It happened back in 1998, when the late country star Chris LeDoux was playing at a (now also late) club called Tulsa City Limits. I was working as an entertainment writer for the Tulsa World at the time, there to review the show, when I fell into a conversation with another Tulsa entertainment guy, Robert Swain.
I knew that Swain, under the name PicKing, had been creating personalized guitar picks for several years, and that LeDoux was one of his clients. I also knew he had a lot of other nationally known performers who used his picks, and I wondered if the time was ripe for me to do a newspaper story on him and his business.
He dissuaded me, saying something like, “I’m just not sure yet whether or not it’s all going to work out.”
Well, here it is 2025. And, despite Swain’s misgivings, it’s all worked out incredibly well for the PicKing and his custom-imprinted guitar picks, with hundreds of thousands – probably millions – of them purchased and utilized over the years by the likes of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Jimmy Buffett, Randy Travis, Tim McGraw and many, many more – including a sitting United States president. (More about that shortly.)
For Swain, who now lives with his wife in a town outside of Nashville, the fact that he became a major supplier of customized picks to the stars remains a source of amazement.
“It’s one of those things where you just pinch yourself when you’re visiting with all these people, these legends,” he says. “As a kid growing up in Owasso, Oklahoma, rodeoing and listening to Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn on eight-track tapes, I never thought I would have a significant role in their stories.”
Before picks became his livelihood, Swain had a Tulsa-based business called BadgeMaker, which, he explains, “did name badges for the Tulsa Zoo, different banks in Tulsa, the Village Inn, Goldie’s Hamburgers – different restaurants. I had a pretty good-sized business, and I was still doing some name badges until 2016. So I worked both of them [BadgeMaker and PicKing] side by side for years.”
Swain had remained a country-music fan; he’d even seen a glimmer of success as a nascent songwriter. Looking around for ways to connect with the music business, he hit upon something that wasn’t “too far” from imprinting plastic name badges.
“The transition over [to picks] was pretty simple,” he explains, “except that, obviously, you were printing a much smaller item.”
Armed with this new idea, he approached Dell Davis, the director of Tulsa’s annual Bluegrass & Chili Festival, and offered to do some picks for the event at no cost to her.
“She was willing to accept the free gesture, and off I went,” he remembers. “I had no picks and had never tried to imprint one before. I contacted D’Andrea, one of the biggest pick manufacturers in the world, to see if they would sell me some blank guitar picks. I about choked when they said their minimum order was 432 picks. It wasn’t much money, but it was a lot of picks to me.
“When the picks arrived, I couldn’t get the box open fast enough. I was amazed at how well they imprinted. Dell let me hand them out backstage to the different artists and they were well-received.”
Davis, he adds, helped him in other ways, as well.
“Dell encouraged me to go with her and her husband to IBMA, the International Bluegrass Music Awards convention in Owensboro, Kentucky. I went with them and set up on the end of their table, where they were promoting the Chili Fest. And I had quite a bit of luck. Bluegrass performers hadn’t gotten into the world of personalized guitar picks, so it was kind of a new step for both of us.
“I started working with Rhonda Vincent, the Lonesome River Band, Jim & Jesse, different ones, and I started doing the picks for the IBMA and the things they had going on. Those were the early days.”
Bluegrass events and musicians remained his biggest clients for several years, and then, in 1997, he notes, “I stepped past my fear and went to the SRO [Standing Room Only] convention in Nashville.” A gathering of booking agents and artist managers, it netted him his “first bona fide country act: Janie Fricke.
“I was far from established,” he says, “but I was off and running.”
Emboldened by this experience, he returned to Nashville for the week-long Country Radio Seminar, which drew country artists and radio personalities from all over. At one point during the week, Swain found himself outside the Ryman Auditorium, home of the famed Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts.
“I walked up and laid my hands on that brick exterior, and I said to a friend, ‘If I ever get to do picks for the Grand Ole Opry, I’ll die.’ And the hair stood up on my arms.
“In 30 days, we were doing picks for the Grand Ole Opry.”
A couple of years later, another milestone in the PicKing story came along, involving one of the biggest acts ever to hit country music and his stage manager, Randall “Poodie” Locke. It was 1999, and Willie Nelson was playing Tulsa’s (now-renamed) Brady Theater.
“That’s when I first met and hooked up with Willie, out there in the parking lot,” Swain recalls. “I went and knocked on the door of their bus, and that’s when I met Poodie. And Poodie immediately started promoting me to everyone he knew.”
It was a business and personal relationship that continued until Locke’s 2009 death.
“Willie was going through 20,000 picks a year,” notes Swain, “so in that 10-year period between 1999 and 2009, I did 110,000 guitar picks for Willie. Poodie would call up and order 10 gross [1,440] – or, as he’d say, ‘I need ten more grosses of picks.’”
As you might imagine, Swain has a story for just about every pick he’s ever produced. One he particularly likes to tell involves a sitting president of the United States. Its genesis goes back to the late ‘90s, when one of his clients, Randy Travis, was filming a movie in Sheridan, Arkansas, called The White River Kid.
“We were still in Tulsa then, and it wasn’t far. So we took off and went down there to get in the movie – like everyone would like to do, you know,” he says with a chuckle.
There, he met a woman in charge of props and traded her a variety of picks for a Randy Travis poster from the film. As it turned out, she’d been a friend of then-President Bill Clinton since childhood. She sent the picks Swain had traded her to Clinton, who liked them so much he kept them in his top desk drawer in the Oval Office.
“She said that with the holographs, he’d take ‘em out and flash them at people when they came in,” noted Swain, laughing. “And she asked if I’d consider doing a pick for him. I told her, “Well, I can’t do the Presidential Seal or anything like that without going through a lot of red tape, so it’s probably not a good idea.’”
Still, she persisted.
“Finally I said, ‘Look, I’ll do the picks. But you take the heat.’ So I did a white pearl pick, the Presidential Seal was in gold on front, with a metallic blue highlight around the oval. And then on the back in metallic blue was Bill Clinton’s signature.”
In response, he got a personal letter from the president, and – according to the Clinton friend who brokered the deal – another honor as well.
“My understanding from her,” he says, “is that they’re supposed to have a place in his Presidential Library.”
Main image cutline: Oklahoma pick maker Robert Swain has worked with everyone from Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard to a sitting U.S. president. Photo courtesy Robert Swain
