Born Country Read online

  To this day, my mama considers my daddy the finest man she ever met. She says he was “as steady as a rock.” He was also a joy to be around. He played every instrument in the band and knew certain aspects of music much better than she did at the time. She learned to play strictly by ear, aided by shape notes. He taught her keys and chord progressions. As soon as they could raise enough cash to buy their own piano, they were a two-person musical team.

  At every opportunity, they would head off to a church and a singing session. Often they went by foot, lugging G.Y.’s guitar and small amplifier. Mama remembers the two of them traipsing right across a pasture I now own on their way to the corner church to play and sing with the neighbors. I can stand in that field today and feel what it must have been like to be the two of them, young and in love, headed by foot to a local songfest, my daddy no doubt popping jokes and my mama laughing and hauling his general-store amplifier.

  Mama says it best: “We’d just play with whoever sung. We went to gatherings, everybody sung, just whoever felt like singing a song just started up. And hang on if you didn’t have the rhythm.”

  Their life was hard, but in Mama’s mind, “We had a good time, don’t you know.” She once told me, “One of the most enjoyable days of a man’s life, if he’s got a companion that loves him, is when they’re striving to accomplish something. They’re working together. And they can do about anything they set their minds to do.”

  That was my parents’ early life. They started out without much, but the Lord blessed them and kept us all safe and well fed, even in the worst of times. It was not only a hard life, it was a strict life according to the tenets of their faith. Both my sister Reba and I grew up without a radio or a television set. We got our first radio when I was about twelve. My mama has a TV today, an old console type from the 1960s, but rarely watches anything but a Sunday-afternoon recording of the Gaither Homecoming Tour. Of course, there was never a drop of alcohol in our house. At a distance, this kind of strict living might seem oppressive. Growing up, it just seemed normal.

  I was the first born, in 1949, followed shortly by my sister Reba. My second sister, Rachel, didn’t come along until I was thirteen and Reba was eleven. She never went to a singing school and never knew life without radio or TV, but she certainly learned music at the feet of Mama and Daddy and joined them in the first grouping of the singing Owen Family. Today Kelly and I have the same mix of kids, two daughters and one son, though in slightly different order. I guess it’s a family tradition.

  When I was about four, my parents scrapped up every dime they had and bought forty acres of land up on Lookout Mountain, then called the McMichen place. The house was an old-style wood-frame house with a great porch swing. They focused at first on growing cotton and corn and later grew mainly corn, hay, and timber. My daddy always had a few cattle around. He loved livestock and the buying and selling of cattle.

  We were poor, no doubt about it. I remember one year when I was old enough to add and subtract, I decided to play CPA and calculate our family’s annual income. It came to a grand total of $800. A year of farming your own land; raising cattle, hogs, and chickens; sharecropping on other people’s land; and selling what you could—all for a yearly gross income of $800. That was around 1960, and according to a conversion site on the Internet called MeasuringWorth.com, $800 in 1960 equals about $5,600 today. In other words, not much.

  But we got by. We raised our own potatoes and vegetables, ate our own meat, and canned everything that could fit in a can. One year when the season was terribly dry and the corn didn’t come up, Reba and I got together and plowed a field and raised these gigantic Congo watermelons—thirty and forty pounds each—and sold them to local country grocery stores. We figured out ways like that to earn money. We had electricity but didn’t use it all that much. Our light bill, I remember, was one dollar a month. We cooked on a wood-burning stove and heated the house by a wood-burning fireplace. We had chickens who liked to crawl in the space under the house and lay eggs. It was my job, at age seven or eight, to crawl under there on my belly to retrieve them. To this day I recall the time I shimmied under there and somehow got stuck in a tight spot between the earthen floor and the floorboards of our house. I completely freaked out. I couldn’t get out, and no one could hear me down there. I finally figured my way out of that trap and lived to tell about it, but it was a claustrophobic moment that still haunts me.

