Early in my Mafia days, John and Kenny helped me discover a talent I wasn’t sure I had—songwriting. At the time, I didn’t really think of myself as a writer—only a singer—and told them as much. I was just being honest, I thought. I had never written anything that I thought was any good. John proceeded to turn my head around about this. “Just because you’ve yet to write a great song,” he said, “doesn’t mean you’re not a songwriter.” Anyone with a story, he went on, and with the talent I had—there’s no way that I didn’t have a great song or two inside me. I just had to figure out how to dig them out.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”
I was starting to get my hunger back. I was starting to feel like I did the night after I first heard Patsy Cline singing “Faded Love” on my grandma’s console record player. Writing songs as an adult was uncharted territory for me but with John’s encouragement, it now seemed worth the effort. It didn’t take long, working with John Rich, Sharon Vaughn, Vicky McGehee, and a lot of other talented songwriters, before I realized I did have something to write about and maybe even the ability to get that experience down on paper. It was a while before I got around to writing or co-writing the songs that helped launch my career—“Redneck Woman,” “Pocahontas Proud,” and “Not Bad for a Bartender,” for instance—but those songs began to germinate in those early days of the Muzik Mafia.
Though it was written a little later in the story, here’s how one of those songs, “Redneck Woman,” came about. We were sitting around John’s apartment in Nashville one afternoon. We had gotten together for the explicit purpose of writing a new song, though we had no idea what that song might be. John was tuning his guitar and I was watching CMT (Country Music Television) on his TV. I watched three videos, back to back, and they all featured drop-dead beautiful women singing beautiful songs. They were combination singer-supermodels and they were, and still are, some of the reigning stars of country music—Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and Martina McBride, just to name three.
John remembers exactly what I was wearing at the time—a wife-beater tank top, a pair of sweatpants, and flip-flops. I had no makeup on and I had a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in another. After watching these videos, I turned to John and said, “You know what, man? There’s just no way that I can do that. No way in hell.”
“Do what?” he asked.
I pointed to the TV screen and said, “That. I can’t do that. That’s just not what I am.”
He asked, “Then what are you?”
I replied, “I guess I’m just a redneck woman!”
Bingo!
“You’re right,” John said. “You are not the Barbie Doll type.”
Right there was the idea for the song, and an hour and a half later, the song “Redneck Woman” was done. It was a song exactly true to who I am and the people I come from. And it has nothing to do with the racist, stupid, hateful, backward “redneck” stereotype that will hopefully, in time, disappear from the language. “Redneck” in “Redneck Woman” is a lifestyle, an attitude toward the world. It’s about people who work hard, often in blue-collar jobs, and play hard. And they don’t take no crap from anyone about who they are and where they come from.
“Redneck Woman” and other songs I began to write were part of a discovery process, I think. I wasn’t discovering how to write a hit song in the conventional sense or how to come up with something that the record executives might see as a commercial winner. I was discovering something much more important—what really makes a singer-songwriter connect to his or her fans and build a career on a solid foundation and not just on hype, musical fads, or the right image for the moment. That’s at the heart of country music—connecting with your audience on some level of real-life experience. The more of yourself you put in the music—warts and all—the greater the chance that the audience will take that music into their own hearts.
It’s a simple-sounding lesson—be true to yourself—but it’s a lesson that a lot of very talented people never quite learn; trying to please others to get ahead usually gets you nowhere. There are a lot of BS’ers in Nashville and if you walk in the door with your own line of BS, they can see it before you plop down on the couch.
John Rich has said that I probably spent too much time after coming to Nashville trying to hide or skip over my rough spots. I guess that’s what the blond hair and gold jewelry were all about. Sobering up helped me shed some of that protective stuff, and when I began to realize that the rough spots were part of my life, and probably a part of millions of people’s lives, that’s when I began to write songs that were more honest and open. When you stop to think about it, a lot of my life was nothing but rough spots—learning to deal with all of that adversity and still keep going was the main story I had to tell. Now, all I needed was someone to give me the chance to tell it.
