Born Country Read online

  I remember one particular gospel song that my daddy just loved: a Florida Boys recording of “Daddy, Hold My Hand.” We had it on a 33 that we got on sale down at Bargain Town in Fort Payne. I never saw it on another record. When I was producing the first inspirational music project for Alabama decades later, I thought seriously about doing that song, because my daddy had loved it so much. I even tried to track down Les Beasley, the lead singer and manager of the Florida Boys for forty-plus years and a major figure in spreading gospel music on television. By the time he got the message, unfortunately, the record was done, without that song. Maybe next time.

  Daddy introduced me to secular country music as well. It was pretty much in the air we breathed in Alabama in the 1950s and ’60s. After all, perhaps the greatest country singer-songwriter of all time, the great Hiram King “Hank” Williams Sr., was born in Georgiana, Alabama, and buried in Montgomery. He was an absolute hero to my daddy and most others in our area. Plus, the weekly broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry on WFM came from Nashville, only a hundred and sixty miles away.

  One country song in particular that I associate with my daddy in those days is the Buck Owens mid-’60s classic “Love’s Gonna Live Here.” Daddy just loved that song. It had a special meaning to him that went far beyond just being a catchy country tune. Perhaps because of personal sorrows I knew nothing about, it made a deep connection.

  Daddy kept farmer’s hours and got up early, around 5:30 every weekday morning. His first assignment was to build a fire in the fireplace. It was our only source of heat. Later he taught me how to build the fire, but until then, I was usually tucked away and fast asleep and would be stirred awake by the crackling and popping of the wood as it burned and sent embers up the chimney. I didn’t have an alarm clock. Those popping sounds were my wake-up call.

  As the rest of us slept and that fire got going, that’s when Daddy would get out his guitar and play. And after we got a radio, he would tune it in to listen to the local farm programs to find out the current price of hogs or what was going on in the corn market. Then he would find a country-music station or a show like The Little Red Barn—the theme song was “In a Little Red Barn (On a Farm Down in Indiana)”—on station WOWO, a clear-channel AM outlet out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, or something on WHO out of Des Moines, the same station that once hired Ronald Reagan to recreate Chicago Cubs baseball games. You could hear these faraway stations crystal clear at 5:30 in the morning. It was pitch dark outside, which added to the quiet and solitude of the situation—my dad, guitar in hand, sitting next to the light of an early-morning fire, thumb-picking and singing gospel tunes.

  We all loved to hear Daddy play the guitar at any time of the day. To this day, Mama keeps his last guitar tucked away under her bed every night. She says it gives her comfort.

  My radio tastes were a little different than Daddy’s. I listened to everything. As you’ll probably hear more than once in thisbook, I never wanted to sing. That was the furthest thing from my mind until my late teens. I just wanted to play the guitar. I didn’t mind singing with the family—in the background—but when I was listening to my own brand of music and absorbing all the different riffs of popular music, I was focused on guitar picking.

  As for the popular country music of the time, I just idolized Merle Haggard. Even at a pretty young age, I could hear the deep conviction in his voice and knew he was an incredible songwriter. Songs like “Sing Me Back Home” and “Today I Started Loving You Again” evoked real life much more profoundly than most popular music, country or otherwise. But I was far from immune to the pop hits of the day, from “Sugar Shack” by Jimmy Gilmore and the Fireballs to anything that came out of Elvis Presley’s mouth.

  After we got a radio in the house, I couldn’t wait to get home and turn it on and listen to Jett Fly (otherwise known as Tommy Jett) on WFLI out of nearby Chattanooga. It would be the full range of pop music, from the Four Seasons to Motown. And because it was AM, you could hear it loud and clear.

  My early teens were also the period when pop music was getting ready for the British Invasion. If you paid attention, you started to hear the utterly fresh sound of British imports like the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, and of course the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was entirely new, at least to my Southern ears: new attitude, new harmonies, new recording styles. And it all worked its way into the yet-undiscovered Alabama style. I remember staying up late at night and listening to a show called the British Countdown out of WHK in Cleveland, Ohio, the future home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. My parents, as far as I knew, weren’t aware that I was listening to music like that.

