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  Finally, the music of Alabama, and my own personal music, came from the music we heard all our lives, the rich Southern tradition of gospel music and the God for whom that music was created in order to help folks worship and celebrate. From my earliest memory, this music was part of my life. I come from a multigenerational gospel-music family. Until the two inspirational albums we recently released, Alabama rarely sang about God, but trust me, God was present at every concert. The faith of my father and mother, both expressed in the music they played and in the life they aspired to lead, runs deep in both my personal life and in the songs Alabama sang every night.

  My mama, as I said, lives and thrives right down the road, and I look forward to every breakfast of homemade biscuits and “syrip ’n’ butter” at her house. My daddy died suddenly in 1980, right at the start of the Alabama success story, while I was on my way to Myrtle Beach. Because of that, I suffered a wound that has never quite healed. Of all the people on earth, my daddy was the one person I wanted to succeed for. As his only son, I idolized him. He taught me to hunt, fish, laugh, farm, persevere, build a fire, and play the guitar. In my pursuit of music, he was my number one fan and greatest inspiration. In so many ways, he taught me how to live.

  This is my story and no one else’s, but in large part, it’s the story of a father and a son. Daddy, this book’s for you.

  CHAPTER 1

  HOME

  Round Ole Baugh Road,

  Is a great place for kids to grow

  Some grow up and move away

  Most of us decide to stay

  Round Ole Baugh Road.

  The neighborhood still looks the same

  just new kids with the same old names

  My Baugh Road’s in a Southern state Yours

  may be anywhere, USA

  Look around for your Baugh Road.

  “OLE BAUGH ROAD” BY RANDY OWEN

  My daddy’s name is Gladstone Yeuell Owen. My middle name is Yeuell, and so is my son, Heath’s. Why his parents gave him such an unusual name, I have no idea. His brothers had more familiar names like Johnny, Albert, Virgil, Riley, and Grady. Mama and some of Daddy’s close relatives always called him Gladsten, but the rest of the world just shortened it to G.Y. It made life a whole lot simpler.

  I really don’t know much about my daddy’s side of the family beyond two or three generations back. We’ve always assumed that the name Owen was Welsh, but I also remember my grandfather, Joseph Ernest Owen, throwing around terms like Scotch-Irish and Black Dutch when I used to pester him as a kid about our family roots. “Black Dutch” was a term used by Anglo-Saxons that referred to anyone with dark complexion of European ancestry. It was also used by American Indians to hide their Indian ethnicity during the time they were less than second-class citizens. I know I have some Indian blood in me, but as to how much and what tribe or strain, I’m clueless.

  The Owen family saga I know best begins with my grandfather Owen. Sometime after the Civil War, my grandfather’s mother, whose family name was Hester, was living around Armuchee, Georgia, about thirty miles east from where I’m writing this. She had apparently lost her husband, my great-grandfather, perhaps in the war or from pneumonia—I’ve heard both theories—and married a guy a good fourteen or fifteen years her junior. Because of four years of the bloodiest carnage ever on American soil, good men in the South were hard to find, so she did the best she could, no doubt.

  There was just one catch. Husband number two didn’t want her two very young children, including my grandpa, around. So my grandpa and his sister Josie, after some period of time, were shipped off to his own grandparents in DeKalb County. They came over in a horse-drawn wagon. There they were raised by my great-great-grandparents Hester and never returned to their home in Georgia.

  I got the feeling, as a kid, that my grandfather never cared for his mother and the way she had abandoned her own children. He never said anything bad about her. He just never said anything, period. My cousin Jackie and I once rode our motorcycles over to the Armuchee/Little Sand Mountain area of Georgia to look for our great-grandfather’s burial site, but we could never find it. Years later, I located my great-grandmother’s grave at a cemetery in the area called Walker’s Chapel. It listed her as Mattie Owen, even though her second husband, named Frank Lindsey, is buried right next to her. I think my family designed her tombstone and went out of their way to keep his name off it, though they were officially man and wife. There was not a lot of love between the two families, it’s pretty clear, even when it came to grave markers.

  My grandparents, Joseph and his wife, Sena SeBell Baugh Owen, lived here all their lives. They had a slew of children and grandchildren. The house my daddy grew up in still stands just a few miles away. It would probably take me all day to drive around this immediate area and say hello to all my cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews who came from this one branch of our family tree. Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, you could go to a community event like a sing-in and half the crowd would be immediate kinfolk or extended-family members. You were always among “your” people, and I loved them all. For me, every family get-together was like a trip to Disneyland.

  My mother, born Martha Alice Teague, was the third of seven children of Henry Baughton Teague Sr.—my beloved “Paw Paw”—and Velma Cloe Goodman Teague. All the kids were raised up on a farm in Cherokee County, situated on the eastern ridge of Lookout Mountain where the land was hard, gravelly, and unforgiving. “Over in the valley,” my daddy referred to that area. My Paw Paw raised cotton and corn and worked as a logger when he could. The milk cows got the corn, and the cottonseed and the cotton itself were sold to make ends meet. With all those mouths to feed on subsistence farming, those ends seldom met.

