Born Country Read online

  Born Country

  How Faith, Family, and Music Brought Me Home

  Randy Owen with Allen Rucker

  For all the kids on both sides of the families,

  Owen and Teague; for all the kids round Ole Baugh Road,

  Adamsburg Road, Dekalb County, the state of Alabama, and the USA who through no fault of their own were born poor with seemingly no way out except hard work.

  And for the land I live on. Out here in the country,

  there’s a sense of calmness, genuineness, quietness, and a feeling of reality of belonging and heritage that’s unmatched anywhere except in my early morning swing and the early morning shadows on this mountain.

  Contents

  Introduction The Morning Drive

  1. Home

  2. God and Music

  3. Cotton Dust

  4. The Bowery

  5. G. Y.

  Photographic Insert

  6. Alabama on Fire

  7. The Family

  8. Breakdown

  9. Giving Back

  10. The Farewell Tour

  11. May The Circle Be Unbroken

  Acknowledgments

  The Career of Randy Owen

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MORNING DRIVE

  Swim across the river, just to prove that I’m a man

  Spend the day bein’ lazy, just bein’ nature’s friend

  Climb a long tall hick’ry. bend it over, skinnin’ cats

  Playin’ baseball with chert rocks, usin’ sawmill slabs for bats

  “MOUNTAIN MUSIC” BY RANDY OWEN

  Relaxing is sometimes hard for me. My favorite way to relax when I’m not making music or running my cattle operation is to get up early in the morning and take a long, leisurely drive around Lookout Mountain in Northeast Alabama, the place I’ve lived pretty much my whole life. I have an old 1968 Ford pickup I bought from my dad almost thirty years ago. The truck sits out by a large gray barn under the big sign that reads: Tennessee River Music, Inc. “Tennessee River” was the first No. 1 Alabama hit and the first I personally wrote. It’s nice to be reminded of that every trip to the barn.

  In the summer our two dogs—Hamlet, a golden retriever, and Prissy, a little Shih Tzu that belongs to our daughter Randa—will hop in the back of the truck, and the three of us will take our morning drive. In the cold weather, Hamlet and Prissy will ride up-front in the seat beside me. I drive them around like they’re canine royalty. Every morning they’re waiting for me by the door. They can’t wait to go.

  Our place on Lookout Mountain is six miles outside of Fort Payne, Alabama, in the far northeast corner of the state. Fort Payne is a small town of about thirteen thousand, known in the region as the location of a number of sock factories, or mills. Lookout Mountain is a 93-mile-long range that stretches along the northwest corner of Georgia, the northeast corner of Alabama, and the southern border of Tennessee near Chattanooga. The Tennessee part of Lookout Mountain was the scene of a number of key battles in the Civil War, including what is known as the Third Battle of Chattanooga in 1863, a decisive Union victory in which General Ulysses S. Grant decimated the last fighting force of Tennessee Rebs. There were no big battles in our area that I know of. There probably weren’t enough people here to stage a fight.

  Our corner of the Lookout Mountain range sits in a little nook in DeKalb County, Alabama. We’re about twelve miles from the Georgia state line, ninety miles from Atlanta, and thirty-five from the Tennessee state line. We’re kind of hidden away up here in the hills, a rural oasis pretty much off the beaten path of the urban South.

  Our family home is right on top of the mountain, surrounded mostly by farm land, grazing land, and a lot of uncultivated timberland. After the dogs and I climb into the truck, I drive down a road just outside our property, called Baugh Road. My grandmother Owen, raised around here, was a Baugh, and many years after her death, and many years after I walked this road as a kid, I wrote the Alabama song “Ole Baugh Road.” It wasn’t the first song I wrote about growing up around here, or the last. And I’m still driving down the same road.