In the same way I had to learn to let a little more of myself out in my music, I had to learn a few things about letting my guard down and being more trusting of others. In some ways, I guess, my “don’t-mess-with-me” personality was getting in the way, or could get in the way, of people embracing my music. Big Kenny’s first impression of me was that I was a bit of a smartass, which I was, and not all that personable. As I said earlier, I had developed a pretty hard edge to protect myself from all the nasty, untrustworthy, and conniving people I had to deal with as a child. Big Kenny remembers having more than one long conversation with me during those tell-it-like-it-is Mafia get-togethers on my need to mellow out a little and not see everyone around me as a potential rival or threat. If that group of merry music-makers taught me anything, it was that there were people out there who cared about me and supported me and were happy to help me stand on my own feet and survive in Nashville.
As I say in the song “Redneck Woman,” I’m not the sweet, perky Barbie Doll type, and never will be. I grew up with a pretty tough crowd and will probably always be a little bit wary of strangers. But, with the help of friends like Big Kenny, I’m a hell of a lot more open and trusting than I was when I pulled into town eight or nine years ago.
Looking back, Kenny now thinks it was a blessing that I wasn’t the Barbie Doll type and couldn’t pull off the glossy beauty-queen act with the soft, sweet voice if my life depended on it. I would have fallen on my face. I would have failed miserably at being something that I wasn’t cut out to be and probably be back at Hoosier Daddy’s right now, pouring beer. I could only be one thing—who I was—a redneck woman who still kept “my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long.”
We were damn lucky that the Muzik Mafia gave a lot of us a platform to succeed, but again, it didn’t happen overnight. I played Tuesday nights with that group of gypsies for another two years before I finally met the right executive who saw what I had to offer and was ready to roll the dice. It’s a truism but it’s the absolute truth—nothing happens fast in Nashville. You have to wait a lifetime for one twenty-minute shot at stardom.
So I was bartending, learning my craft with the Muzik Mafia, and trying to stay positive and hopeful about the future. Then something else happened to make things even more complicated.
I up and got pregnant.
CHAPTER 8
BABY GRACE
At twenty-seven I had baby Grace
I was born again when I saw her sweet face
And I knew she was the greatest thing I’d ever do
“Pocahontas Proud”
I guess you’d have to say that the period where I had my sweet daughter, Grace, while still trying to both earn a living and get ahead in the music business was simultaneously the highest and the lowest point of my life. Personally, it was one of the happiest times I’ve ever experienced, before or after. I loved the whole experience of having a child growing inside me and then being with that child day and night for the first six to eight months of her existence on earth. I had Grace at twenty-seven and believe it or not, I felt I was pretty old to have a baby. Where I was from, I was a late starter.
My mother had me at sixteen. A lot of women in Southern Illinois started having kids long before they were twenty. It is just part of the rhythm of life there.
As I mentioned earlier, Grace was conceived on the very night that my dear grandma passed away, in fact, within an hour of her death, as I later reconstructed. I took that as an important omen in all of our lives. A couple of weeks after her passing and the small family funeral in Illinois, I started feeling really sick, put two and two together, and decided to go get a pregnancy test. I went to a walk-in clinic and had a professional do the test, and got the good news. I’ll never forget the old man who walked into the room and said, “Picked out any names yet?” I about passed out.
I wasn’t planning to have a baby, that’s for sure, and frankly, I was a little scared. It was something that I had wanted for a long time but it never quite worked out. At that point it was the furthest thing from my mind. I had gotten the divorce from Larry only a few months before and was now seeing Mike, Grace’s father, who was then one of the owners of the Bourbon Street Bar. We didn’t really know each other that well at the time and neither of us were ready to contemplate raising a child together. Mike worked until four every morning at the bar and I was still stuck in the in-between place in my career where I had to keep working like a dog if I was ever going to make it to the next level. It was a very difficult time.
