First things first for Lari White

Lari White is working her way down her career checklist.

"I'm trying to check them all off, slowly but surely," says the 40-year-old jill-of-all-trades. Make records for a major label? Check -- with a handful of top-40 country hits in the mid-'90s. Appear in a blockbuster movie? Check -- that would be the Tom Hanks film Cast Away. Go to Broadway? Check -- she now performs in Ring of Fire, the jukebox musical based on the songs of Johnny Cash.

So where does becoming the first female producer of a male country-music superstar fit on that list?

"That's right up there in the top five," White says, grinning.

White checked that off her list this week with the release of Toby Keith's White Trash with Money. The album's first single, Get Drunk and Be Somebody, already is a top-5 country hit.

Though the music industry's top female stars, such as Madonna, Beyonce and Sheryl Crow, often receive co-production credits for their own albums, few women ever take the step to producing other acts. It's practically unheard of for a multiplatinum male artist to bring a female producer aboard midcareer.

But Keith, who recently launched his own label, has made a career of confounding expectations.

"I had heard Lari's Green Eyed Soul album that she did herself," Keith says. "It's one of the best albums I've ever heard. Her being a friend, I didn't want to commit to nothing. I just said, 'Let's do a few demos, but bring the A-guys in. If we like something, we'll kick the scale up and go with masters.'

"About four songs in, it was so good, I knew I wasn't going to back out. I just said, 'Master that last song and send it to radio right now, and let's finish the album.'"

Keith and White cut tracks at The Holler, the studio that White and her husband, songwriter Chuck Cannon, built at their home west of Nashville. Since White had majored in audio engineering at the University of Miami, she handled most of the technical details.

"I'd be cross-eyed in front of the computer at 3 o'clock in the morning, doing edits," she says.

Keith's testosterone-charged persona caused news of the collaboration to raise eyebrows throughout the country-music industry, but the entertainers' careers have crossed paths often.

Music history repeats

White has a songwriting credit on one of Keith's early albums; they recorded a duet for one of hers. White's husband co-wrote several of Keith's hits, including How Do You Like Me Now?!

"Toby knew it would be a cool thing if it worked," White says. "If we made a (great) record, that would be much cooler than him getting the hot producer of the moment, which inevitably would have been a guy."

Keith says he didn't realize how unusual their collaboration was when they began recording. "We were about halfway through the project when I went, 'Lari, what other girls are producing?' We couldn't come up with one."

There aren't many. This demanding job -- which parallels the comprehensive supervisory duties of a film director, and can involve everything from choosing songs and musicians to supervising recording sessions and editing the results -- is historically a male province.

According to Terri Winston, founder and executive director of the San Francisco-based Women's Audio Mission, women make up less than 5% of the workforce in recording technology.

Historians often point to Bonnie Guitar, who produced The Fleetwoods' 1959 hits Come Softly to Me and Mr. Blue, as the rock era's first successful female producer. During the '60s, Ellie Greenwich and husband Jeff Barry produced hits for Neil Diamond and the Dixie Cups.

Sylvia Robinson co-founded Sugar Hill Records in the '70s and produced pioneering hip-hop records such as Rapper's Delight.

"In Nashville, I look to people like Gail Davies and Wendy Waldman," White says. "Gail did her own records. Wendy did Suzy Bogguss, New Grass Revival and the Forester Sisters. I have reference points."

Winston says she believes young women may avoid the recording arts because of the way they're socialized with technology.

"Production requires you to be in a studio environment that looks like the inside of an airplane. That's been intimidating. If we make women more comfortable with technology, I think you would see more women in a producer role."

Rising through the ranks

Women with success stories often have come from entrepreneurial environments. Guitar and Robinson co-owned the labels that released their records. Keith just broke away from a major label to form his own Show Dog Records.

"It's hard to rise through the ranks," says Guitar, 83. "I made my own rules with Come Softly to Me. And when you have a Toby Keith, you know how much input he has. In show business, where you are and who you're working with can make all the difference."

You'd think there'd be more female producers, at least in country music. According to Arbitron, 56% of country's radio audience is female, and the percentage of music buyers is at least that high.

"I didn't premeditate this and say, 'Hey, I want to go out and get a female producer, so I can sell to the female audience,'" Keith says. "I'm already doing that."

Keith likes having a different set of ears around when he's recording, however.

"Lari's very jaded with the industry, and it takes a lot to impress her," Keith says. "So if I come out of the studio after singing a scratch vocal, and she's sitting there, shaking her head, going, 'That is so sexy,' then you've got to think that, somewhere, there are other women who are going to go, 'That is so sexy.' You know what I mean? I'm never going to look over at a guy producer and hear him say that."

White says, "My take on it is he just wants to get on Oprah. He wants to get on Oprah, he needs a chick producer. So he calls me.

"Lucky for (him), I know what I'm doing."

The changes White brings to Keith's sound aren't dramatic.

"I wanted to hear Toby a little more raw, a little more acoustic, a little more rootsy," she says.

She prominently featured a National slide guitar throughout the album and brought in real horns where Keith previously had used samples. For three songs, including next single A Little Too Late, she hired Argentine string arranger George del Barrio, who had previously written arrangements for Michael Jackson, Shelby Lynne and Five for Fighting.

"When we finished recording the strings for Can't Buy You Money, I ran into the studio, threw my arms around George and gave him a big kiss," she says. "The entire orchestra fell out of their chairs, laughing. They were like, 'Well, we've never seen a producer do that before.'"

While Ring of Fire has White in New York for the foreseeable future, Keith already has recommended her to other acts signed to his label. White hopes that having a Toby Keith credit under her belt will bring more production offers when her Broadway stint is over.

She also hopes her success can open doors for other women she knows who have been honing their production chops in their own home studios.

"I really hope that we grow as a group, as a community, to include more women producers," she says. "The talent is there, the ability, the competence, the professionalism, the experience. It takes an ice-breaker, and it typically has to be outside the corporate mentality."

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