  As for the two powerhouse groups, I liked the Beatles more at the time, but today I’d have to say I find the Rolling Stones more compelling. My guess is, looking back, that the harmonies of these English rock groups had as much to do with the later harmonies of Alabama as did the country-gospel groups like the Louvin Brothers. It may all be part of a long continuum. Early on, the Beatles did covers of songs by the Everly Brothers, a country group very similar in sound to early gospel duos and quartets.

  My second guitar was a Harmony Archtop and around the time I was listening to late-night radio, my daddy bought me a Supro electric guitar with a Premiere amplifier. It was beautiful—all white. I still have a picture of Rachel, Reba, me, and that guitar over Mama’s piano but she won’t part with it. It’s the only such picture that exists.

  As I worked to master it, I used to take that guitar and amplifier out to the front porch, turn the amp wide open, and play my heart out. You could probably hear my second-class rendition of Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man” all over Lookout Mountain. Again, I never thought about singing—just playing that guitar. And, I swear, there is nothing in the world that sounds any better than the sound of a single electric six-string guitar being picked on a porch at night way out in the country. There was nothing going on out there soundwise other than a few crickets or cicadas. It was like the whole world came to a halt to hear you play that guitar. It was magical.

  All of my family was involved in music in one way or another, but when I was about nineteen, Mama and Daddy decided to put together a formal gospel group, the Owen Family, and perform together on a regular basis. By that time Reba was married and out of the house, and I was pursuing my own eclectic musical tastes, so the original group was Mama on piano, Daddy on guitar, Rachel on bass guitar, and Reba playing tambourine and harmonizing.

  Rachel, as I said, was much younger than Reba and I—thirteen years younger than I, eleven years younger than Reba. She started singing in church, she recalls, when she was about five and became the third mainstay in the Owen Family at age eleven. By then Daddy thought she knew all the notes well enough to harmonize with him. Daddy sang lead on almost every tune. Mama loved his voice—he could sing soprano or tenor and any kind of harmony. “If you could carry a tune,” she said, “he could sing with you.” He didn’t sing bass, however. He apparently didn’t have the voice for it.

  At some point Rachel took up the bass guitar. Mama remembers going to work at one of the sock mills for two weeks to raise the funds to buy her an old red bass guitar and amplifier from my daddy’s nephew Odis. Daddy was no bass player himself, but he taught her a few chords, and she basically taught herself from there on. She never had a formal lesson.

  The Owen Family, once constituted, played for any local country church that asked them to play, and they played for free. They played mostly evening performances to an average crowd, according to Mama, of a hundred people or less. And over the years, every denomination of small church asked them to play. Daddy was quick to mention that they were once invited to a local Catholic church.

  They traveled, usually in an old Chevy van, to locations mostly in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. They worked their schedule around growing season, harvesting season, and other work. In those days they traveled to little churches often situated on poorly kept dirt roads—they didn’t have the luxury of mud
tires—and it rained a lot. More than once, they ended up in a ditch and someone would have to come along and pull them out. They probably never went more than seventy-five miles to get to a venue, but sometimes it took them quite a while to get there. And, believe me, there were—and still are—a lot of churches within seventy-five miles of Lookout Mountain. They were so busy at some points that they didn’t have a chance to go to church themselves unless they were performing at one. They might play one function on a Sunday afternoon and another one forty miles away that evening. A family church they could call their own, at least during that time, was out of the question.

  And they did it all for the Lord.

  They saw it like a ministry, a ministry of music. They’d show up at a church or church basement, maybe get a little bite to eat if a potluck dinner accompanied their performance, then play God’s music. The only pay they ever received was an occasional love offering. They never set a price, but some churches, especially the bigger ones, might give them some money to pay for gas and other expenses. Reba remembers how flabbergasted they would all be if some congregation came up with a hundred-dollar payment. The work didn’t fill their coffers. It filled their spirit.