  We drive to the little Wesleyan church up on the corner. I don’t know the exact age of the church, but I do know that my grandfather donated some of the timber for the original structure. Though it has gone through a renovation or two, some of which I helped make, it is pretty much the same church where my mother, Martha Teague, first met my daddy, Gladstone Yeuell Owen, about sixty years ago at what is known as a Christian “singing school.” On the way up to that church, we go by a little brown two-bedroom frame house that has been sitting there since my daddy moved it from its original location sometime in the 1970s. First my sister Reba lived there; then my wife, Kelly, and I moved in after we got married. Our daughter Alison had just come along, and we really needed a place to live, even a place with only a wood stove for heat. We paid my dad $3,500 for it. When Alabama hit it big, we were still living in that house. It was our first “mansion.”

  On the days the dogs and I turn left at the church, we follow the two-lane road past an old schoolhouse and a little store until we spot another little red brick church on the left. Behind that church is a cemetery where my daddy and my grandparents are buried, alongside a whole slew of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Probably 90 percent of my relatives who lived in this area are buried there.

  We proceed to make a long, languid loop around the whole area, checking out some of the six hundred head of mostly Hereford and Angus registered cattle we have grazing on pastureland. Some of this property, formerly owned by other people we knew well, was land that my daddy sharecropped when I was growing up. My parents had their own land to tend, but they also worked other people’s land to make a little extra. As the only male of three children, I was expected to work out in the fields right alongside my daddy. Cotton and corn were the main cash crops in those days. Chopping cotton in the summer and picking it in the fall is just as tedious and exhausting as you would imagine it to be. Your fingers got eaten away, but your arms got big and your back got strong.

  Today, driving past those old fields, I’m drawn back to an exchange I once had with my daddy. We were out in the hot sun, picking cotton, and a plane flew over. He stopped, looked up, and said, “I wonder what it would be like to fly in a plane like that? I’d like to try that someday.” Within a year or two of his passing, I could afford to fly him anywhere he wanted. And not long after that, I could have flown him around on Alabama’s own plane. But it wasn’t to be. He died just before Alabama took off.

  We finally connect with Highway 255 and take it south down to the most beautiful site in our area of the country, the Little River Canyon. Forged by the Little River, a tributary of the bigger Coosa River, this is a surprisingly deep gorge carved into the back side of the mountain. Except for a few kayakers who come paddling down the river in the spring, few people outside of the immediate vicinity even know it’s there. It’s a natural wonder yet to be blemished by large parking lots and souvenir stands. Driving down to it early in the morning, we rarely meet another car on the road.

  The Little River separates two counties—DeKalb County and Cherokee County. My dad was born and raised in DeKalb, and my mother was born and raised in Cherokee. For some reason the boys in DeKalb would always go looking for girls in Cherokee and never the other way around. I don’t know why, but I’m glad my dad was bold enough to go a whole county away to find the love of his life.

  Somewhere along the way, someone had the foresight to pave the long road that follows the rim of the canyon on the west side, not far from where some of my property ends. A few years back they repaved this rim highway, and it is no
w the best way to view the canyon outside of floating down the river in springtime. If you drive along that roadway, you’ll maneuver numerous switch-backs over a course of twenty-six miles, not to mention take in some stunning natural scenery.

  The weather on the mountain is different from that in the valley below surrounding Fort Payne. It can be three to five degrees cooler or hotter up here, depending on the time of year. And for whatever reason, we get a lot of fog. Or sometimes there’s fog in the valley and it’s crystal-clear up here. The atmosphere often feels more coastal than rural inland Alabama, like the way the fog rolls in and out around Carmel, California.

  The canyon is absolutely beautiful most mornings. You can drive down, and there’s a fog coming across the chasm, and you can’t see two feet in front of your face. Then you go a hundred feet, and you’re in sunshine. You look down into the gorge and see all the flowers and foliage in pristine morning light. It’s pretty incredible.

