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  He was a great swimmer, for instance, one of the most awesome swimmers I ever knew. It was part of that boyish enthusiasm he had for the outdoors. He loved the water and would swim up, sideways, backward, for hours. Mama couldn’t swim at all. Daddy tried to teach her a hundred times, but it didn’t take.

  He loved to drive like a madman on the mountain’s country roads—fishtailing, squealing tires, scaring his kids half to death. He loved car racing, at least as far as listening to NASCAR on the radio. We didn’t have a radio for years, but when we finally got one, Daddy and I would tune in a race and listen to the crash-by-crash broadcast. His own favorite car trick was to fill our car up with gas—never more than a dollar’s worth, as I remember—then shut the engine off at the top of every hill in the area so we’d pretty much coast off the mountain into town. I loved it. It was like riding a soapbox-derby car, a free ride. At the bottom of the hill, he’d pop the clutch and roar on down the road.

  And he told stories. In a house with no radio and TV and a life far from town, storytelling was a major form of entertainment, and my daddy was good at it. Back in the days when foxes were plentiful around the mountain, my dad and his buddies would go on overnight fox hunts, and I’d tag along every chance I could. It was a social outing more than anything. They’d march out into the woods, wearing their Liberty overalls and accompanied by their favorite fox dogs, bring along a pint jar full of pinto beans and cornbread all mixed together, build a fire, and tell stories.

  Oh, yeah, they’d finally get around to turning the fox dogs loose to hunt down a fox—to “sic ’em” or “cast ’em.” You could tell by a dog’s bark whether he had succeeded in treeing a fox, but it didn’t really matter all that much. They never shot one, to my knowledge. They loved the foxes and never intended to kill one. It was all about the chase, and the storytelling.

  One of my favorite fox stories involved a dog Daddy called Old Red. Daddy loved the dog and felt bad about selling him, but a man from Rock City, Georgia, almost forty miles from our farm, offered a hundred dollars, and Daddy couldn’t turn the money down. Most people back then wouldn’t pay anywhere near a hundred hard-earned dollars for a fox dog, even a good one. Daddy would tell us about one old boy who was looking for a dog with a good “squalling mouth.” Someone offered to sell him one for a hundred bucks, and his reply was, “Oh, good God, no. If I had to pay a hundred dollars for a fox dog, I’d squall louder than the dog!”

  One day, my dad and my uncle Virgil were sitting around, and Daddy was bemoaning the fact that he no longer had Red to “put in” on a fox. Virgil walked out to the road, turned to Daddy, and said, “Well, here he is, right here.” The dog had jogged home from Rock City, and it was clear that if Daddy had taken him back to his now-rightful owner, he would have just turned around and come back to our farm. The man understood that the dog was never going to switch homes, so they worked out a new deal for Red to stay with us. Which made perfect sense to me. Here he had a beautiful canyon and woods and open fields to run foxes on. If I were a fox dog, I wouldn’t leave here either.

  As my sister Reba would certainly confirm, Daddy held center stage in our family. Next to him, I was the quiet one. I never wanted the spotlight. It was reserved for him. I was shy, undemanding, and easygoing. Certainly early on, Reba got into a lot more trouble at school than I did. If I got worked up about something, I generally held it inside and rarely showed it to the outside world. Even when I began to take an interest in music, my goal was to learn the guitar and play in the background but never to sing, let alone be the lead singer. And even when I began to sing onstage, I never wanted to talk or dance around onstage.

  But when I finally came out of my shell and began to put myself out there, I always had one good model to point the way—my fun-loving daddy.

  In general, I was the son of a farmer—or as Mama first described Daddy, “a good clean farm boy”—the first twelve years or so. People ask me all the time, “Why do still live up there?” Why do I choose, a lifetime later, to live so close to my childhood home, right down to the same acres of land I farmed with my father and so close to my mother, my sisters, and all the other relatives within shouting distance?

  The answer is always the same: because this is home.

