Copyright © 2006 by Gretchen Wilson
All rights reserved.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: November 2006
ISBN: 978-0-446-50677-9
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Pocahontas Proud
Chapter 2: The Rock
Chapter 3: Here for the Party
Chapter 4: Rebel Child
Chapter 5: Hitting the Small Time
Chapter 6: Nashville Skyline
Chapter 7: The Muzik Mafia
Chapter 8: Baby Grace
Chapter 9: No Bad for a Bartender
Chapter 10: Camp GW
Chapter 11: This Is What I Know
This book is dedicated
to my daughter,
Grace...
You are my reason
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have not only been blessed with the life I’ve been given but also by the wonderful people who surround me and helped make this book possible. They include all the folks we interviewed for the book: my family, Big O, and Big and Rich. Also, David Haskell, Michele Schweitzer, Crystal Dishmon, Dennis Willis, Jess Rosen, Tanya Welch and Tracy Fleaner at Sony, Mel Berger and Greg Oswald at William Morris, my co-writer Allen Rucker, and my editor at Warner Books, Colin Fox.
A special thanks to a few people for giving me some of the greatest advice a new girl can get: John Grady, Connie Bradley, Donna Hilley, Anthony Martin, Sue Leonard, my booking agent Barbara Hardin, and my managers Marc Oswald and Dale Morris.
And last, but not least, one more hug for my precious Grace, who has taught me what it means to truly live. You are my inspiration.
INTRODUCTION
Swinging doors and cleaning floors is all I’d ever known
and out of nowhere somehow I found my yellow brick road
so when you’re broke and paying dues,
look at me I’m living proof
and if there’s hope for me
I know there’s hope for you
“Not Bad for a Bartender”
It was my ninth showcase, I think, my ninth time to go in front of a Nashville record company executive, sing a few songs, and try to walk away with a record deal. The first eight tryouts had been stone-cold rejections, for a hundred reasons. I didn’t have the right look. My hair was dated. I didn’t have the beauty-queen bone structure of many of the female stars currently topping the charts. I was a little too old, a little too heavy, a little too hard-edged, a little too rock and roll, a little too something. Rumor had it that I occasionally chewed tobacco and enjoyed a shot of Jack Daniel’s. My friend Big Kenny thinks that a lot of those deal-making executives, used to new talent that they could dress, mold, and manipulate, took one look at me and said to themselves, “There’s no way in hell I can control that woman.” Well, at least on one count, they were dead right.
So the night before this particular showcase—scheduled to take place in the office of the then president of Sony Music Nashville, John Grady—I found out that the appointment was for eight the next morning. I started freaking out. I called my new manager, Dale Morris, and said, “Dale, eight o’clock in the morning is way too early to sing. I can’t do that. I’m a bartender. I’m a club singer. I’ve been singing from nine P.M. to two A.M. my whole life!”
Dale said, “Well, then, get up at six.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “Get up at six and it won’t seem so darn early. Eight A.M. will seem like ten A.M. and you can sing your heart out.”
And that’s what I did. That morning, waiting to go into that office and sing to a man behind a desk, I was so scared. Doing an in-office musical showcase is always an unsettling experience. You feel so naked standing there, often staring at a lineup of businessmen, and then having to pick a guitar and sing without a microphone, lights, loud amps, or anything else to boost your performance. It’s so hard for someone who’s creative to stand and let someone who’s not creative judge them and tell them whether or not they are worthy of a commercial career. But, in this business, I’d come to realize, it’s just something you have to do, and I had pretty well made up my mind that I wasn’t going to turn tail and quit until they dragged me out of the last room of the last audition.
There was something about this moment that was oddly reminiscent of the very first time I had ever been paid to sing. I was all of fifteen and equally on edge. The venue, so to speak, was a little place called the Hickory Daiquiri Dock Bar and Grill in Collinsville, Illinois, a shotgun bar in a nondescript strip mall. My “act,” never before tested in public, was to sing some much beloved country standards to the unamplified backup of music-only tapes on a portable tape recorder, kind of a homemade, do-it-yourself karaoke machine. I sat on the top of the bar in a blue evening gown and curled-up hair and sang for the Happy Hour crowd at the Dock. I was so scared that first time that I threw up for an hour before going on “stage,” but I did it anyway. I knew I could sing.
I also knew I could sing when I walked into John Grady’s office at eight that morning twelve years later but that was no guarantee that he would agree with me. I felt a little better this time because I had Dale Morris, one of the most powerful managers in Nashville, at my side. I also had Big Kenny and John Rich, then virtual unknowns, playing backup for me. They were people I loved and trusted, two of the soon-to-be-legendary “Godfathers” of the Muzik Mafia, the loose collection of eccentric Nashville singer-songwriters I had hooked up with. Dale Morris said that my only job that morning was to go in, shake hands, sing like it was eleven o’clock at night, and leave. He would take care of any business afterward, should there be any interest from the star-makers across the room.
