David Ray Skinner

David Ray Skinner was born and raised in Nashville, and he developed an interest in both art and music at an early age. He played in several garage bands in the mid-’60s and later appeared on local Nashville TV shows performing original songs. His Christmas song, “He Slept On” was published by Broadman (publishers of the Baptist Hymnal), when he was a high school senior.

In the early ’70s, Skinner attended Carson-Newman, a small Baptist college in East Tennessee, where he studied art and journalism. His junior and senior years, he served as editor-in-chief of the college’s newspaper, The Orange and Blue and won two Southeastern College Newspaper Competition awards his senior year. In addition to his cartoons for CN’s paper, he also drew editorial cartoons for the Morristown Citizen-Tribune, an East Tennessee daily newspaper. As a summer job during college, Skinner drew caricatures for Opryland, USA; this would prove to be an invaluable experience that would help him with his later cartoons.

After graduating cum laude from Carson-Newman in 1974, Skinner served as writer, reporter, and artist for The Sevier County Times, a weekly paper in the Smoky Mountains. At night and on weekends, he wrote music and played guitar and banjo for a variety of bluegrass bands that played in the clubs in and around Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

The mid-’70s found Skinner back in Nashville, writing and recording songs and freelancing at various ad agencies. However in 1977, his love for art, design and music landed him in New York City, where he became the cartoonist and paste-up artist, and, eventually, the Art Director, for the now-defunct international music trade magazine, Record World. During his tenure at RW, he did custom illustrations and caricatures for such notables as Elton John, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Led Zeppelin, Kenny Rogers and Billy Joel.

After five years at Record World, Skinner went to work for Doubleday, art directing their prestigious Literary Guild Magazine. At Doubleday, he created marketing treatments for books by writers such as James Michener, Bob Woodward, Peter Maas, Stephen King, and celebrities such as Candice Bergen, Dinah Shore and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

In 1984, Skinner moved back south, this time to Atlanta. Here, he co-founded a print, design and advertising agency called Indelible Inc. One of Indelible’s first big advertising clients was Glock firearms, and he created their first major advertising and marketing campaigns. In the early 90’s, Skinner also became involved in various music projects, including Johnny Cash’s gospel video and CD, Return to the Promised Land, for which he designed the logo and co-wrote the title track with Cash and Cash’s manager, Hugh Waddell. He also renewed a lifelong interest in Civil War General John Hunt Morgan and began writing songs, which eventually took the form of a concept album. The album, John Hunt Morgan: A Southern Legend, was a novel-in-music circle of songs (beginning and ending with Morgan’s death) and ranged in musical styles from folk and bluegrass to rock and gospel. In 1997, it was nominated for Gettysburg College’s famed Lincoln Prize, an award given annually to a literary work focusing on the American Civil War. Skinner’s next musical project, Jolly Roger Tailgunner, chronicled his father’s experiences in World War II as a tail gunner for The Jolly Rogers, a heavy bomb group stationed in the South Pacific.

In the mid-’90s, Indelible Inc. was bought out by SFI, a Norfolk, Virginia printing and fulfillment company, and Skinner was promoted to manager of their Creative Services department. He continued to expand the creative department until 2005, when he set out on his own.

Since 2001, he has produced an online literary magazine called SouthernReader.com. He has also continued to do advertising, marketing, illustration and design for a number of clients, including Home Depot, Target, Glock, HanesBrands and Citibank, as well as colleges such as Bluefield College, Truett-McConnell, GBCN at Mercer University and his alma mater, Carson-Newman. His recent projects include the creation and design of a bobblehead character, Mr. Extreme, for Travel Centers of America; the concept and illustration of an 20-foot, 3-dimensional bronze bas-relief for the University of West Georgia’s new football stadium; a barbecue sauce radio jingle that ran on the Grand Ole Opry for several months; and a watercolor painting commissioned for Justice Clarence Thomas, which now hangs in his office at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

In November 2022, Skinner was awarded 2022 Carson-Newman Triumph Award in the field of Arts and Social Sciences by his alma mater.