In the early 1970s, Ron Simpson and his business partner were walking back from a meeting in downtown Salt Lake City. As they paused at a streetlight, they noticed that on one side a man was whistling the tune to one of their songs. On their other side, a man was singing some of their song lyrics.

If you're a musician whose goal is to connect with people, says Simpson, it doesn't get much better than that.

Simpson has spent his career making musical connections in just that way — as a musician, songwriter, producer, promoter and teacher. At the 2006 Pearl Awards, he was honored for those accomplishments with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Faith Centered Music Association.

His foray into the music world began when Simpson was growing up in Southern California in the late 1950s. "It was a heady place to be. I got to see people involved in the emerging world of rock 'n' roll music at a close range."

Simpson started out playing the trumpet, then later switched to fretted instruments. In high school, he was a singing partner and bandmate with Joan Baez.

He later shared a guitar-teaching studio with Jerry Garcia, who had just started the Warlock band that would evolve into the Grateful Dead. "I had the mornings, and he had the afternoons."

That was at Dana Morgan's music store in Palo Alto, "and it was a magnet for early rock-and-roll folks."

Simpson got his first "star-level" job playing bass for June Christy at the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite. He studied musical theater at Stanford University and later at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, where he met his wife, Maisa, a fellow student.

Along the way, he also composed and arranged music for Liberace, the Mills Brothers and Roy Clark.

So, "when I arrived in Utah with all this background, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. At a very young age, I understood the models of the music business — what was publishing, what was selling. And I had invented in my mind a series of companies to do that."

Simpson started out in Salt Lake City in a home office in 1968. By 1969, he had moved to a suite in the McIntyre Building on Main Street. "Then I moved into a suite in the home of Ken Sansom. He had been a big name in local circles at that time, and it felt to me like the torch was being passed to a new generation."

Simpson and his partner, Dennis Nichols, founded the Sound Column. Simpson bought out Nichols in 1976 and then added Clive Romney as a partner. Their band played at events and business gatherings, and they were hired by the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce to do promotions, and they began to do radio and TV commercials and corporate themes. "Corporate music was more of a fine art than it is now," he says.