  My mother claims to this day, “I won’t take nothing for it. It made good children out of all of them,” she says. The lesson was early and clear: if you got anything, you had to work for it. They were the poorest of the poor, but they never went hungry, even during the worst years of the Depression. My mother often had to walk to school without a long coat in the winter, just a hand-me-down jacket or sweater, but I never heard her complain much about it. In fact, I’ve never heard her complain much about anything.

  I’m sure my mother’s growing-up years were far from the often sentimental image of the noble, salt-of-the-earth rural farm family, but despite the obvious hardships and limitations—my mama had an eleventh-grade education—she and all her siblings survived and thrived. Of the seven children in her family, all now in their seventies and eighties, only one has passed away, and that was only a few months back. A hard life created a hardy stock, that’s for sure.

  The key component in her family life beyond work was faith. Both of my parents come from the Southern Holiness tradition, a set of Christian beliefs that shares some similarities with early Methodism and modern Pentecostalism but is also distinctly different in many ways. I know from my own upbringing that the Holiness faith my parents practiced placed a high premium on the idea of living a holy life, a life that was free of what they considered sinful practices. More than what particular church you attended or what denomination you identified with, the emphasis was on how you lived your personal life and how you taught your children to live theirs. It was the kind of religious practice that focused on the community, not a greater religious organization or label like Methodist, Baptist, or the like. Many of the churches my parents attended and where they performed music were nondenominational. Today, for instance, some of my family attends the Rainsville Community Church, a nondenominational congregation. My sister Reba says she likes it because all of the offerings and other donations stay right in the community and aren’t divvied up with a large national association.

  One expert described the Holiness ethic as “no smoking, no drinking, no cardplaying, and no theatergoing.” There weren’t too many theaters, at least not live theaters, in rural Alabama to lure you off the straight and narrow, and my daddy smoked at one point in his life, but
I was certainly raised to abstain from drinking and to be very leery of what came across the radio and television. I don’t remember the issue of cardplaying coming up. This was long before there were legal Native American bingo parlors in Alabama and floating casinos anchored off the coast of Mississippi.

  My mama remembers her daddy carrying her to church as a very young child. The church didn’t have Holiness in the name—it was a Wesleyan Methodist church—but in my mama’s words, “they believed in people being clean and walking upright,” so it passed the test. From the very first time she attended church, she remembered her daddy singing. By all accounts he was an outstanding singer. His mother’s maiden name was Speer, and even people with only a passing appreciation of Southern gospel music know of the Speer Family as a legendary, multigenerational singing institution. I can’t say for sure if I’m related to those Speers or not, but it’s nice to imagine.

  My grandmother Teague was apparently no musician, nor could she carry a tune. My grandfather, the singer, didn’t have any instruments around the house because he couldn’t afford them. He did play a mouth harp but had to be careful playing it at home because the dogs would start howling and wake up the neighbors. For some reason, dogs get very excited at the sound of a mouth harp.

  The only instrument my granddaddy did buy was a big upright piano that is still in the family. He bought it mainly for his three oldest girls, including my mother. He wanted a piano around because he loved directing group singing and he didn’t have anyone to play for him. The piano cost him $210, a king’s ransom for a poor tenant farmer from Cherokee County, Alabama, in the 1940s, but I doubt he ever regretted his decision. At least one of his daughters (Mama) and Mama’s brother Charles became terrific piano players and passed on a rich gospel-music tradition to a whole new generation of offspring, including me, Martha’s black-haired son.

  My mother and her sisters each took a total of seven piano lessons from an old man in the area named Jim Sparks. The deal was that he would charge a dollar a lesson for the two older girls and the little one would get to learn free. The little one was my mother. She walked two miles in snow every Saturday to learn to play. Her sisters lost interest quickly. After the seven lessons, my mother just kept on teaching herself. As she recalls, “I just went to work at it.”

  My daddy loved music, too, with a passion. He, too, came from a musical family. He loved to sing and could play a little piano and fiddle, but mainly concentrated on the guitar. Pretty early in my life, I realized he harbored a long-standing dream to be a professional musician. He had great love for some leading country musicians of his time, like Martha Carson, Little Jimmy Dickens, and the great Merle Travis, whose famous picking style, called thumb picking, he tried to emulate. His emotional release, like mine, was music. In many ways, my life is the product of that dream.

  A few years before I came along, Daddy even tried his hand at recording. Sometime in the mid-1940s, he got together with his brother, Blackie, and their cousin, Sonny, and formed a trio called Stony, Blackie, and Sonny. Daddy was Stony, a shortened version of Gladstone. They went into a studio and recorded two songs on a 78, one side being “Let’s Say Goodbye Like We Said Hello” and the flip side being “Just to Know You Still Remember Me.” Daddy, as he always did, sang harmony and played lead guitar. I remember being all of nine years old when I heard that recording for the first time. I was very impressed.