  Though she had a young family to raise, Reba would try to join the others at one of these sing-ins every chance she got. If it was any kind of special occasion, she’d be there and so would I. I was perfectly happy to stand in the back and add my guitar to the proceedings and occasionally join the harmony behind Daddy’s lead with Reba or Rachel.

  The Owen Family got around, that’s for sure, and though my role in the group was anywhere from minimal to nonexistent, it doesn’t stop people today from remembering it differently. Whenever I’m out in the world, someone will invariably come up, like a gentleman did recently in Montgomery, and tell me how much he enjoyed seeing me singing and playing with my family the time the Owen Family came to his small country church. As far as I could remember, I had never been to his church, with or without the Owen Family, but I sure wasn’t going to tell him that. I just swapped the titles of a few old gospel tunes with him—“Oh, yeah, we’d play that one every time we’d perform…”—and leave him with a fond memory of an area gospel group that he, and many others like him, obviously enjoyed.

  By the time the Owen Family really got going, I was through high school and in college. There was a period when I joined up with another gospel group—called the Big Rock Singers—but the core group that became Alabama was already working for tips in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when Mama, Daddy, and Rachel were working every church in the greater tri-state Fort Payne area.

  In the late 1970s—Rachel was fifteen at the time—Daddy decided it was time for the Owen Family to cut a record. We all got together on that venture. Simply called The Owen Family, it was a collection of gospel standards like the first cut, “I Am the Man, Thomas.” Daddy sang lead on almost every cut except one where Reba sang lead and one where I did. I sang the lead on the old standard “Silver Headed Daddy of Mine,” since it was a song about a son paying tribute to his dad. There is also an all-instrumental cut that showcases Mama’s splendid piano playing.

  Mama still plays every chance she gets. Besides frequent appearances at local churches like the Rainsville Community Church, the Adamsburg Church of God, Liberty Hill Baptist Church, where many of my kin are buried, and the Mount Carmel Wesleyan Church, she also plays at a lot of funerals. It is a wonderful thing to watch her play. She has this old spinet piano that she’s had forever in her living room, surrounded by the same decor that’s been there for decades. She’ll walk out of her kitchen, take off her apron, and sit down at that piano to play a tune. Once her hands touch the keys, she is transformed. She plays with the spirit running through her veins, the same way she no doubt played that summer long ago when she played for the singing school where she met Daddy. Early on, I learned something from the way Mama played and her attachment to the gospel music that she joyfully performed. This was not just entertainment for a crowd. This was food for the soul. I felt the same way when Alabama later recorded those two inspirational records. They both connected me to the earliest music in my life. Plus, those records brought a smile to my mama’s face.

  My daddy never made any money from his musical endeavors. He never became a gospel star or went on television or was asked to perform on one of the Gaither Homecoming Tours. But I’m pretty sure he dreamed of becoming a commercial success as a singer and guitar player. He loved recording the Owen Family album, and whenever there was an opportunity to play live on a country radio station, he was there. He was a born performer, and he played that urge out as best he could, mostly for love offerings and the gratitude of area country people. He certainly passed that spark of ambition on to me.

  On the other hand, I think a lot of my own ambition came from the inside, not from an outside role model like my mama or daddy. I was born with it, I think. When I was growing up, I never felt like I quite fit in. I never fit in with the guys who went around drinking and partying and starting fights and often ending up in jail or worse. And I didn’t feel too comfortable with the idea of simply following in my family’s footsteps and continuing to work as a small farmer. I love the farm life, that’s for sure. I live on a farm today—more of a ranch, actually—raise cattle and chickens, house three horses, and tend a lot of land. I’ve never had a strong desire to live anywhere else, or in any other way. But growing up, I felt restless and often unsatisfied. I had a deep urge to do more. There seems to be one like me in almost every family—one who hears the faint beat of a different drummer and decides to follow it at a very early age. The restlessness was not an indictment of rural life. Just the opposite—it was a desire to celebrate that life on a much larger stage.

