Born Country Page 6

  Daddy also loved to read poetry, especially the poetry of the English-American poet Edgar A. Guest, enormously popular at the time. Edgar Guest wrote poetry that millions of regular Americans enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century, and especially people who weren’t particularly schooled in the finer points of meter and rhyme. He was aptly called the People’s Poet. My favorite poem is “You.” His folksy, easy-to-grasp, plain-speaking poetry would show up in newspapers and books, plus he had a popular radio show in the ’30s and even briefly had a TV show called A Guest in Your Home in the early ’50s.

  My daddy adored the vernacular verses of Edgar A. Guest. Those poems spoke of home, faith, and the simple pleasures of life and were filled with an infectious native optimism. Daddy kept his books around the house, books with titles like All That Matters and Life’s Highway. One of his most famous books, A Heap o’ Livin’, contains his classic poem “Home” that millions like Daddy loved to read and hear read. I’m sure many of you, if you were raised in the South or Midwest, have a grandparent who memorized this poem and maybe recited it around the dinner table. It opens with:

  It take a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,

  A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam

  Afore ye really ‘preciate the things ye lef’ behind,

  An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.

  Listening to my daddy read poems like this instilled in me a love and appreciation of both poetry and words in general that I carry with me to this day. Even before I was conscious of my own passion for such things, I’d begun to write song lyrics in my head, lyrics that would later work their way into early Alabama songs like “Tennessee River” and “Mountain Music.” The link between the words I heard read by Daddy and the words I would spend my life making up is undeniable. By the time I got to college, I was consciously working at writing my own poetry. That’s why I majored in English.

  As I mentioned, my mother started schooling me in the three R’s when I was of the age we’d now call preschool. Since we had neither a radio nor a TV, reading books and listening to stories from my daddy and his friends were about the only ways I could learn about the world. Mama obviously did a good job of giving me a head start, since it led to the decision that I jump from second to third grade in elementary school. This seemingly minor event came back to help me through a critical passage later in my young life.

  I loved school and did fairly well at it up through the eighth grade. No one thinks like this now, but in those days eighth grade was something of a turning point in many people’s lives, much as graduating from high school and college are today. Many of my cousins didn’t finish high school—they just went to work on the farm or in a trade and never looked back. Since I was a bit of a country creature like they were—or at least that’s the way a lot of kids with more money and better clothes saw us—I looked around at my friends and kinfolk and decided to do what they did—drop out of school.

  I was fourteen at the time, having just completed the eighth grade at Adamsburg Junior High, when my daddy got sick from some unknown cause. He had been doing the relentless job of growing, picking, and marketing corn all by himself for years, and he had nobody around to jump in and help him out. It killed me, as his only son, to see my daddy hurt, and it hurt even more when he was helpless to do the most important job to keep the family going—farming corn. So I made the decision to drop out of school and do it myself.

  At that point, we had a hundred and some acres of corn, most of it on rented land and ready to be picked. So while the other kids went back to class, I picked the corn, shoveled it into the truck, and hauled it off to the marketplace to sell. While that had been a tough job for my father, it was doubly tough for a fourteen-year-old working out in the field on his own. The corn was green, and the shoveling was especially backbreaking work. You grow up fast doing hard labor like that.

  A near tragedy took place in those fields—I almost got my right hand cut off when I caught it in the old corn picker we had at the time. How it got stuck in there, I can’t remember, but within seconds one of those blades would have come around and lopped it clean off. Fortunately, I jerked it out instantaneously, suffering only a ripped-off fingernail, or I would have never played the guitar again.

  The corn got harvested and marketed, and I stayed out of school for about a year and a half, working alongside my daddy after he got back on his feet. It was a good life, as far as I could tell. I could work with my daddy, play guitar with him, and have a lot more time to hang out and hear his stories. And it might have stayed that way if I hadn’t decided to get a summer job down at the junior high school. I was working around the school as a caretaker to make a few extra bucks, when I bumped into the principal, Mary Ellis. She was a beautiful, red-headed woman with a deep Southern accent. For reasons I will never quite understand, she took an interest in me and began to look into my school records.

  She said, “Randy, I went back in the files and checked your grades, and you made great grades! You even skipped the second grade and moved right into the third. Why aren’t you still in school?”

  I had no good answer for her—I think I tried to explain that none of the other people in my family continued on in school and that at one point my daddy really needed my help—but she wasn’t buying any of it. She insisted I try to get back in school, if I wanted to, and assured me I wouldn’t have any trouble. I was more than a little worried. By that point I had been out of school for almost two years. What if I couldn’t cut it anymore?

  Actually, when I sat down with the high-school principal to reapply to high school, he thought pretty much the same thing. He wasn’t sure I had actually finished the eighth grade, and in any case, a year and a half had elapsed—I was now sixteen—and I was probably wasting both of our time. Maybe he didn’t like the way I looked. At the time, I was dark—heavily tanned from being outdoors all the time—with a full beard and the body of someone used to physical labor. Maybe he thought I had already found my chosen career path.