Initially, I felt downright miserable. I saw myself as fat and ugly and pregnant, in other words, every negative emotion a woman goes through as her body and her life are being taken over by a pregnancy. At the same time, given my fragile emotional condition, I started feeling that my dream that led me to Nashville was slowly slipping away. Muzik Mafia aside, I thought, I hadn’t really gotten that far in the four years I had been in town, and here I was, pregnant! It’s even hard to sing in the shower when you’re pregnant, let alone on stage or in a studio. It affects your breathing patterns. You tend to run out of breath in the middle of a long musical phrase.
I felt like I was falling into a whole new life that I really hadn’t chosen. The responsibilities of motherhood can easily take over a young woman’s life. I saw this happen to girls all the time in Illinois; they’d get pregnant in high school by the boy they liked at the time, and their life proceeded to take a radically different path than the one they imagined. College was out, traveling was out, taking a few risks on their own was out. Marriage and babies and worrying about the next mortgage payment were in.
I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t ready to have a child but didn’t want to give her up. Nor did I want to give up on a career. I remember one extremely important conversation I had with John Rich about all this. We were sitting in his Dodge pickup truck, somewhere downtown, right off Broadway, after a showcase one night. I hadn’t been pregnant very long and no one really knew but Mike and me. I remember this little heart-to-heart talk like it was yesterday.
“I’m pregnant,” I said to John, “and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I feel awful about this. You and Sharon and others have worked so hard for me. You’ve set me up on showcases, you’ve gone into the studio with me to cut demos, you’ve drawn me into the Mafia, you’ve talked me up all over town, and now, here I am. I’m pregnant. I don’t want to let you guys down, but I don’t know how I can keep on. I think this is going to be the end of it. I’m afraid I’m going to be finished. I’m done.”
This was the moment of truth, I guess, where I had to decide what I was really going to do.
John is the son of a preacher. His father is a nondenominational Christian evangelist in Ashland City, Tennessee; he’s a speaker, a healer, and a visionary. It felt, sitting in that truck, like John kind of turned into his father. He had a very definite idea of the right way for me to proceed. First of all, he said, I was ignorant if I was to even consider the thought of an abortion. I had, of course, but only for a split second. He told me that with all the things I had lived through in my life, all the pain and worry and misery, I was certainly tough enough to handle being a mother and having a career at the same time. If anyone could, he said, I could. If anyone should, he said, I was the one who should.
He was absolutely right. He convinced me that night that the right course was the hardest course—do both things at once—and that I could pull it off. That conversation was a definite turning point in my life and a bonding moment for John and me. Whenever I get mad at him these days, whenever I’m ready to throw something at him, all I have to do to calm down is remember that little session in his pickup that night. It forever reminds me of how close we are.
The first thing, of course, was to have a healthy, happy baby and give her all the love and attention I could muster. Mike and I made the decision that he would keep working to provide an income and I would quit my bartending job and focus on my pregnancy. It was a wonderful thing for him to do, and the right thing, too. Hanging out in a smoke-filled bar night after night is hardly the healthiest way to go through a pregnancy, let alone putting up with all the drunks and lounge lizards giving you a hard time. I went home and tried, without much success, to keep up singing and songwriting during those nine months. Mike brought home the paycheck.
It was a hell of a delivery. Baby Grace weighed in at eight pounds, six ounces and she had a fourteen-and-a-half-inch head. She had her father’s head. I was in labor for sixteen hours and when it was over, my doctor told me right out, “You’re not made for having babies.” After sixteen hours of tough, tough labor, I understood.
Again, I had Grace when I was twenty-seven. Soon 27 became kind of a magical number for me. It seems to pop up everywhere. Stop and think about it. When I left Pocahontas, the population was 727. In the song “Pocahontas Proud,” I sing, “At twenty-seven I had baby Grace.” And what was my first week of record sales? 227,000 units.
