Don Meehan holds more than 35 RIAA Multi-Platinum Engineer awards and has worked with some of the biggest names in American music, including Simon and Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, and Bob Dylan. In addition to his thirty-two–year tenure at Columbia Records, he has released more than thirty singles and three albums of his own material.

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Meehan began singing at age six and hosted a weekly radio program on Beaumont’s new station KRIC around 1937–38, accompanied by his sister on piano. He learned guitar in his early teens and performed with Beaumont-area country bands led by Cliff Bruner, Moon Mullican, and Shelley Lee Alley, as well as several local pop groups. He later taught himself bass guitar. As a teenager, he appeared in local talent competitions alongside George Jones and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson.

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Meehan eventually connected with a band that took him to New York, where he performed at the famous Astor Hotel on Broadway in Times Square. He was signed by RCA Victor the following year and was offered a spot on the Louisiana Hayride, but he received his draft notice for the Korean War the very day he arrived. Although he was not sent overseas, he served by performing with the Third Army Band until 1954.

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After his service, Meehan entered the RCA Institutes to study radio and sound production while continuing to perform and record. Over the course of his long engineering career, he worked with many major country and pop artists and became widely respected for his meticulous studio craftsmanship. He also developed and patented a unique method for listening to 5.1 surround sound using small speakers positioned around the listener—an innovation that anticipated modern immersive-audio setups. Another of Meehan’s signature achievements was engineering early multitrack vocal layering techniques, which helped shape the modern sound of studio-produced pop music.