  When I took this message back to Mrs. Ellis, she was not happy. After she finished cursing him for his obvious by-the-book shortsightedness, she wrote him a letter and sent it over, special delivery, along with a full report on my grades from the first grade on. She told me to go back there and sign up again, and if the principal gave me any grief, she’d be over in his office in no time.

  Where do angels like Mrs. Ellis come from? I had had some great teachers in junior high, but she wasn’t one of them. She had no vested interest in my education. She just took a liking to me, for whatever reason, and by going to bat for me at that critical turning point, she changed my life forever.

  So I reenrolled in high school in the second semester of that year, which meant I was at least a year or more older than anyone else in the class. And I was a little rough around the edges. I looked like a buffed-up field hand, and my hands were stained with “cotton dust.” This was particularly embarrassing. Cotton dust is very fine and gets into the pores of your skin. You can’t really wash it off. You have to sweat it out. If you sweat a little, your skin turns a brown/black from the mixture of dust and dirt. It looks like you forgot to clean up before coming to school.

  And though I was still shy and self-conscious in my social interactions, I had developed the defensive attitude that comes with being a poor working boy in a classroom full of “city” kids. I was hard as a rock from working, and that helped give me a new-found meanness. I was just waiting for somebody to say something I didn’t like so I could smack him in the head.

  I guess I needed that surly chip on my shoulder to get me through that rough transition. I needed to feel that God had a special hand on me at the time. It worked. I wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Bring it on, pal, and I’ll eat your lunch.

  So, like preparing to walk into battle, I walked into the school that first day, and someone told me to go to my homeroom. I didn’t know what a “home
room” was. I’d never been to one. Finally I found mine, and as I walked into the classroom and across the room, this big lug of a ninth grader was holding a pint-sized kid out the window, threatening to drop him from the second floor. He apparently found this entertaining, and there was no one else in the room who was going to do anything about it.

  This was my battle, I guess. Without much hesitation, I walked over and said to the bully, “Put him back in here.” He instinctively said, “No way.” Then he turned, slowly looked me over, and finally said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m the guy,” I said, “who’s gonna whip your ass if you don’t put him back in here.”

  I had already committed mentally to following through with my threat, and I think the guy knew this. He picked the little boy up and set him back down in the room. The kid ran over and got behind me like I was his older brother, and the bully just sneered and walked away. I guess it was my initiation rite into high school. I was there to stay, on my own terms.

  A short time later that same first day, I almost lost it again. When I came in that morning, I was chewing gum. My grandma Owen loved Beeman’s chewing gum, and she would give us kids a block every once in a while as a big reward for completing some chore. My parents chewed gum, too, as a kind of breath freshener. Beeman’s gum bordered on being a luxury in my house.

  So, the young teacher strolled in, saw me chewing a big wad of gum on the first day of school, and said, “Hey, young man, what are you doing chewing gum in my classroom?” I answered, “It makes my breath smell better.” The whole class broke out laughing, at my expense. Only a boy from the sticks would chew gum to sweeten his breath, they all figured. The teacher laughed too.

  I was deeply embarrassed and ready to knock the guy through the wall. I was waiting, almost hoping, he’d pop off again so I could teach him a lesson. Teacher or not, he was making fun of me, and I hated it.

  As punishment, the teacher decided I should sit in the very front of the class, right next to him, and for about two weeks he’d come in every day and sit down at my side. I kept waiting for him to say something I didn’t like so I could settle the score. He didn’t, thank God, or my high-school career would have been over in a matter of weeks.

  My redemption came soon after when a wonderful teacher named Mrs. Biddle administered what was to be my first high-school test, a test I remember in great detail. It was on diagramming sentences. After the test was done and Mrs. Biddle had graded them, she came over to my desk and asked, “Mr. Owen, where have you been going to school?”

  “I haven’t been going nowhere,” I sheepishly answered. Another big classroom guffaw.

  “Well,” she said, “just so the rest of you in class know, Mr. Owen made 99.5 on this test. And the rest of you flunked.” Talk about a proud moment. From then on, I was no longer the gum-smacking country boy in the room.

  Mrs. Biddle, Mrs. Landstreet, Mrs. Hawkins, Mrs. Mallory, Mr. Holtzclaw, Mr. Guice, Mr. Shipp, Mr. Roche…these names mean nothing to you, but they were some of the most important people in my life. Those caring, patient, encouraging teachers made a huge difference in my life at a very critical point. Outside of my parents, they were the adults who guided me into adulthood.

  I was happy to be back in school and continued to set my educational goals higher and higher. I didn’t want to be looked down at or made fun of because my hands were covered with cotton dust or my clothes were a little threadbare, and I figured the more educated I became, the less that would happen. My daddy, on the other hand, was sad. I had made the decision to go back to school without much prodding from either parent. I think it broke my daddy’s heart because he’d had his buddy with him all the time, working at his side, swapping stories and easing his load, and now he was gone.