  I know, probably to some of you raised in the suburbs, this all sounds like a sad old country song—raised poor, crawling under the house for breakfast, stoking the wood fire on a winter’s day—but it wasn’t sad, and those rural routines made for a rich and vigorous existence. There were tough times, for sure, times when my parents were frustrated or discouraged about their lot in life, but I have a tendency to block out those memories, to let them go and move on. This is probably a survival technique I learned early on to protect myself against bitterness and discouragement. Envy and jealousy can eat away at you, and the only person who is generally harmed is yourself. I don’t really know where I got the instinct to eliminate bad memories, but it has served me well over the years.

  In general, though, we weren’t embarrassed to be poor—we didn’t even feel poor most of the time. We were surrounded by uncles, aunts, and cousins who were in the same situation, and since we weren’t glued to the radio or TV, we didn’t envy the rich people who paraded across the screen. My sister Reba and I were only twenty-three months apart in age, so we largely entertained ourselves, with the help of all those cousins. Reba contends that I was never in a picture that she wasn’t in too. I either had my arm around her or was holding her as a baby. We were inseparable and we had plenty to keep us amused. We had two imaginary friends—Pooterst and Chillynx—to keep us amused. Plus, we had real live cousins like Jackie and Donnie Owen to play with, and we had all of Northeast Alabama as our playground.

  Like all kids in the country, we were very close to our pets. One of our favorite hens was Groucho, a Rhode Island Red. When she disappeared one day, Reba and I were beside ourselves with grief. Even on a grand car ride to a family reunion with our great aunt and uncle, Troy and Edith Payton, all we could do was worry about Groucho. Two weeks later we finally found her camping out in a mule-drawn seed planter. I couldn’t wait to crawl under the house to get her next batch of eggs.

  Dogs were our constant companions. Ole Lead, an English shepherd who had survived a rattlesnake bite in my aunt Goldie’s garden, couldn’t survive when the mule-drawn mowing machine accidentally mangled his right back leg. Joker, our black-and-tan beagle, took off with me and some friends to the canyon to go swimming one day and never came home. I’d spend hours with Joker on the front-porch swing, swaying his paw around like he was directing a song at one of the singing schools.

  In our free time, we were allowed to roam wherever we wanted. We either walked or bummed a ride from a passing truck. It was a given that if you saw someone on the road while you were driving by, you’d stop and let the person hop on the running board and hold on to the window for a quick ride. If you didn’t stop, everyone on the mountain knew about it before nightfall.

  But our main activity as kids, other than school, was working alongside our folks. Besides raising livestock and much of the food we ate, my daddy farmed forty acres of his own land and then often sharecropped other land. There were two forms of sharecropping he practiced. One was straight sharecropping, where you work another person’s land, split the cost of fertilizer and seed, and literally “share” the crop that is produced on some proportional basis—halves, or thirds, or fourths. The second form we called “standing rent.” In this arrangement you rented the land from someone for a fixed price and then reaped the benefits of the entire crop. To pull this off, you had to have the money to pay the rent and all the farming costs going in, or you had to be able to borrow it. It was always more expensive to do a standing-rent arrangement than a straight sharecropping one. And if the crop was bad, you might really take a
bath.

  It was a struggle for my parents for most of my growing-up years. I remember one year, all we seemed to eat was peas and okra. I don’t know what happened to the other vegetables, but it was peas and okra almost every night. If we went somewhere else to eat, they’d ask what I wanted, and I’d say peas and okra. I guess that was comfort food for me, at least that year. We always had homemade cornbread, of course, and chicken and eggs, so we got by just fine.

  I didn’t mind working alongside my daddy in the fields, but the burden of responsibility he constantly carried was distressing to me. I took it personally. I adored my father and hated to see him upset or anxious. Seeing the hurt and worry on his face over how much he’d have to borrow next year to make a crop or how he was going to make his tractor payment that fall or what kind of crop was coming up in the fields—I took it all in like it was my responsibility. The weather was always a source of anxiety—too little or too much rain could ruin an entire growing season and throw the whole family into financial distress. When my daddy stayed up nights worrying about all of this, I stayed up too. I think I was different from most farm kids in that regard. It was just my nature, I guess.