By that point, I started spotting 27s everywhere in my life. The address to Hoosier Daddy’s is 12727 Rural Route 127. When I landed in Australia during a worldwide media tour on the heels of my first album, it was the very first time I had ever set foot on foreign soil, not counting Canada. When the plane hit the ground, the first thing I saw out the window was a big meat truck with a giant 27 on the side.
And on and on it goes. I’m now surrounded by 27s. One night in Los Angeles, we got a little crazy and ran across the street from the Viper Room Lounge to a tattoo parlor so I could get 27 tattooed on my ankle. If you come to one of my concerts and use your binoculars to look at me closely, you’ll see that around my neck I’m wearing a silver dog tag I engraved with 27. The people closest to me, on stage and in my personal life, are probably wearing one, too.
I don’t really know what it all means—I am not a numerology freak or anything—but I guess the number has become a sign for me. If I go too long without seeing or hearing a 27, I might want to rethink the path I’m on. Maybe I’ll have to do that around the time of my twenty-eighth album.
Remember that number, 27. It comes up later in the story.
Grace is of course the most important 27 of all. For the first six months of her life, I stayed home with her. I didn’t want it any other way. I was with her every day, every night, every meal, every burp, every diaper, every everything. It would have been devastating to me if I had had to go back to work right away and drop Grace off at a day-care center, like millions of working mothers have to do every day. If I was going to have a kid and have a career, I was going to do it right, and doing it right meant giving Grace my total attention during the early stages of life.
I got the name Grace out of a name book for babies. I looked up every name known to man and none of them felt right until I got to Grace. She clearly had “graced” me in her life and love. Given her connection to my grandmother, her second name is Frances. Frances happens to be my middle name, too. We have a lot of Franceses around the family now.
At a certain point, I felt it was time to leave my full-time involvement with Grace and get back to work. This was a really hard thing to do, as every new mother knows.
In fact, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, to leave my child and go out for myself and my own career ambitions. It felt self-indulgent and still does sometimes. In those first couple of years, it was physically painful to be separated from her for any length of time. I tried to figure out every way in the world that I could keep her with me, wherever I was. Then, as now, she was the center of my life.
Mike and I never married, but we were together as long as I had been with anyone in my life. As I said, he supported me both before and after the birth of Grace. Then, as Grace grew and my attitude about working began to change, we made a conscious decision to switch roles. As long as I provided support for the family, Mike would quit his job and devote his time to raising Grace. As it turned out, this arrangement went on for another four or five years. Mike was, and is, a great dad. The fact that I could be sure that Grace was in good hands with him really helped ease my mind during the period and concentrate on getting a foothold in the music business.
One way in I found, was the demo business. Demo recordings are huge in Nashville, an ongoing year-round cottage industry. There are literally thousands of both aspiring and veteran songwriters working on new songs every single day in that town. Some are holed up in a cheap apartment somewhere, working away, like the way John and I got together to write “Redneck Woman” and other tunes. A lot of professional songwriters are in little rooms and cubicles in the big publishing offices on Nashville’s famous Music Row, trying like hell to come up with the next hit for Reba McEntire or Brooks & Dunn. It’s a tough trade being a songwriter in Nashville. It’s kind of like being a Hollywood star, I guess. For every real star you see on Entertainment Tonight, there are thousands of actors struggling to pay the rent.
Even if you are an established pro, the work is hard and unpredictable. Published songwriters on Music Row turn all the songs they have written in a given period to the publishing company they are attached to. The publishing company listens to them and says, “All right, out of the twenty songs you wrote this month, we think five of them are awesome. So we’ll reject the other fifteen and concentrate on the five we think might appeal to and get cut by a popular performer. Now we’re going to give you, say, five or six grand to get a band together, go into a studio, and cut a demo of these five songs. And get them back to us by next Tuesday.”
Redneck Woman Page 11
