Fans of country music may have heard the recently released song by the group McBride and the Ride entitled “Marlboros and Avon.” The nostalgic track is off the band’s EP release of the same title that will appear later this spring and was released as the first single from the album on Jan. 5. 

The song has a strong Co-op connection in that it was written by two friends — Mark Harris and Bill Vaughn — who are former Tennessee Farmers Cooperative (TFC) employees. Mark worked for Rutherford Farmers Cooperative in Murfreesboro and Eagleville, as well as Bedford Moore Farmers Cooperative in Shelbyville before coming to TFC, where he worked from 1991 to 1996 in the Home Lawn Specialty Department. Bill began his Co-op career at Rutherford Farmers Cooperative in Eagleville before joining TFC in the Hardware Department in 2006 and later moving to the Crop Nutrients Department. He retired in July 2020 and is now working at the Eagleville location again. 

Mark and Bill’s friendship started long before their mutual employment at TFC. They began playing music and writing songs together in the early 1990s. Mark left TFC in March 2014 and moved back to Texas where he bought a local farm supply store. He is now a regional sales representative for Merck, servicing parts of Texas and New Mexico. The pair have retained their collaboration and friendship despite the distance between them.

“We stayed in touch via phone calls with advances in technology like iPhones, FaceTime, and Zoom meetings,” says Bill. “I could be here in Eagleville while he’s in Roby, Texas, and we talk, play, and write together, though we are a thousand miles apart.”

“Marlboros and Avon” was cowritten via those collaborative methods, but was conceived while Mark was attending a concert featuring the 1970s pop band, Three Dog Night. One of Mark’s friends, noting the older crowd at the event, jokingly remarked that the place smelled like Marlboros and Avon. As a writer, Mark latched on to the phrase and shared it with Bill. In their songwriting discussions over the years, they had discussed the phenomenon of how an aroma can sometimes trigger a memory.

“The smell of your grandma’s biscuits baking or of coffee in the morning can take you back to a certain place or time,” says Bill. “I thought the idea was great. I had never heard a song about that.”

 Together, the pair refined the rest of the lyrics to the song, and Bill says it seems to appeal to those who are nostalgic for simpler times, no matter when they grew up.

The songwriters have written several songs together and “click” because of their similar backgrounds, says Bill, noting that he has written a few hundred songs in search of something that might be a hit. Mark has had some success, too, having co-written the song “Boots,” which was recorded by Joey + Rory in 2008.

“When Mark and I were playing together in the ‘90s, we didn’t have a record deal or anything, but we were getting pretty good,” recalls Bill. “We had some [music industry] management people interested in us. If we had signed on with them, we would have been traveling across the country to fairs, rodeos, and so forth. I realized I would be gone two or three hundred days a year, and I just couldn’t do it. My wife would have been home alone with three kids. I said, ‘Well, I’ll just write songs. How hard can that be?’ So, it was exciting to hear this song played at the Grand Ole Opry [on December 30], even if it took 35 years to get there.”