  I remember one year when I was about eleven, I decided I was going to give my mama and daddy a big lift and turn all the soil before the spring planting season. Turning the soil is where you break up all the old soil and allow it to aerate before you plant a new crop. We had a little 1953 Ford Jubilee tractor, bought used from Otis Mitchell for $1,250, and I set out to turn about forty or fifty acres. This included all our family land plus some land we were working under a standing-rent deal.

  The day I finished that job was probably the proudest day of my eleven-year-old life. I had really lightened my daddy’s considerable load.

  Mama worked just as hard as Daddy. She milked cows, fed chickens, canned vegetables, and even churned butter. She churns her own butter to this day. Her only nod to modern times is that she now churns with an electric churning machine. The butter makes itself, she says. All she’s got to do is clean the machine afterward.

  Plus, she made all our clothes. She could make anything. When I was going to grade school, she made everything I wore—pants, shirt, even my cap. As Reba remembers, Mama was so good that she would spot a new dress in a Sears, Roebuck catalog and proceed to make it without a pattern. Later on, Mama wrote a gospel song that included the lines, “If the garment fits you well, the pattern you must know.” It was an analogy about instinctively knowing the way of the Lord, but Reba says every time she hears those lines, she remembers the seeming miracle of Mama’s making a dress that fit from scratch, already knowing the pattern.

  As I said, Mama was quite the looker in her day, and though we didn’t have money for fancy clothes for her, she figured out a way of getting some. Her aunt Mary, my great aunt, lost her husband due to injuries from World War I when she was in her early twenties and then suffered the cruel fate of losing her son in World War II. The son, named L.C., had graduated from Auburn and soon after got his wings as a navy pilot. He went down on his first or second mission, never to be found.

  Aunt Mary, as we all called her, left Cherokee County, moved to Montgomery, and got a good job at the Alabama DMV. She was a young, single, attractive woman, and the suitors apparently lined up at her door. She would occasionally bring one of her boyfriends up to see us, and they always seemed to drive Cadillacs and throw around money. They would beg Mama to get Aunt Mary to marry them. She was obviously a major catch and in no big hurry to be tied down.

  In any case, these gentlemen callers also bought Aunt Mary clothes, lots of clothes, and when she tired of them, she’d box them up and send them to her sweet niece Martha. It was like Christmas every time one of those boxes arrived. They were hand-me-downs, but they were the finest hand-me-downs in the house, and Mama looked great in them. Later on, my mother took Aunt Mary in as she got older until finally the onset of Alzheimer’s disease forced her to put my aunt in a nursing home.

  Later on in her own life, in the early 1970s, Mama began to take what she would call a “public” job, i.e., a paying job off the farm. As I mentioned earlier, Fort Payne is renowned in the South as a sock-mill town, mostly a center of production of sports and children’s socks. The landscape of the town is peppered with small-and medium-size sock factories. Reba, Rachel, and I all did our stint making socks in our younger years. Many of these sock mills have long shut down since this kind of manual labor moved either across the border or overseas as part of the global economy. But there is still an active sock-making business around here, and for twenty plus years—long after Alabama had hit it big and I could easily afford to help supplement her income—Mama punched in and made socks.

  Her specialty was sewing toes, using a big industrial sewing machine. Nothing but toes. And in her words, “Believe you me, I reckon I thought I had to do more than anybody,” so she often passed on the opportunity to get up from her workstation and relax in the middle of the day. If her back hadn’t given out after twenty years of sewing toes, she’d probably still be working there today. Hard work, in her mind, was part of a clean life, a message I got at a very young age.

  Borrowing money was also a way of life for small-farm people like my parents. That year they made all of $800, they probably had to borrow $400 and pay it back with interest. Every spring they had to make a trip to the local bank to borrow enough to plant a crop and then pray to God that they’d make enough from selling the cotton to repay the loan in the fall. My daddy was a stickler about paying this money back. His word was pretty much the only collateral he had.