  This one early stab at musical stardom came after Gladstone Owen married Martha Teague, having met and fallen in love specifically because of their common interest in music. They first met in 1945 at the hallowed Southern institution called a “singing school,” which happened, as I said, to take place at the Wesleyan Methodist church up on the corner, which we pass every time we leave the farm and head to town. My mama was fifteen years old and as a dozen old photographs make clear, she was a real looker. My dad was twenty-six going on twenty-seven and in Mama’s words, “a black-headed, black-eyed handsome dude,” almost six feet in height. She goes on to say he had “a lot of boy in him,” which anyone who ever knew him could attest to. He was the kind of guy who was always full of foolishness and laughter and fun. My mother’s family, and to a certain extent my mother, was more on the sober side. It was a match of personalities made in heaven or, at least, singing school.

  “He didn’t act hardly like he was that old or nothing,” Mama now reports. “He’d never been married. He was just a good, clean farm boy.”

  A singing school is a long-standing cultural tradition in the American South. These itinerant music programs were actually created in the Northeast in the early days of Protestant America to pass along spiritual music and underscore the importance of group or congregational singing in worship services. At some point they migrated to the South and took hold. The purpose of a singing school in my parents’ day was to teach hymns, new and old, to anyone in the community who wanted to learn, and especially young people. The music was usually taught using sight reading and a form of musical notation called shape note.

  Shape notes were just that—notes in distinct shapes like a square or a triangle, which made it relatively easy for an amateur to follow a tune. Shape-note music has been around for two centuries in the American South and allows different groups of singing-school participants to learn different parts of a song. The bass voices would learn the bass shape notes, the altos would learn their own line of notes, and so on. The idea was for everyone in the church or musical gathering to participate in the singing in a serious way, not just mumbling the lyrics of some hymnal selection. My mama calls this “convention type” singing as opposed to a musical group or a choir in the front of the sanctuary. Sacred-harp singing, a pure a cappella style of Southern church singing where the altos stand in one section of the hall and the tenors in another, was also practiced in this area of Alabama and North Georgia, but it wasn’t the tradition of my parents.

  Singing schools were the way that sacred songs became popular, not to mention a major social event for rural families. Many of the songs written by the great gospel composer Albert Brumley—classics like “I’ll Fly Away” (featured in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and “Turn Your Radio On”—were first heard at singing schools. Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie, attended a singing school. So did I when I was growing up, but my own interest went far beyond learning new gospel songs. I was mainly there to meet girls.

  The singing school where my parents met ran for two weeks in the summer, when the twenty-five or so participants weren’t in school and weren’t needed on the farm to either plant or harvest. Mr. Sparks, the old man who taught my mama to play the piano, was in charge of the school, and he asked my grandfather if his teenage daughter could come over and be the chief accompanist. (Mr. Sparks couldn’t actually play the piano, only teach it.) My mama had an aunt named Sophronia who lived across the road from the church at the time, so her dad said fine, she could make the trek all the way from “the valley” to help out.

  Mama loved playing for that singing school. It was the first time she had ever done anything like that. It gave her a spurt of confidence to master and play those new songs in front of all those people. She clearly liked to perform. Sixty-plus years later, she is still playing gospel music before church and community groups every chance she can get.

  As she tells the story, on the very first morning of the school, her dad brought her over in his 1936 Ford and dropped her off at her aunt’s doorstep. While she waited on the front porch for her aunt to come to the door, she looked across the street and saw tall, dark, and handsome Gladstone, her husband-to-be, sitting on the church steps waiting for school to begin. According to her, he saw this teen beauty across the way and whistled at her. “Needless to say,” she now reports, “I just looked away.”

  After the singing school ended, they kept bumping into each other—Mama even played at G.Y.’s grandmother’s funeral—and soon he started writing her letters, many of which she still has. As soon as he c
ould get his hands on a car, he’d drive over the mountain and visit. Their main going-out date was to a convention-type, open-invitation singing event. As Mama says, it was “a clean place to go.” These sing-ins usually happened on Sunday afternoons all over the area. The level of musical sophistication among these poor, largely uneducated rural farming people was high. Many would venture from one church to another on Sunday afternoons to sing in harmony with their neighbors, most of whom had learned their parts in a singing school. It was both soul nourishing and fun.

  My mama, then as now, accompanied the group singing on piano. And then as now, she played shape-note music. She says she never got around to learning “round note” or conventional music notation, because she could just glance at the shapes and know exactly where the music was headed.

  After about two years of courting and singing together, my parents got married in July of 1947 and settled down to a life of farming and raising kids. My Paw Paw Teague gave them two wedding presents: a crippled Jersey heifer and a fifty-pound sack of white potatoes. Daddy traded the heifer for a milk cow that turned out to have no milk. About that time, their first farming mule, Ole Kate, died of bloating after Daddy overfed her after a hard day’s work. So with no mule or cow, he had to rent a mule, Ole Dixie, from his daddy to finish the crop. It cost him $25, but as with most things, he got it done.