Bill Anderson he may not be loud and flashy, but he has quietly written some of the greatest songs in country music, including "Po' Folks" and "Tip of My Fingers." Connie Smith, Hank Locklin, Porter Wagoner and Jim Reeves all recorded his songs. This gentle gentleman from Columbia, S.C. is also a fine singer, and his most recent CD release draws upon the bluegrass influences of his youth.

"Whisperin' Bluegrass" is evenly divided between secular and sacred songs. The first half is filled with sinful tunes about drinking, cheating and dying, whereas the second part could easily fit into a Sunday morning church service.

"That was the idea of Steve Ivey, who owns the record label and who co-produced the record," explains Anderson, who also just won a Country Music Association Award for helping write "Give It Away," a hit for George Strait. He also was nominated for a Grammy for the song.

"We both go back to the days when acoustical music – they called it hillbilly music before they came up with the name bluegrass – when there was so little distinction between secular and gospel songs. Everybody – Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Don Reno Red Smiley, all the great bluegrass groups – always included gospel music as a part of what they did."

"Whether they were doing a concert or a television show or even some of their recordings – there'd be secular songs, and then there'd be a bluegrass gospel song or at least a song with a positive message or something to it included in there."

"So, it just always kind of seemed to me and to Steve - who grew up in the same part of the country that I did, although a few years later - that it wasn't that much of a stretch to do that; so many of the people that like bluegrass music also like the gospel music, so it seemed like a natural fit. I don't know how well it transitions from ‘The Lord Knows I'm Drinking' to ‘He's got the Whole World in His Hands,' but we tried," Anderson chuckles.

When you look over the album artwork for "Whisperin' Bluegrass," all you see are photos of Anderson next to his guests Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Vince Gill.

And in each every picture, Anderson is the perfect picture of a country gentleman. With his welcoming smile and friendly eyes, it's much easier to associate this kindly looking man with the album-closing church hymns, than with the "Cold Hard Facts of Life" (to borrow one of the song titles) explored at the disc's start.

"Going all the way back to the beginning of my songwriting career, when I was 19 years old, I wrote a song called ‘City Lights,' which talked about the bright array of city lights and a glass of sherry wine and ‘(Lights that offer other girls) for empty hearts like mine,'" Anderson says. He song went number one for both Ray Price and Mickey Gilley.

"I didn't have any idea what I was writing about. I just had a great imagination. I'd never been in a honky tonk in my life. The first honky tonk I ever went into, I was booked there. My dad told me when I wrote ‘City Lights,' he said, ‘I should have known that if you could sit up there in a little town of Commerce, Ga., on the top of a three-story building and conjure up the bright array of city lights and honky tonks and all that stuff, you had the imagination to become a songwriter'. So, I guess you don't have to have lived every song you've written. In fact, if I'd lived every song I'd written, I'd be 400 years old."

There was that vivid imagination, of course, and also a healthy diet of country music listening.

"I never listened to anything else growing up and also when I got to Nashville," he recalls. "It's really kind of ironic because my musical tastes are really rather broad. I like a lot of different kinds of music and all, but I never sat down and listened too much of anything else other than country music. I might accidentally hear something and say, ‘Hey, that's pretty good, I like that.' But I never would necessarily go out of my way to listen to anything else. So, the country thing is just so ingrained in me that I guess it's just a big part of who I am."

One of the new disc's central songs is "I've Got a Thing about a Five String," where Anderson praises the banjo's unique aural beauty. He loves the sound of it, even though he's never mastered playing the instrument himself.

"The guy who plays banjo in my band let me carry his up the steps one time at the Opry," Anderson recalls. "That's as close as I've come, and it's probably about as close as I should come. I'm afraid a banjo in my hands would be some kind of weapon that you wouldn't want to see or hear. I grew up listening to a banjo player named Snuffy Jenkins, and I was so impressed with that kind music. I got to thinking back about that time, and that's when I came up with the idea to write ‘I Got a Thing about a Five String' because I've always enjoyed five string banjo music. But as far as playing myself, no thanks."

An older Anderson song on the album, "The Cold Hard Facts of Life," was also a hit for the late Porter Wagoner.

"I went to see Porter in the hospital on Sunday before he passed away the next weekend (in October)," Anderson remembers. "And a lot of people had been there, but they left. And I had about an hour to just sit and talk with Porter, and it was a wonderful hour. I wouldn't take anything in the world for it. And I told him at that point - he was laying up there in the bed, he was fully lucid and knew everything that was going on – I said, ‘I just recorded a bluegrass album, and I cut a bluegrass version of ‘The Cold Hard Facts Of Life.' And he broke into this big grin, I mean, it was like he was gonna laugh. He said, ‘Oh man, I can't wait to hear that. I never really thought about it, but that would make a really good bluegrass song.' And I said, ‘Yeah, several people die in there (in the song), and you've got to have people dying in bluegrass songs.' And he just laughed, and we had a big laugh over that. And I will remember that forever."

If you know anything about Wagoner's music, you're well aware how plenty of people die or at the very least go crazy in his songs. It almost seems as though Anderson wrote "The Cold Hard Facts Of Life" especially for Wagoner. But, surprisingly, such is not the case.

