it was safe.

They walked across the world famous street toward Hughes’ Pontiac. Hughes got in the driver’s seat while Sadler walked around the front of the car. Sadler opened the car door and got in.

As Sadler sat in the passenger seat he said he saw something out of the corner of his eye. He tried to shut the door, but a man with a gun (“He came out of the shadows,” Sadler said) had wedged his way between the door and Sadler.

The gunman fired one shot, hitting Sadler four inches below his right armpit.

Sadler said he didn’t see what happened to Hughes. Sadler hustled, dripping blood, to a nearby apartment to get away.

His story ended there.

There was one particular thing about the story that piqued Pridemore’s interest.

Sadler had controlled the night.

“He’s the one that called and asked Kevin, let’s go eat, let’s go drive over to Evergreen Records under the pretense that they had the toll free phone,” Pridemore said. The killer “knew that (Kevin) was going to be there. (What are) the chances of somebody sitting there waiting all night with a gun and a ski mask and a hat, waiting for (Hughes and Sadler) to hopefully show up?”

To Pridemore, Sadler’s description of an unplanned meeting with a random stop didn’t sound right.

Here’s what was in Pridemore’s mind after that first hospital meeting with Sadler: “It adds up to suspicion,” Pridemore said.

Within walking distance of a dream

Kevin Hughes dreamed differently than most people who came to Nashville.

Hughes didn’t try to master guitar or drums. He didn’t envision himself on stage.

If he was going to make it in music, it would be because he loved the sound of crunching numbers.

He wanted to be on the business side of drinkin’ and cheatin’ songs.

As a teenager, Hughes’ parents drove him 45 minutes each week to Evansville, Indiana, so he could buy Billboard Magazine to devour the music charts. When that wasn’t enough, he made up his own.

And he bought rock albums.

“He would go and get every record,” said Kyle Hughes, Kevin’s younger brother. “He would put it on an index card. He would have who wrote the song, year it was put out, who sang it. Index cards. He had about a thousand albums.”

Hughes grew up in Carmi, Illinois, on his family’s grain farm (soybeans and corn). His brother said he didn’t like country music. He loved the band Kansas, and everything rock — from Air Supply to Metallica, Kyle Hughes said.

Their dad would drive Hughes and his friends to Evansville’s Roberts Municipal Stadium to see acts like Styx, Kiss and Rick Springfield.

When the local radio station changed formats — from rock to country — both Hughes brothers were depressed.

Hughes graduated from Carmi Community High School in 1983. It wasn’t long before he left for Nashville to attend Belmont College, which is about 200 miles from his hometown and adjacent to Music Row.

In the early 1980s, he was within walking distance of his dream.

While he was at Belmont, he took an unpaid internship at Cash Box Magazine as a chart researcher.

“That’s all he wanted to do was something in the music industry,” Kyle Hughes said. “He played the trumpet, but he never got into the art of music. He was always into the business side of it. That’s what he liked to do. He wanted to write songs. He wanted to produce music. He was really into that type of thing. He wasn’t into singing or being a vocalist or anything like that.”

Eventually, he wanted to work at the Gospel Music Association in Nashville. He thought working at Cash Box would get him closer to accomplishing that goal.

Among the music charts, Billboard had the most credibility. R&R (Radio and Records) was a smaller chart but well-regarded. There was the Gavin Report and a few others. Cash Box was generally ranked last.

Founded in the 1940s, Cash Box had the reputation among some people in the industry for rewarding producers, artists and promoters with chart positions if they paid for advertising and made other under-the-table payments.

There is a term for that.

Payola.

It’s an undercover or indirect payment in return for commercial promotion.

It’s against the law.

In 1959, popular disc jockey Alan Freed (who is credited with inventing the term “rock ‘n roll,”) was fired from WABC radio in New York after the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight concluded that he and more than 300 DJs had taken payments to play records.

'Crazy things going on in my life'

Hughes worked his way from unpaid intern to paid researcher.

He was hired for the full-time job by chart director Richard D’Antonio, a big talking dude who people knew as Tony D or “The Tone.” D’Antonio was known for gold chains, chest hair and bravado.

D’Antonio had met Tom McEntee, who was the Cash Box chart director in the mid-1980s, while he was playing video games in the lobby of the Universal Tower. D’Antonio had worked as a card dealer in Las Vegas, and McEntee figured he would be good with numbers.

D’Antonio would later be fired for harassing the women and openly using drugs in the office.

In 1987, Hughes dropped out of Belmont to work at Cash Box fulltime.

Marilyn Conwell knew Kevin Hughes from the time they were in middle school together. Over the years, he became an important person in her life.

“I was a victim of some bullying because my family was very, very poor,” Conwell said. “But (Kevin) never treated me like that at all. He was just such an open person. He never met a stranger.”

The last phone conversation Conwell had with Hughes came two days before he was shot to death.

She said he was upset. “‘There's a lot of crazy things going on in my life,’” she said he told her. “And I said, well, do you want to talk about them? And he said, ‘I can't right now.’ He says, ‘Maybe when I see you, but I can't talk about it right now.’” 