  At some point, usually a turnout in the road, I’ll stop the truck, and the dogs will take off in search of whatever they can sniff out. I have been coming up here since I was old enough to walk—I was born in 1949. It seems so close to all I know yet so incredibly distant from how most people know me. To the millions of Alabama fans I’ve never met, I’m the dark-haired guy standing between two guitar-picking cousins singing about the Tennessee River or 18-wheelers or 40-hour workweeks. I usually have a shaggy beard onstage and am wearing the sweatshirt of the local high school or college football team. I’m the lead singer. Randy Owen of the group Alabama.

  What the three original members of Alabama—Teddy Gentry, Jeff Cook, and I—accomplished since we first got together to play music in Jeff’s living room in 1968 is hard to comprehend. For years we worked hard in clubs and bars and paid our dues, but from the day we signed with RCA Records in 1980 until our American Farewell Tour in 2003, it felt like we were riding a bull we couldn’t get off of…or maybe better, a runaway train. Someone asked our lifelong manager and friend, Dale Morris, to describe our rise, and he said, “From zero to a hundred overnight.” That’s sure what it seemed like—a country-music wildfire. Sitting on this mountain on cool summer mornings, it all seems like a distant, bygone dream until I recall all the effort, energy, and passion that went into those extremely exciting years. Every one of our forty-two No. 1 singles involved hours and hours in a recording studio, getting it right. All of those millions of albums sold signify thousands of concerts, autograph signings, and radio-station appearances. And the awards, up to and including induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, were gifts I never expected and was humbled to receive.

  In trying to describe the legacy and impact of Alabama, a lot of people turn to those dry statistics of records sold, awards won, No. 1 hits in a row, and the like, but the only people who study these statistics are insiders like record executives, PR writers, and music historians. Fans don’t show up at your concerts because they consulted Billboard magazine and counted your hits. They’re interested in the music and a good time. Period. Starting out as a bar band, living on tips and the good graces of our audiences, we knew that from the beginning. When we played “Long Train Runnin’” or “Can’t See You” on a Saturday night at a nightspot called the Bowery in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, we did it to please the crowd who had asked for it. When we played “My Home’s in Alabama” before thousands of screaming fans at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York, we had the same goal in mind—tear the roof off of the place and get that crowd out of their seats and jumping around and hollering for more. Alabama, record-breaking statistics aside, is in essence an audience-oriented band that forged its own definable sound and style, drew a whole new audience to country music, and made it big.

  And I wouldn’t have changed a minute of it.

  Alabama is not through yet. The extended two-year, eighty-city farewell tour in 2003 and 2004 was an end to an often exhausting, nonstop twenty-three years of constant touring, but it wasn’t a goodbye to recording and performing. We just felt it was time to slow down, see ourselves as individuals again, reintroduce ourselves to our families, and pursue some of our own pet projects. My motto these days is simple: get up in the morning and slow down. That’s why it took me a couple of years to do my first solo record, which has given me immense pleasure. That’s why I now alternate music with running a cattle business with my wife, Kelly. And I love working with groups like the fund-raising arm of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, one of the true passions of my life. And that’s why I’m up here on this canyon rim this morning trying to take all of this in.

  Heading back home, I check out the deep foliage along the way and remember how my daddy could just reel off their varieties one by one—that’s a red maple, that’s a yellow maple, not to be confused with that tree, a post oak, or that one, a scrubby oak. He was my personal botany professor, and walking in the woods with him was both a delight and an education. He loved being outdoors. He and his friends would go foxhunting, with the goal being to chase the fox but never catch it. It was all about being in the fox’s universe.

  Nearing our home, I always loop back around to my mother’s house, the same brick house I grew up in after my daddy, my cousin, Roland, and I built it with our own hands when I was sixteen. My mama is seventy-six and insists on living on her own, tending her own garden. The idea of moving to an assisted-living home is to her as foreign as moving to the south of France. I generally just toot the horn when I go by to let her know it’s me and I’m checking on her. I usually don’t stop because her dog and my dogs don’t always get along, and I don’t want my two jumping out and starting a fight. She looks forward to that little toot. It’s my way of saying, “Good morning.”

