UMG Nashville Launches Sing Me Back Home Productions

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Cindy Mabe and Dawn Gates

Universal Music Group Nashville has started a new TV and film production company, Sing Me Back Home Productions. The company will emphasize storytelling through music integration of UMG Nashville’s roster of past and present artists.

The new division will be helmed by UMG Nashville Chair & CEO Cindy Mabe and SVP of Digital Business and Creative Development Dawn Gates. This new division will develop a content slate for a variety of documentaries, original scripted and unscripted television, feature films and short form content, and will be heavily involved in securing production partners, music supervision and distribution.

“Country music has always been the home of the richest storytellers in music. Storytellers like Merle Haggard, whose song ‘Sing Me Back Home’ helped frame the intent and name behind our production company,” says Mabe. “Songs and stories can transport people and literally sing them back home no matter where they are in the world. Creating a new canvas for our storytellers to paint was a natural next step for our artists to talk to their fans in a new way.

“With several productions underway, this new endeavor fits prominently into what we are sustaining and building as a music company: roots, legacy, music discovery, and storytelling. We are finding faith, family, and heartland are at the core of our business and we are making sure we are building generational content for different mediums across a variety of platforms and shepherding it into the homes of our audience.”

Sing Me Back Home Productions has partnered with ITV America’s Thinkfactory to develop and produce a new docuseries that will follow Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter, the Grammy-nominated husband-and-wife duo The War And Treaty. Thinkfactory’s CEO Adam Reed will follow the couple to show how they work together to navigate their careers and home-life. The War And Treaty docuseries, which is already in the works with a broadcast partner, is the first among many projects in development via Sing Me Back Home Productions’ broader collaboration with Thinkfactory Media.

“Country music and its community of artists, past and present, offer such a vast and rich world to explore for content,” shares Reed. “As Thinkfactory doubles down on work rooted in the Heartland, we’re incredibly bullish on the projects we’re developing with Sing Me Back Home, and we admire what Cindy and her group are building at a time when the genre and its hitmakers are flying higher than ever.”

Coming up for the company will also be the release of documentary Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive via partnership with Storyville Entertainment. Emmy-nominated Betsy Schechter produced the film which follows the journey of music icon Gloria Gaynor. The documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and was the official opening night film at the Nashville Film Festival, where it also won the Audience Award. The film also won the Best Feature Documentary Award at La Femme Women’s International Film Festival in Los Angeles and most recently won The Palm Springs International Film Festival audience award “Best Of Fest.”

“We are thrilled to have the expertise of Cindy, Dawn, and the Sing Me Back Home team to partner on producing Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive,” shares Schechter. “Just like her iconic song ‘I Will Survive,’ Gloria’s life is equally inspirational and this film has the power to impact audiences around the world for years to come.”

Madison Hahnen
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