  I could live somewhere else. I could live anywhere, really, as long as Kelly went along with the decision. Country performers these days live all over the world. They come to Nashville to record and attend industry functions like the CMA Awards or Fan Fair. Otherwise, they are on the road much of the year, living out of a touring bus, and then go home to places as wild and exotic as an island in the Caribbean, a house in Jamaica, a farm in Australia, or a beachfront home in Hawaii.

  For whatever reason, I’ve never had the desire to live in any of those places. I love to visit them and visit friends who live there. Some stars have two or three homes. I’ve always only had one home. Here. At home.

  It’s pretty simple, really. If I relocated to any other spot on earth, it might be heavenly, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. It wouldn’t be where my heart is and near the hearts of my mother, my two sisters, all my other blood relations, and now my children. This mountain is our heart. This mountain is our home.

  I think it all goes back to the kind of childhood my sisters and I had. We had a wonderful, loving support system growing up. We didn’t have money, we certainly weren’t indulged in any way, and we never felt entitled to anything. But if things had been awful at home, if our parents had been troubled and full of bitterness at their fate, if drugs or alcohol had poisoned the atmosphere, then any one of us might have wanted to leave and never come back. Thanks to God, that didn’t happen. We’re all three here because of the good times we had, because of the memories and the love we shared and continue to share. All of that is irreplaceable and everlasting. So why would we ever want to leave?

  I go away from here a lot—in the heyday of Alabama we were on the road sometimes for 250 to 300 days a year—but when I come back, it is ultimate reality. At least it’s my ultimate reality, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

  Plus, you can’t beat a life centered on soul-stirring Southern gospel music.

  CHAPTER 2

  GOD AND MUSIC

  We sat down at the table and thanked God in prayer

  Cause we had plenty to eat and plenty to wear

  We had patches on our britches but Momma kept us neat

  We had food on the table and shoes on our feet

  “FOOD ON THE TABLE” BY RANDY OWEN

  The four constants in my life, then and now, are, in no particular order—work, faith, family, and music. And they are all deeply intertwined. The music I write and perform is largely about work, faith, and family. The music I was raised on was largely the rich Christian tradition of Southern gospel music. In the late 1960s, my parents and sisters formed their own gospel group, the Owen Family, and played together for the next twenty years. As a kind of coming-home gesture, I guess, the last two original Alabama albums at the time of this writing were both made up entirely of inspirational music, most of them songs my cousins and I have known since we first learned to carry a tune. It was like coming full circle, musically.

  Faith is at the root of all this. My sister Reba, a very devout woman, probably puts it best. Ask her about anything to do with her life or my life—my success, talent, good fortune, and overcoming some difficult times—and her answer will be pretty much the same: “It’s God,” she’ll say. “Because He is in charge. He is in charge of everything that happens in our lives. You have to go on faith and trust that He knows what He’s doing. And it’s in the asking. If you never ask, you aren’t going to receive what you want and need. The Bible says He will supply your needs if you give Him honor.”

  There is a favorite family story that we all like to recount to drive this point home. When Reba and I were in grade school, we drank water out of an old well at school, a pretty common thing back then. Apparently the sewer system had backed up int
o the well water and contaminated the system with bacteria. A lot of kids got hepatitis, including Reba and me.

  I was especially affected, and everyone in the family thought I might not make it. Mama and Daddy didn’t rush either of us off to the doctor’s office. In that day and time, it simply wasn’t their first impulse. Doctors were expensive—health insurance was unheard of—and they had little contact with them. They weren’t opposed to organized medicine—it was just unfamiliar to them.

  Their first impulse was to pray. My aunt Lillie and uncle “H.” came over and prayed for us. At the time, I hadn’t eaten anything for two or three days. The whole family prayed hard, then took a good long look at me and said, “Randy, do you think you could sit up and eat some ham?” And I said, “Yes, I believe I can.” I still felt sick as a dog, but I got up out of bed and started eating the cured ham they were serving up. And I never went back. Almost instantly—miraculously—I was over the hepatitis and have never been that sick since.