Something was bothering him.

As he learned the Cash Box business, Hughes began to tell people he was uncomfortable because the charts weren’t accurate.

He had been offered perks and cash.

Hughes told people he knew he was trying not to partake … even though he had taken a couple hundred-dollar handshakes.

The singer who didn't sing very much

Growing up in Leonard, Texas, Sammy Sadler sang country songs from the time he was 3.

His parents coaxed his singing dream. His father ran a very successful painting business, so successful it funded the purchase of a 56-acre farm where he raised several quarter horses that raced in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Jerry Sadler bought his son a mail-order guitar. 

Sadler played on the Leonard High School baseball team and cymbals in the marching band. His marching only lasted a few weeks. Sadler couldn’t read music, and he wanted to sing and play guitar.

For a short time, he joined a band called Perfect Stranger. But that didn’t last long, either.

A couple of months after he graduated from high school, Sadler moved to Nashville with his mother to make records.

On his first night in Nashville, Sadler’s father paid for a limousine and spent the evening riding around town with his son talking excitedly about his future. It was November 1984, the same month Ronald Reagan waxed Walter Mondale and was reelected as president.

The quest for stardom for many who came to Nashville began with the search for an open microphone. They played sweaty gigs in hotel bars, backyards at graduation parties and anywhere someone would listen.

That was the Garth Brooks approach. His ascension in Nashville is the stuff of legend — working in a boot store, playing gigs all over Music City, including a key performance at the Bluebird Cafe, and finally signing a contract with Capitol Records.

Sammy Sadler didn’t take the Garth Brooks route.

Sadler’s path involved a tiny independent label, a monotonous job, custom records, seedy promoters and a corrupt music chart.

Dets. Bill Pridemore and Pat Postiglione had to immerse themselves in the underbelly intricacies of the Nashville sound to understand the Kevin Hughes murder. They had to learn about the lives of singers like Sadler and how another side of the music industry worked.

Sadler made a demo and began shaking hands.

After a few months in Nashville, Sadler couldn’t afford an apartment, so his father paid most of his rent.

Despite his lack of funds, he got married to a teenager named Jeania he had known in Texas. He said he doesn’t remember the date of his wedding (probably in 1985 or 86, he said) or his divorce (sometime after the shooting). He declined to talk more about his ex-wife.

Sadler had been in Nashville about six months when he signed a deal with Evergreen Records and producer Johnny Morris. The independent label had produced some good singers like Narvel Felts and Robin Lee, who had some minor success.

Morris agreed to help Sadler make an album, and at the same time hired him to work 40 hours per week in the office as a promoter. Sadler made $200 per week ($5 per hour) to call radio stations and ask them to play Evergreen records.

The radio stations would call him back with their statistics — the number of Evergreen songs added to their playlists and number of times those songs played.

Sadler would then call Cash Box magazine to report those numbers.

Some industry insiders said a singer calling in his small label’s numbers was highly unethical.

“It don't make any sense. That's total corruption,” said Mark Carman, who became the Cash Box Director of Operations after Hughes died. “If the reporter …  that's like going and doing ballot harvesting for a vote. That don't make any sense. So that stinks to high heaven right there.”

For all the years (1985-1989) Sadler worked at Evergreen, Kevin Hughes worked compiling statistics for Cash Box. Even though he called Cash Box magazine every week for more than four years, Sadler said he didn’t know Hughes until the last several months Hughes was alive.

Dangerous job in country music

The day after the detectives interviewed Sadler in his hospital bed, Pridemore got a phone call from the homicide office of the Illinois State Police, where Master Sgt. Terry Raymer had received a tip from a woman named Marilyn Conwell.

“Victim sounded very depressed,” Pridemore wrote after a phone interview with Conwell. A music producer was trying to get Hughes fired from his position as chart director, Conwell explained. Hughes hadn’t named the producer, but “he thought he was about to lose his job.”

Cash Box chart director, as it turns out, was a life-threatening position.

In the early 1980s, Tim Stichnoth held the title until he died in a single car accident in 1982. Juanita Butler held the spot next.

Butler said she felt her life was threatened by a promoter named Ray Ruff, who told an associate of hers he would kill her if she didn’t include one of his artists on the chart.

“He said, ‘Don’t be surprised if your little Toyota blows up in your face someday when you go to turn it on,” Butler said. “And, you know, I have to say that I didn't really take that threat that seriously until Kevin Hughes was murdered. And then I realized, wow, that that could have been a legitimate threat.”

In the 1980s, there was a conga line of Cash Box chart directors.

Richard “Tony” D’Antonio held the position until he was fired on March 26, 1988. D’Antonio was replaced by Joe Henderson. Then Hughes replaced Henderson. 

Hughes’ name was finally listed on Nov. 19, 1988 as the Nashville coordinator for chart research.

He would be dead in less than four months.

READ PART 4:Murder on Music Row: Predatory promoters bilk Nashville's singing newcomers