Broadcasting
Harris began her broadcasting career in Minneapolis as a high school student, working behind the scenes at WLOL and on-air at KTCR-FM.
With the online expansion of the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Stacy Harris has contributed an entry on Harlan Howard that now appears online with her entries on Brenda Lee and Carl Perkins, previously available from the publisher only in hardback. Harris' writing is not limited to consumer and general interest publications. In 1999, she was published in Volume 2 of Southern Jewish History, the Southern Jewish Historical Society's academic journal. Her scholarly work was titled "Kosher Country: Success and Survival on Nashville's Music Row".
Her byline has appeared in such entertainment trade and special interest publications as Billboard, Cash Box, Record World, Music Row, Performance, Amusement Business, CMA Close Up, Goldmine, Satellite Business and Business Week. A former editor of Country Song Roundup, Country Spirit, Spotlight on Country, Trading Posts, Prairie Country News, and the Upper Midwest Country & Western News-Scene magazines, Harris' byline has also appeared in scores of magazines. As a newspaper columnist, Ms. Harris' byline has appeared in The Tennessean ("Nashville Eye") and the Nashville Banner ("Community Voices"). Her book reviews have appeared in both publications. Harris' work is also cited in Ryan Carlson Bernard's The Rise and Fall of the Hillbilly Music Genre: A History, 1922—1939.
Harris has covered the Music City, USA entertainment scene as a Nashville-based stringer for Newsweek and as a domestic stringer (with Secret Service clearance) for the ABC Radio Network and its affiliates.
Acting
Harris' movie, TV-movie, and stage acting credits include Two Weeks (starring Sally Field), Hank Williams: The Man and His Music, Against the Wall, The Cradle Will Fall, Children of the Winner, Country Gold, The Concrete Cowboys, and the annual SPJ Gridiron Show.
In November 2009, Harris completed filming her role in Angry Monkey Productions' A Pure Country Gift, starring Katrina Elam, with a cameo appearance by George Strait. In February 2010, Harris completed filming her role as a paid extra in the Screen Gems production of Love Don't Let Me Down (since retitled Country Strong), starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw. The former is scheduled for release in 2010. The latter opens December 22.
Public relations
In addition, veteran Nashville area artist manager Tony Gottlieb, trustee of the late music arranger Lou Busch's estate and administrator trustee of Burning Bush Music, commissioned Ms. Harris to serve as a publicist and spokesperson for the estate, a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed December 4, 2007 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago against DDB Chicago and Capital One Financial for infringement of the world-famous work, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter from Camp)", created by Bush and comedian Allan Sherman.
In 2009, Harris assisted Pepsico with recovery from an in-house generated public relations disaster regarding one of the company's products, Mountain Dew, stemming from a February 12 preview of a Diane Sawyer documentary previewed on ABC News' Good Morning America.
Harris' quick action, consultation and recommendations resulted in Pepsico's ability to reposition itself prior to the February 13th telecast of the Sawyer special, titled A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains. Following broadcast of the hour-long investigation, Pepsico built on Harris' recommendations during the February 17th edition of the network's flagship, daily evening newscast World News (with Sawyer substituting for anchor Charles Gibson), next when Sawyer revisited the documentary, on the February 18th edition of Good Morning America and once again during the February 20, 2009 telecast of ABC News' 20/20.
Writing
Harris authored Comedians of Country Music, The Carter Family (children's books published by Lerner Publications), while doing the photo research for these and a series of eight other Lerner-published country music books for children.
Her published books include Classic Country (2005, hardcover); The Best of Country: The Essential CD Guide (1993, paperback); Comedians of Country Music (1978, hardcover); and The Carter Family (1978, hardcover); while her credits as a contributing author include entries in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (1998, hardcover), You Are So Nashville If... (1998, paperback) and chapters in Country Music Stars and the Supernatural (1979, paperback).
Harris' contributions have been acknowledged in books written by Steve Eng, Alanna Nash, Ivan Tribe, Eileen Sisk, Cliff Linedecker, Warren B. Causey, Tom C. Armstrong, Anne Fletcher, Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, Stephen Miller and Rick Marschall and by Adam Compton in The Texas State Historical Association's The Handbook of Texas Online.
Authors Karen Breen and Judith Silverman acknowledged Harris' children's books in the Index to Collective Biographies for Young Readers (1988) while author Hao Huang cited the body of Stacy Harris' work in Music in the 20th Century, Volume 2 (1999).
Ms. Harris' writing is not limited to consumer and general interest publications. In 1999, she was published in Volume 2 of Southern Jewish History, the Southern Jewish Historical Society's academic journal. Her scholarly work was titled "Kosher Country: Success and Survival on Nashville's Music Row".
A former publicist for several Grand Ole Opry stars, Harris did tour press for MCA, RCA and Con Brio Records. Mercury Records commissioned her to photograph "publicity shots" of its artists and to contribute liner notes. Ms. Harris wrote promotional material for Ron Cornelius' Gateway Entertainment and she supplied CBS Records with archival audio of interviews with its artists.
Ryan Carlson Bernard also cited Harris' work in the footnotes to The Rise and Fall of the Hillbilly Music Genre: A History, 1922—1939, a thesis presented to the faculty of East Tennessee State University's Department of Liberal Studies, "in partial fulfillment of the requirements" for obtaining a 2006 Master's Degree in Liberal Studies at ETSU.