  When something like that happens to you, in that kind of miraculous way, it gives you faith. We all believed then, and continue to believe, that God healed me that day. It took Reba much longer to recover from her sickness. If you asked her today, she’d tell you that at the time, she didn’t have as much faith as I did. She was weak, she’ll say, and only later did the Lord intercede and strengthen her faith.

  To this day I still wonder what might have happened if the family hadn’t gathered in prayer for my recovery and I hadn’t gotten out of that bed to eat a little ham.

  This may sound corny, but I sincerely believe, and have since that hepatitis incident, that God has had his hand on me, protecting me in some way and directing me to do His work, however badly I might stumble through the assignment. Like millions of people, I pray every night, and I’m proud to do it. I go to the local Methodist church every time I can for one simple reason—going to church for me is a soothing, reassuring experience. It’s a special place, and as long as it’s Protestant, I can understand what’s going on. I really don’t know much about other churches, which doesn’t mean I’m wrong or they’re right. You can get up and leave an address or a location, but it’s hard to leave a culture.

  I don’t practice religion with the same rigor and devotion as my mama and my two sisters, but I do think I practice it in a practical, hands-on way. I try to direct at least part of my daily life toward the needs of others. That might be my kids, my wife, my many relatives, or the much larger family of the St. Jude organization and other worthy charities. If I have a personal ministry, it is in the charity work I do, from St. Jude to helping young farmers-to-be in Alabama get a foothold in life, and the older I get, the more that kind of work means to me.

  And the sense that God has a hand on me and I’m in His presence doesn’t leave me when I’m out on the road or otherwise absorbed in the day-to-day business of making music. Reba likes to recount the dozens of times I’d be about to go onstage and I’d call Mama and say, “Mama, it’s really stormy and dangerous here. I need you to pray that the weather lets up.” And sure enough, more than once, the weather would clear so we could perform. You tell me that Mama’s incessant prayers for our safety and well-being didn’t matter.

  Being constantly on the move, constantly overwhelmed by all the energy and excitement that goes into performing before fifteen to twenty thousand people every night, can easily leave you in a never-never land somewhere between the show world and the real world. You often don’t even know what city you’re in, like you’re helplessly wandering around in some altered reality of backstage dressing rooms. Amidst all that chaos and madness, I’ve never really felt alone. I certainly have my parents, and my parents’ faith, to thank for that.

  My daddy had a similar health crisis as my hepatitis when he was thirteen, in the early 1930s. He caught pneumonia, a very bad case, and given the way his family lived in those days—poor, self-sustaining farmers far out in the country—they didn’t exactly rush him to the local ER. On the most critical night of his illness, a large group of family and friends formed a prayer vigil outside the farmhouse and prayed all night for his recovery.

  Meanwhile, inside, his own mother, my grandma Owen, spent the night rubbing his chest with coal oil. I guess it worked something like Vicks VapoRub does today, as a topical salve that had some effect on easing the pneumonia. Either because of the intense prayer, or the coal oil, or both, my daddy survived the night and slowly recovered. Along the way, unfortunately, his heart and lungs were damaged.

  Later on Daddy was turned down for service in World War II because of his damaged heart. He tried to make up for that by growing as much corn and cotton as he could to help the war effort. When I was a youngster, he decided that his impaired health dictated that he stop smoking. This was long before 12-step programs and Nicorette gum. I remember vividly the day he took a pack of Winstons out of his pocket and placed it on the mantel above the fireplace.

  “That’s it,” he said, “I have officially quit.”

  That pack of Winstons stayed up there for years, and he never smoked another cigarette. Given all the trouble most people havestopping smoking, the older I get, the more astounding I find it that he had the ability, the willpower, to just up and quit, and quit for good.

