Growing up in Richmond County, Jonathan Robinson was drawn to writing more than anything, but when he found guitar as a junior in high school, he began to pen a new story.

“I was kind of late to the music thing, but at like 16 or 17 I started playing guitar and just got obsessed.” 

He began to use that new tool, music, to accentuate what he wrote.

“I had this great English teacher, named Miss Martin, who, when we were doing poetry, would let me bring my guitar in. If I had a song, she’d let it count for points.”

After he graduated, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and though he went to pursue an English degree, he soon shifted to music as a career.

Robinson started playing regularly, building his skills, but the next chapter in his career began when he teamed up with a friend who was working to create outreach initiatives in Europe through a church plant. As a more modern, non-denominational church, the songs they wanted didn’t need to sound like traditional worship music, like hymns, so Robinson used his experience to find material.

“It was, ‘This thing is on my mind or heart’ – something I was struggling with there. I had to feel inspired, then I would write a song, you know? So it would always be personal to me,” he said.

“I probably wrote 30 or 40 songs, before it was all said and done, that they were using in some of those churches.”

Experience is one of the best teachers, and Robinson continued to learn. But growth only comes from pushing into new territory. He discovered the Nashville Songwriters Association International.

“When I started really sending my work to the guys in Nashville, and they were like, ‘Oh, this is okay,’ that was when I thought, ‘Maybe I can write songs.’”

While he was working and writing songs for the church, he continued to hone his songwriting skills through the NSAI. The organization gave him opportunities to travel to Nashville working on songwriting and playing in writers’ rounds shows.

“By 2010, I was going about once a month to Nashville to write and go to those inner-city meetings.”

His work garnered attention, and he was offered a more intensive experience. Major Bob Music, a production company out of Nashville, invited him to take part in a four-month songwriting program.

“They would take like 12 writers a year and invite them to Nashville. Then for four or five months you’d meet every Tuesday night with the vice president of that publishing company, and whoever he brought in, and just write new songs. And they would kind of tear ‘em apart. Sometimes they’d give you single song deals or stuff like that.

“I went to Nashville thinking I was going to stay for those four or five months, and I just never left.”

The next page of the story really began about ten years before, when he married his wife, Kristi, a few years after he moved to Charleston. The owner of the store she managed had a connection to a Nashville songwriting powerhouse, named George Teren. She was able to coordinate a dinner during one of those early trips Robinson took to Nashville, and Teren became a resource for Robinson. As an experienced Nashville songwriter, Teren gave him insight into songwriting on a professional level and the music industry as a whole.

“(For the church) you’re sort of writing thinking, ‘Okay, people are going to sing this with you.’
(For Nashville) you don’t have to think about that at all – just tell a good story that makes sense, that has a hook, that gets in people’s heads.”

Robinson quickly learned that to be a writer in Nashville, to make a living on that side of the industry, songs couldn’t come solely from the inspiration that guided his hand before. He developed discipline and mechanisms to build his skills in the craft of songwriting.

He went to Nashville to pursue his love of writing. That he loved playing guitar was more an advantage than an integral part of his career. He was still playing writers’ rounds and writers’ nights around the city, sometimes  3 each night.

“You could do that seven days a week there, if you wanted to,” he said.

“But a lot of the writers in Nashville were not necessarily great musicians. They’re writers, and traditionally that was very separated, but I was a good guitar player.”

Because of that, his colleagues would invite him to play their music on writers’ nights or play on a demo track for one of their songs.

“I thought I was going to just write, I thought I was going to write songs. I went into that world trying to get a position as staff writer at a publishing company, but everything was changing.”

Streaming services were beginning to shift the market, and publishers were assessing their signing strategies. Robinson began to examine his own strategy.

George Teren tipped the scales with a prediction that playing live would give more opportunities than one could find exclusively as a writer, so Robinson started going for gigs downtown. The tools he developed as a writer, came in handy.

“I wasn’t a country player really at all, but I would just start making lists of the songs I was hearing over and over again, then I would go home to my little tiny apartment and I would learn them. Before long I was sitting in downtown. I started getting called for gigs, and then that turned into full time.