So I walked in, smiled, shook a few hands, stood there, and started singing. I sang three songs, none of which I had written myself. I was in the middle of a passionate ballad, “Holdin’ You,” which later appeared on my first record, when I glanced up at the only person I was really singing for, John Grady, sitting behind his big desk. He didn’t appear all that interested in my performance. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me. He seemed to be totally distracted, going through his desk drawers, looking for something to write with, like he needed to jot down a grocery list for the trip home that night. It was all very awkward, even more awkward than most in-office, let’s-see-what-you-can-do-kid type auditions. I was trying to keep my cool and not glare back into his eyes, as if to say, nonverbally, “why, you inconsiderate prick.” At the same time I was trying to sing a tender love song—“. . . I feel like I’m falling apart, holding you holds me together . . .”—with some emotion at eight o’clock in the damn morning.
About halfway through the song, I noticed Mr. Grady start to write something on a piece of paper. From my vantage point, I could clearly see him write the letter “n” followed by the letter “o”. As in . . . “NO.” That was it, I thought. He’s passing on me halfway through my three-song set and it looks like he had to write a note to remind himself. He folded the paper up and left it lying there on his desk while I went on to my third and last song. I couldn’t wait to get out of that room.
As we said our goodbyes and headed out the door, I turned to Big Kenny and John and indicated that I was sure the guy hated me and was passing on me; after all, I had seen him writing “NO” right in front of me. About that time, John Grady tapped me on the shoulder, handed me the folded piece of paper, and said, “Here, I w
ant you to have this.” About halfway down the hall, hands shaking, I finally got up the courage to open that note.
It read, “NOW.”
With that one word, the dream I had had since the age of seven started to come true.
I am a redneck woman, and proud to say so. I grew up in rural Illinois, the first child of a single mom who struggled to keep her life, and my life, on track. I grew up living in rental housing of one sort or another: trailers, apartments, tacky little houses, even a camper or two. I dropped out of school at age fifteen and pretty much supported myself as a waitress, bartender, and club and dive singer until I moved to Nashville at age twenty-three. For my first five years in Nashville, until I finally got the break that changed my life, I continued to tend bar, sing for anyone who would listen, and had a baby out of wedlock along the way.
Except for the fact that I got this extraordinary opportunity to write songs and sing about the people I grew up with and feel a deep love and admiration for, I am no different from them. Like them, I’m “just a product of my raising” and I still say “hey y’all” and “yee-haw.”
In many parts of this country, “redneck” is an acceptable slur, along with equally acceptable put-downs like “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “hillbilly.” Low-income rural whites are about the last people in America who seem to be fair game for blatant stereotyping. Even media personalities who should know better regularly refer to Britney Spears as a white-trash queen or a NASCAR fan as a (dumb) redneck whose idea of entertainment is watching a bunch of stock cars going around in circles for hours. NASCAR, not to mention Britney Spears, are of course enormously popular and profitable, so the slurs are not as loud or frequent as they once were, but the attitude is still there. Say the word “redneck” or “trailer trash” in polite company outside of the South and everyone in the room will understand what you’re getting at.
Like I, or any self-respecting redneck, could give a good rat’s ass. We are way past the day where we automatically feel bad because we happen to live in the country, call a trailer our home, or get our hands dirty when we work a wage job. We have an ever-increasing sense of pride in who we are and where we come from, and some of this pride is starting to get noticed. Since I stopped doing work like waitressing and bartending and became known as a singer-songwriter, I have been asked the same question over and over again, whether I was in Stockholm, Sweden, Sydney, Australia, or Darlington, South Carolina. Everyone wants to know what I think it means, in a positive and truthful way, to be a Redneck Woman. I have always had to try and answer that question with one or two short sound bites and it’s always been frustrating. It’s too big a question to answer in a two-minute radio interview.
Since the redneck stereotype still exists in many places, and carries with it some pretty ugly associations of backwardness and racism, I thought this book might be the perfect opportunity to answer that often asked question—What does it mean to be a Redneck Woman?—and to describe in detail what the life of at least one such woman has been like.
As you will see, many of the most important—and powerful—people in my life are women: my incredible grandmother, my Aunt Vickie, my daughter, Grace, my mother, and the women of country music who inspired me from as far back as I can remember. This includes all the tough, resourceful, hardworking women I grew up around, the women I write about and sing about; none of them are “high-class broads.” In many ways, this book is for women, especially women who find themselves in difficult or unglamorous circumstances. Despite the hardships, many such women love their life, have a great time being who they are, and shouldn’t be told, by Hollywood or anyone else, that they should aspire to be something that they’re not. On the other hand, for those women who feel stuck with the wrong job, the wrong husband, or a life they don’t want, I can only repeat over and over again something I learned from my own life: If there is hope for me, there is hope for you.
Many of you already know what I’m talking about, of course, because you live it every day. To the rest of you, men and women, city or country, I say: Welcome to our world.
Now “let me get a big ‘hell yeah’ from the redneck girls like me . . .”
“Hell yeah!”