  Simply put, I wanted to be somebody. From the time I was a small child, I tried to do everything I could to please my mama and daddy and make them proud. My mother, a very bright woman, started homeschooling me when I was three because I had an intense desire to learn. By the time I got to the first grade at the Adamsburg Junior High School, I was bored. When I got to the second grade, it was only a few days before the teacher, a very pretty, slender woman named Mrs. Blake, called my mama in for a consultation. I thought I was about to get punished for being so antsy and talking too much in the classroom. No, I was being moved ahead to the third grade. All this meant in those days was moving from one side of the classroom to the other, but it was a big move, and I could tell how much it pleased my mama.

  I had big dreams, probably from the first time I played guitar next to my daddy. And I took those dreams seriously. Later in high school, for instance, I made a conscious decision not to have a serious girlfriend. I chased girls just like the next guy, but I worked at avoiding a situation where I’d get so hooked on a girl that we’d get married and settle down. That was a pretty common scenario where I came from—get married around seventeen or eighteen, go to work to support a family, have a crop of kids, and try to stay one step ahead of the bank.

  I knew that was not what I wanted to do. I don’t know why I knew that, but I did. I didn’t want to find myself with a young wife with small-time dreams, someone who had never given a thought to shooting for something beyond the ordinary and everyday. I was turned off by that outlook. I pretty much kept my ambitions to myself, so it wasn’t a source of tension with others. I never acted like an uppity outsider or music-star-in-training. I just didn’t want to make any serious missteps that might stymie my dream.

  I think that attitude really helped me to focus on pursuing my own goals and perhaps stay away from people who wouldn’t be good for me and the life I wanted to live. If the hard rules of Christian living that my parents practiced taught me anything, they taught me discipline. And I think I set out pretty early to honor their influence and example and give them something back.

  So if I was driven to succeed in the music business, I was driven both by that dream and by the desire to be able to do something for my parents and other family member
s. I don’t really think I was driven by wanting to get out of poverty, and I certainly didn’t just want to be able to give my loved ones money or material things when they needed them. To this day, my mama turns down virtually everything material I offer her. It’s more than money. It’s the ability to make a phone call and help them out of a legal jam, like that incident in my boyhood when my daddy was accused of trading in stolen cattle and I felt he was being treated like a common criminal. Or, again in my daddy’s case, to be able to take him on an airplane ride that he always wanted to go on. I like to be on top, but ego gratification was only a small part of my drive. I wanted to be somebody as much for my parents as for myself.

  CHAPTER 3

  COTTON DUST

  It was July hot ’cross Georgia

  On my way to Myrtle Beach

  I just got my diploma

  so I set out in search of me

  “TAR TOP” BY RANDY OWEN

  My parents weren’t educated beyond the eleventh grade, and they never placed a premium on going to college and getting a degree. Given their background and the way they chose to live, schooling simply didn’t rank high on their list of life achievements. They placed a much greater value on hard work, raising a family, and living a clean, moral, upright life. They were farmers, grounded in the strong faith and folk wisdom of their forebears who lived much the same life they did. Unlike my generation, they didn’t fret much about where their kids might end up. They figured they’d probably end up staying close to home and doing pretty much the same thing and living pretty much the same life as they did.

  But both of them, in their own ways, were able to convey to my sisters and me a love of learning and the power of words. When he wasn’t working all day raising cotton and corn or trading cattle or picking at his guitar, my daddy loved to read and often read aloud to the rest of us. He would sit us down at night and read aloud from the Bible. He could make those stories of ancient Egypt and Israel come to life. I knew it was something special that he would take the time to read to us out loud, but I don’t think I really appreciated it fully until I had my own kids. I’ve tried to pass on to them the sheer pleasure and impact of reading aloud, to themselves and hopefully to their own kids someday.