One of those first calls set the stage for another chapter in Robinson’s journey. People would tell him ‘don’t say no to gigs,’ so he was playing whenever he could, and one day Clay Wieczorek, a touring musician, reached out. He had three gigs in Georgia, and Robinson’s name came up as a replacement guitarist.

“I knew who he was, and I knew that some of the guys in his band played for Martina McBride and Alison Krauss. He had really good guys who typically played with him.

“So I said, ‘Yes.’ Then he sent me a master list of 70-something songs, and he said, ‘Man, I don’t know which ones we’ll do.’

“Painful,” Robinson said, shaking his head. “I ate and slept and breathed those songs for the next three days. I went to Georgia, played all three shows with him, and have played a ton of shows with him since.”

That gave Robinson the outline for his next steps. He was touring with bands, playing in Nashville and writing, sharpening his skills and growing as a musician.

Eventually he was touring with Dexter Roberts, who was on American Idol and placed second on The Voice. It was a good gig, until it wasn’t.

“We had been doing these big festivals, and I’d been doing radio tours with him. He had a song on the charts, all that kind of good stuff.

“And then the guy who was running his label went to jail for embezzlement and tax fraud.”

Robinson took that as an opportunity to step back. He felt like he needed a break, and maybe more importantly, his wife was pregnant with their second child. They moved back to Hamlet, in Richmond County, with the intention of regrouping and heading back to music city. But the appeal of small-town life can be unparalleled. His family loved it, and he found he missed it.

He was still getting calls from Tennessee to go on tour, and began playing on the weekends for Alan Craig Miller, which he did for about a year. Driving to Nashville for the weekend when the band was on tour and then driving back home.

Building on the experience and techniques he’d developed from his time in Nashville, he set pen to paper, but through rediscovered flexibility after moving back, these lines were for him.

Over the next year, back and forth between Tennessee and North Carolina, he released a new EP, and something clarified for Robinson.

“I thought, ‘You know what? I can just make whatever music I want.’ It doesn’t have to be for anybody. I’m not trying to get anybody else to record it. It’s just for me to do, you know? If I want it to sound like Allman Brothers, or if I want it to be some weird mix of like 90s rock and southern rock and blues, it can be that.”
He began to refine his style, and, as he did that, made another connection that expanded his story. He met Baxter Clement, co-owner of Casino Guitars in Southern Pines.

That began a new routine that he’s held in recent years of touring, writing and teaching a few days a week at Casino Guitars. He’s also a regular face on the shop’s YouTube channel. He echoes what any one of the musicians working at Casino will say, including Clement.

“Casino, for me, is this great little community that feels like family, like everybody’s sort of invested in each other’s art.”

In Robinson’s case, that means their support recording new material.

“I feel like a lot of this year has just been getting my brain around what are the right songs? How do we record it? But I think we’re – I’m getting down to pretty much ready to just do it. I think all the work has been done on the front end, so now that should be relatively simple.”

He is looking, now, to open the next chapter. He plans to release an album in 2025, but he also wants to expand his on-stage footprint.

“I really do think that there’s a place to step up to the next level. Original stuff and slightly bigger venues, maybe more ticketed shows, but we’ll obviously have to spread out for that, because you can’t do that in the same spot over and over again.”

Most of that touring is done as The Jonathan Robinson Band, but he’ll still play for friends he’s made over the years. Next weekend, Sept. 28, he’s heading to west Tennessee with Robbie Cummings to play a show with David Crowder and Rhett Walker.

This Sunday, Sept. 22, at the Sunrise Theater, he’ll be playing another songwriters’ round. This time with Jordan Foley and Kyle Keller.

Touring, releasing a new album, working in Southern Pines a few days a week, Robinson said he does it with support.

“I’ve been married to my wife for 21.5 years. We have two kids, but we were married for 11 years before we had kids. So I’m fortunate that she’s been there from the beginning. It wasn’t like she came in and I had this weird life of saying yes to these things and leaving. We were together through the whole journey, and then had kids through it. I’ve been lucky.

“My wife would say, ‘Oh, yeah, you have to say yes, you have to go do that.’ You know, it’s a month here or a week here or whatever. Anybody has to figure out for themselves if that’s what they want to do, then say, ‘Yes.’ Hopefully they have people that support them and say, ‘Oh yeah, you can do it.’”

See more of what he does on his website.