Again . . .
“Hell yeah!!!”
CHAPTER 1
POCAHONTAS PROUD
I’m the biggest thing that ever came from my hometown
And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let’em down
If it’s the last thing I do before they lay me in the ground
You know I’m gonna make Pocahontas proud.
“Pocahontas Proud”
I grew up in the southern part of Illinois, a kind of no-man’s-land between St. Louis on the west and the Indiana border on the east. The land is flat, as flat as Iowa or western Kansas. The horizon is broken by an occasional silo or water tower but otherwise is endless. There are plenty of cornfields and dairy farms, interrupted by small town after small town with names like Pierron, Dudleyville, Greenville, Edwardsville, Millersburg, and Pocahontas. Some of these towns are so small that their inhabitants just say they’re from a particular county, like Bond County or Madison County. Pocahontas doesn’t even have a grocery store. Pierron doesn’t have a gas station or stoplight. I guess the four hundred people or so who live there don’t need to stop that much.
Travelers whiz by on Interstate 70 from St. Louis to Indianapolis and rarely stop and investigate the places or the people who live within a stone’s throw of that highway. A common saying is, no one comes to Pocahontas who doesn’t already live there. It’s part of a rural society that looks inward to the lives of its neighbors and not outward to the life of the world.
Although Illinois fought for the North in the Civil War, the area of Illinois that I’m from feels a lot more like the South. The region is very close in distance to Southern strongholds like Kentucky and Tennessee, much closer than it is to Chicago and the upper Midwest. The speech is Southern—people say “carn” for corn, “fark” for fork, and “arwl” for oil. The name of the Interstate is Highway “Farty,” not Forty. More importantly, the outlook is more Southern than Northern. The people there feel a part of the great traditional Southern culture that has now made huge inroads into every part of America—country music, stock car racing, pickup trucks, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey. If you think about it, the South really did rise again, and is still rising, in ways no one could have predicted.
My mom, Christine, gave birth to her only daughter, Gretchen Frances Wilson, when she was sixteen. My father, who I didn’t really meet until I was twelve years old, was a local boy she had married at fifteen. Her main reason for marriage, she says, was to get out of her childhood household and escape from a tyrannical father. She dropped out of school in the beginning of the tenth grade and now claims she didn’t have much time for school even when she went because of the demands her father put on her—everything from baby-sitting her younger brother, Vern, to moving rock piles for one of her dad’s many landscaping projects. She soon tired of her new husband (my father) because, even as a teenager, she was forced to work two jobs—waitressing and housecleaning—while he was struggling to find one.
She left my biological father after two years and soon met up with her second husband, my stepfather, who to this day she rightly refers to as “the dark one.” At the time of their marriage, my mom was eighteen and he was twenty-eight. He was a smooth operator, the kind of charmer who could talk anyone into anything. He talked my beautiful, blond, adventurous teenage mom into marriage and made her life—and much of my life—a living hell for the next sixteen years.
My mom married my stepfather for stability and he was anything but stable. He made his living as an itinerant, self-employed contractor and builder—anything from bricklaying to deck-building—and he knew a hundred ways to often talk people out of their money. He would bid a job, for instance, take half the money up front for materials, buy half the materials, do half the work, and then just take off with the
rest of the money. And he’d often do this to people who didn’t have the wherewithal to find him. There were always a lot of angry people looking for him.
In my mom’s words, he was a master at “playing the role.” One way or another, he was always making money but he could waste it on pursuing the next job as fast as he made it. At the end of the day, he never had anything to show for it.
Soon after her second marriage, my mom had another child, my stepbrother, half-brother, Josh, who I now just call my brother since we’ve been so close for so long. Because of my stepfather’s methods of doing business, we were always moving. My stepfather would be ready to walk away from a job half-done or maybe the rent became due on the trailer or apartment we were living in at the moment, and it would be pack-up-and-get-out time. My mom would pack Josh and me, along with the dog and cat and a few meager belongings, into her beat-up Ford Escort and away we would go. Sometimes we’d only go ten miles, from one little town to another, rent another trailer with nothing more than my stepfather’s solemn promise to pay the rent after he got his first paycheck from a job he only claimed to have.
So we were always moving on, always running from debt, never having enough money to stop, plant roots, and live a normal life. I spent a large part of my childhood on the move, never really sure which unfurnished rental unit to call home. Moving was our principal family activity. We moved an average of every three or four months from the time my mom met the dark one until the time I took off on my own at age fifteen. I’m from Pocahontas, but I have lived in some form of temporary residence in Collinsville, Edwardsville, Belleville, Troy, St. Jacob, Greenville, Millersburg, Pierron, and Glen Carbon, all towns in the same general area. Consequently I kept switching school districts every time we moved. Even within one school year, I might find myself as the new kid in class in three or four different elementary or junior high schools. I probably attended twenty different schools from the time I began kindergarten until I finally quit in the beginning of the ninth grade. For both Josh and me, it was an endlessly crazy existence.
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