  I’m a routine person, you might say, and that morning routine with the dogs is one of the great pleasures of my life. When it’s time to go on the road to perform, something I’ve done a good part of my life since age nineteen, I don’t sit around saying I can’t wait to get home. But when I get here, I’m home. That’s the reason, over the years since Alabama hit it big, I’ve acquired a lot of the land up here and tried my best to preserve and conserve it. And when I drive by the houses I’ve driven by and stopped by for decades, it takes me back to the people I grew up with. And I don’t want to change too much of what they were about.

  Or maybe I should say…what I’m about.

  I decided to write this book, after some arm-twisting from Kelly and a few close friends, because I wanted people to know where I came from, the people who raised and nurtured me, and the outlook and values they engrained in me, hopefully values I’ve passed along to my own three children. As you read along, I expect you’ll be reminded of some of the things I’ve tried to say in the music of Alabama. Of course, it’s because of that music, and the millions of wonderful people who have embraced it for two and a half decades, that you even know who I am. I certainly don’t speak for the group Alabama, which has always been and always will be a wholly collective effort, but in many ways the music of Alabama speaks for me.

  You can only get so much into a three-minute song, no matter how many of them get played on country radio. But those songs, especially the ones I personally wrote or co-wrote, can certainly give you the feeling of my story. When the opening lines of “My Home’s in Alabama” report that “Drinkin’ was forbidden in my Christian country home” and “I learned to play the flattop on them good ol’ Gospel songs,” that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t get those lines from another country song or watching TV. I got them from my life.

  So in writing this book, I guess I’ll try to fill out the rest of that song and the dozens of others that were inspired by the real world I grew up in and still live in. Even today, those songs aren’t very far away. Every year at Tennessee River Music, Inc., named for one song, we have our annual cattle auction—it’s called Dixieland Delight, named for another song, that one written by my good buddy Ronnie Rogers. It’s surprising I didn’t end up naming our children “Fe
els So Right” and “Love in the First Degree.”

  This is my own story and my own version of the larger story of Alabama, the group that was my musical life since I was a teenager. When I say this or that happened in the history of Alabama, that’s my impression or recollection and mine only. Teddy or Jeff might see it completely differently, and they might be right, or at least as right as I am. It’s like when several people witness the same event like a bar fight and each tells a completely different version of what happened. If you really want to know what happened in every aspect of the Alabama story, you need to get the details from three people.

  Someone once referred to me as a “cultural conservationist.” I think they meant I have spent a lot of my life trying to preserve, or at least pay tribute to, the way of life I inherited from my parents and that they inherited from their kin. It’s a life that is centered on a day-to-day connection with the land. You live on the land, you work it, you protect it, and you revel in its variety and beauty. You try to teach your kids the values that living on the land demands—patience, hard work, and being attuned to the rhythms of nature. In my own case, I think the family farm is an essential part of American life, and I try to do whatever I can in the state of Alabama to help young farmers-to-be get on their feet and pursue that life. As a country, we’ve long been dependent on foreign oil. We’ll be a much different culture the day we also become dependent on foreign food.

  So, living on the land is a big part of my story. So are the many, many loved ones in my life, people you don’t normally read about when someone writes about the music of Alabama. I’m rooted on this mountaintop because my parents and all my aunts and uncles and cousins and assorted blood relatives are rooted here. After Kelly and I got married, I brought her here to live, and, thank God, she settled right in and learned to love it like I do. In an age where people move around so much they don’t know how to answer the question “So, where are you from?” this is a story of what you can gain by never leaving where you’re from. There are sacrifices, for sure—there always are—but at least in my life, I found a reality here at home that helped me survive the kind of high-stakes career in music that has damaged or destroyed some of the most talented people on earth.