  Health matters aside, faith’s deepest connection in my boyhood was with music. Faith and music were two sides of the same coin. As I described, Mama and Daddy played and sang together from the moment they met. Daddy had a sister, Lela, and the three of them were performing at sing-ins and tent meetings. Church music was simply a part of my family’s collective DNA.

  First in church, at weekend sing-ins, and in the family living room, then later on radio, and finally on TV, white gospel music was always in the air. Back in the days of black-and-white TV, if you got the antenna turned just right, you could see classic groups like the Spear Family and the Singing LeFevres perform Southern-gospel music on Sunday afternoon out of, say, a station in Atlanta. That was a big deal in my household—a group of people, mostly kinfolk, gathering around a static-filled black-and-white TV screen to watch this music, in the same way people in the ’50s in New York City probably gathered around to watch New York–based shows like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners. As a little kid, I vividly remember that Eva Mae LeFevre, the wife of Urius, sister-in-law of Alphus, was the piano player for various incarnations of the group. In those days, she was the only female onstage, and she dressed much nicer than the men.

  I don’t remember seeing black gospel music on television, but you could hear it on radio, and my parents always spoke highly of it. To them, there were two kinds of church music: “proper” music, sung in perfect pitch, note to note, without deviating from the musical text; and music filled with spirit, infused with high energy and spontaneity, an uninhibited outpouring of the soul. Both black and white gospel music share this joyful exuberance. In many ways, they were much the same music, just sung in slightly different styles in two different cultural traditions.

  My daddy was a born guitar player. That was his passion. Right before I was born, I’m told, he sold his favorite guitar for ten or fifteen bucks because they needed the money. I can’t remember what age I was—probably around six or seven—but I distinctly remember his saying, “You know, I think I really need to get me another guitar.” He did just that, and I sat at his feet, watching him play. He tuned his guitar in a funny way, a way I have never figured out to this day. Then he announced, “Well, playing this way is going to be much harder for you, son, so I’ll tune it like everyone else does.”

  So he played whenever he could, and I soon became consumed with the thought of playing myself. It was all his fault, so to speak.

  Daddy bought me a little acoustic guitar, called a Stella, and began to show me a few chords. The fact that I could pick the strings at all was something of a miracle itself, given a near-tragic accident that I had had years before when I was about two and a half. Daddy was driving a rental car while his truck was getting fi
xed, and when I got into it, I slammed the door on my thumb and cut the end clean off. I can’t recall what happened after that, because I was in shock and later sedated, but Daddy rushed me to a local doctor who sewed my thumb tip back on. I spent the next year or so with a thumb brace so it could heal. Mama kept it clean and made sure I didn’t overuse it, and my thumb eventually grew back into a functional digit. Without my daddy’s quick action, that half thumb could have ended my guitar picking before I could write my name.

  With all my fingers and thumbs, it didn’t take long for me to learn the basics. It was crazy. As my mama would say, “It just come natural.” Perhaps because, at the time, I was shy, isolated, and stuck close to home, I advanced so fast at basic guitar skills that Daddy came to me one day and said, “I’d like to show you more, son, but you’re way past me already. So we’ll just play together.” For a preadolescent kid, it was a genuine thrill to be able to pick up a guitar and play alongside my dad.

  I especially liked it when he bragged on me. The fact that he thought I had done something well meant a lot to me. Every performer, musician, actor, or stand-up comedian has a need to be recognized, to be seen. Given my incredible shyness, maybe I had even a greater need for that kind of public approbation. Especially if the public I was performing for was my daddy.

  As I said, Daddy gravitated toward the guitar style of the great Merle Travis. Even early on, I felt inspired by a man who himself was inspired by Merle Travis: Chet Atkins. We all loved the close harmony of popular ’40s and ’50s gospel groups like the Louvin Brothers (from Section, Alabama), the Florida Boys, and the Delmore Brothers (from Elkmont, Alabama), not to mention the Speer Family (with the built-in-maybe family connection), the Stamps Quartet, the Lefevres, and a dozen more.