"I never have written very much for any particular artist," Anderson clarifies. "I've always just tried to find a song and then let it find its home. A few times, when I've written with artists, maybe we'll try to write something specifically for them. But most the time, I just try to write a song, get the most out of it that I can and then see who it sounds like when I get finished. And take it to that person."

One of Anderson's best ever songs is "Whiskey Lullaby," a huge hit for Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss. It does not appear on his new recording, but the story behind it gives great insight into the evolution of a great song.

"Jon Randall (the song's co-writer) had been going through a rough time in his life," Anderson begins. "I had run into Jon about three weeks or so before our writing date – we already had the date on the books. I ran into him one day in the parking lot at a publishing company over on Music Row."

"And I just said, ‘Hey Jon, how are you doing?"' He said it hadn't been a real good day. He said, ‘Today alone, I have lost my publishing deal, my writing deal, I have lost my recording contract, and I just found out my wife has filed for divorce.' Then he looked at his watch and he said, ‘And it's only 2:30.' He laughed. And I laughed. Good gosh, it was almost funny. It would be funny if it weren't so sad."

"Jon and I got together about three weeks after that," Anderson continues. "And I came to find out that after he left the parking lot that day, he went to a friend's house and proceeded to pretty much get out of it for a couple of weeks. He just kind of drank himself into oblivion and slept on his friend's couch. When the whole thing was over, after a couple of weeks, he decided he needed to get his back act together, straighten up and face reality. He told his friend how sorry he was for everything that he had done. And (his friend) said, ‘That's all right Jon, I've put the bottle to my head and pulled the trigger a few times.' So Jon made note of that line, as a good songwriter will do; you don't let a line like that get away."

"When Jon and I got together to write, as happens a lot with co-writing sessions, you say to each other, ‘Well, have you got an idea?' So, Jon says to me that day, ‘So, have you got an idea?' And I said, ‘Yeah, I've been toying with a phrase that I like. It's kind of an imagery thing. I've been wanting to write a song called ‘Midnight Cigarette.' The idea would be a love went out or faded out or one person put it out like the burning end of a midnight cigarette. That just paints a really vivid picture to me.' And he said, ‘Boy, I love that!' We wrote down: ‘She put him out like the burning end of a midnight cigarette.' And then he turned to me and said, ‘I've got a line that's kind of been on my mind.' He picked up his guitar, and he said, ‘He put the bottle to his head and pulled the trigger.' And as soon as he said that, I said, ‘Well, let's just forget about the midnight cigarette idea; let's write your idea. So the way it turned out, we blended them together. The ‘midnight cigarette' is in the opening line of ‘Whiskey Lullaby.' Then we just kind of went from there."

You might assume these two knew right away they'd created magic. But bells and whistles don't always sound every time a wonderful song is penned.

"You know, you don't ever know whether you've got something great or not," Anderson admits. "You don't know if you've got something commercial or not. The only thing you know when you've finished writing a song, is whether you've gotten everything out of that idea that was in there to get out - if you've extracted everything that was to be extracted from it. And I really thought that we had done that. I almost had to twist Jon's arm to get him to come in and do a demo. I said, ‘Jon this song is really something special. We need to put it down and make a good demo on it.' He wasn't as excited about doing that as I was."

"'We've got to do this. This song is too good to not show it to somebody'," I urged. So, he came in one night, late one night, and we did a demo. And the song sat around for about three and a half years. The Dixie Chicks had it on hold for a short while."

"And then everything blew up on them. We knew it wasn't the kind of song that everybody was gonna rush to beat down the doors to record because it was a sad song; it was a double suicide drinking song. It kind of went against the grain of everything that was going on in country music at that time. And we knew it was going to take a very special record. It was going to take a very special performance and a very special artist to make it work."

"During the time that the Dixie Chicks had it on hold, Brad Paisley heard it. In fact, I was there the day he heard it. And he said, "If they don't record it, you let me know. I want to put a secondary hold on it.' And that's what we did. And when everything kind of blew up with the Dixie Chicks I said, ‘Brad, you remember that song ‘Whiskey Lullaby'? He said, ‘Oh yeah.' Then, he and his manager, Frank Rogers, came up with the idea of making it a duet because we did not write the song as a duet at all."

More recently, George Strait had his 51st number one hit with Anderson’s co-write on “Give It Way,” which is nominated for Best Country Song at this year’s Grammy program. Anderson collaborated with Buddy Cannon and Jamey Johnson on the track, and - according to a recent interview with Cannon in The Tennessean - Johnson was so depressed about his impending divorce he no longer wanted any of the material belongings he shared with his soon-to-be ex-wife. This led to the song's lyrical focus on giving all that stuff away.

So, how does this latest big hit rank among Anderson's many chart accomplishments? "I'm not sure how a writer goes about 'ranking' his hit songs, but this one was named both the ACM and the CMA Song of The Year for 2007 and it's up for a Grammy Award in February," Anderson comments via email. "I think the public ranked it pretty well, and that's what matters to me."

Bill Anderson, who is as quiet a man as his "Whisperin'" nickname implies, is living proof that the pen is, indeed, sometimes mightier than the sword.. Because behind that friendly face and soft voice is a sharp songwriter's mind. Now with "Whisperin' Bluegrass," Anderson shows us that his insightful honky-tonk songs and gospel favorites also fit the bluegrass style.