  That was probably the last sustained period of time that my daddy and I spent together—after high school, I was off to junior college, then college, and only home for a month or two at a time. Then every summer, my cousins and I relocated to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to help get Alabama off the ground, and during the winters we worked hard elsewhere. For that reason alone, I’m so glad, in retrospect, that I quit school for that year so I could simply be with my daddy all day every day. I didn’t realize at the time how little time was left for us to be together.

  I spent a lot of time in high school around people who went looking for trouble, found it, and ended up on the wrong side of the law. For whatever reason, I sidestepped serious trouble. I had a sixth sense about when it was coming and when it was time to simply move in the other direction. Again, looking back, I felt like that hand of God was nudging me in the right direction. Or I was just damn lucky.

  I wanted to play all sports in high school—that’s a good way to stay out of trouble—but I never did get to play on any team but the baseball team. I was interested in sports like football and wrestling, but there was the inevitable conflict between practice time and working on the farm. Working on the farm always won out. Finally, I got to play organized baseball my senior year, for Coach Chambers, won a letter, and loved every minute of it. I think we won all of three games.

  My cousin Teddy Gentry, grandson of my father’s older sister, Ollie, grew up nearby, and we spent a lot of time together, often playing music with our other cousins or other family members. I didn’t have a blood brother, but I had the next best thing.

  By the time we were in our teens, Teddy, eventually the bass player for Alabama, was playing off and on with various rock bands in the area, bands with names like the Shifters and Bickerson Flash. At an early age, he was learning many of the cover songs we’d later play to survive as a group. I never met anyone in those days with whom I really wanted to play. I wasn’t particularly interested at the time in learning to sound exactly like one of the Top 40 bands of the era. I’d occasionally play with my family and in other pick-up situations, but mostly I kept to myself, tried to learn more guitar skills, and took my first steps toward writing my own songs.

  I kept getting encouragement to carry on with music, from my daddy, for sure, but also from other wonderful people like my cousins Sonny and Linda Reece. Sonny and Linda ran a nearby place called Bingham’s Barn Dance, and all through high school and early college, they’d hire me to sit in with the house band—I played piano and organ—and sing a song or two. Like the caring teachers I had in high school, the Reeces kept nudging me in the right direction.

  Another cousin of Teddy’s and mine, a more distant relative, was a year or so ahead of me in high school and already an accomplished musician. He was more of a “city” boy; that is, he had grown up in metropolitan Fort Payne and not on top of a mountain. His name was Jeff Cook. Although I had never seen myself as much of a singer, let alone a lead singer, I ended up singing a song with Jeff’s band on one occasion at a public performance at Fort Payne High School. I guess that was the beginning of the beginning.

  Then one Sunday afternoon—I was eighteen at the time—Teddy and I decided to get together with Jeff at Jeff’s house in Fort Payne. Jeff was definitely a step or two ahead of us—he had a little more money, a little more worldliness, and he was already married. I had brought along a song I had written. It was called “Jeannie Brown.” It was a true life story about a girl, Jeannie Brown, whom I had gone with. But she’d pulled away, saying she didn’t want to be pinned down. She wanted to get away and take a few risks. I guess you’d say the song was about our sad parting.

  Anyway, the three of us fooled around on our instruments for a while and then played this song. To me, it was a real eye-opener. What was unique about the experience was that we were singing together on an original song, not some worn-out rock-’n’-roll or country standard. We were all willing to throw caution to the wind and do something all our own. So we continued to work it up and perfect it, and along the way we took the first tentative steps toward a musical bond and a shared musical vision that would continue for the next forty years.

  Soon after that, we were calling ourselves Young Countr
y. That would later change to Wildcountry and finally, inevitably, to Alabama.

  First we had to decide who would play what. From the time my daddy had given me my first acoustic Stella guitar, I had considered myself a guitar player, a lead guitar player. That’s what I did. Jeff had other ideas. He announced that he wanted to be the lead guitar player and that I could play guitar, but in a supportive role. I could also be the featured singer, but even at eighteen, I still didn’t picture myself as the guy out in front.

  In one of those decisions that you look back on and see as absolutely critical, I went along with the plan. Jeff would play lead, Teddy would play bass, and I would play what is generally known as rhythm guitar. I think I originally accepted that decision for what I thought was the good of the group, a group I wanted to be a part of. It ended up as a decision that allowed me to exploit my strongest talents as a singer-songwriter and allowed Jeff to exploit his obvious gift as a master guitarist, not to mention his chops on the fiddle and a half dozen other instruments.

  This lineup went a long ways toward determining what later became the sound of Alabama. I evolved a style as a rhythm guitarist that depended heavily on what are known as bar chords. Bar chords are created when you hold a chord and you hit every note in the chord by playing all six strings at once. It was a sound I particularly liked—it was bigger and fuller than normal rhythm guitar picking—and I came to use it on virtually every Alabama song I played on. It was a full-throttle rock-’n’-roll approach to playing rhythm guitar, a long way from a more delicate kind of country thumb picking in the style of Merle Travis or Chet Atkins. I used a very thick pick. I wanted to hit those strings hard and make sure you heard every note slightly out of tune.