  Years later, when I was on the board of the same bank (now Compass Bank) where he used to borrow money, I heard a great story about my dad. One morning, G.Y., as they all called him, walked into the bank to borrow $700. He was planning to buy some cows, go through all the work of getting them on the truck and hauling them down to the stockyards, and then hopefully sell them at a profit. The banker said sure and handed him the money.

  Later that very same day, the banker sees G.Y. coming back down the sidewalk. He walks in and hands the guy his $700 back, plus half a day’s interest. He had driven out to the cattle farm, gotten the cattle, hauled them back to the stockyards, sold them, got immediate payment, and marched right to the bank, all in a span of a few hours.

  The banker had a big laugh. “Hell, G.Y.,” he said, “I can’t make any money like that. You’re borrowing money in the morning and paying it back in the afternoon!” My daddy got the joke but was still glad he had paid that debt so fast.

  It’s often the smallest of details in matters like this that make the deepest impressions. For instance, later when I was in college, I bought a 1972 yellow-and-black Camaro and borrowed the money from the Farm Bureau to pay for it, with my daddy co-signing. The payments, I remember, were $34.98 a month. One month I wrote that check with only $35 in the bank, and it still cleared. My new balance: two cents.

  My daddy told me, “When you’re ready to make the next-to-last payment, make two, and pay the thing off a month early.” I did as he said and got a nice note back from the Farm Bureau that if I ever needed another loan, to give a call. I called them and asked if I’d need my daddy to co-sign the next loan too. They said, “No, son, your signature is good enough now.” With that one small gesture, my word was now as good as my daddy’s.

  During my early years, Daddy mostly farmed, but later in life raising crops took a backseat to trading cattle. He loved the cattle business. For a couple of years he worked directly for his cattle sales outfit in order to learn the ins and the outs of the trade. But mostly he bought and sold commercial cows and calves. He would have loved to have had registered cattle, a business I’m in today, but he couldn’t afford them. Like many things in my life, my own interest in cattle is probably an extension of his dream.

  On one occasion when I was a kid—an occasion indelibly imprinted in my brain—my dad bought some cattle that had originated with a guy from Florida. Noth
ing seemed out of the ordinary until the day a federal inspector and the sheriff showed up at our front door. The sheriff, I remember to this day. His name was Harold Richards. They were there to arrest my dad on a charge in trafficking in stolen cattle.

  My dad had no earthly idea what they were talking about, and I was scared to death that they were going to haul my daddy off to jail. But Harold Richards, who knew my dad well, wasn’t buying the charge. He told the inspector, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not going to arrest G.Y. Owen.” The inspector replied, “Well, he’s got stolen cattle in his possession.” “Well,” said the sheriff, “there’s some other explanation for it.”

  I remember the grief this caused my dad and the sleepless nights when he thought he was going to prison for some scam he didn’t even know existed.

  The straightforward explanation finally came out. The guy in Florida was reporting his cattle stolen so he could collect insurance money, then shipping them to Alabama and selling them to people like my daddy. In other words, the man was getting paid twice for the same cow. Once they figured this all out, my dad was no longer in trouble, but the feeling of injustice has stayed with me forever.

  This kind of screwup happened more than once. Federal officials and other experts with badges would show up at our farm on occasion and ask a lot of insinuating questions about our livestock. But it was probably that first time that did the trick for me. I have always had a real tough spot in my heart for officials like that. They invariably treated my dad like a criminal, a really good man who was as honest as they come. To this day I still resent that feeling I got then of being pushed around and looked down on.

  But most of the time my daddy was a card and a cutup. We’d come in from the fields at night, and Daddy would be ready to play with us. As with a lot of families, city and country, Mama was more often the serious one, the taskmaster, and Daddy was the entertainer. I love my mother to death and feel that I am as much a product of her as I am of him, but Daddy had energy and mischief to burn.