Redneck Woman

by Gretchen Wilson

  Now, of course, all I had to do was to write, sing, and record a damn album, something I’d never done before. At that point, I hadn’t written any of the songs that people now associate with me. I hadn’t written or co-written “Redneck Woman,” “Here for the Party,” or all of the songs that were part of that first album. I guess it took actually signing that deal for me to say to myself, “Holy s**t, girl, this is it! You got to write those songs. You got to say what you want to say—and you’ve got to do it right now!”

  I sat down to start writing and I wrote every single day for the next three months or so. I wrote lyrics the old-fashioned way—by hand. I’d be hauling Grace around with one arm and trying to scribble down a lyric going through my head with the other. I wrote with John, Vicky McGehee, Rivers Rutherford, George Teren, and Big Kenny—anyone who could help me put a part of me into a three-minute song. I think I wrote a hundred songs in that first month. Most of them are in a drawer someplace, but the ones that clicked, like “Redneck Woman,” ended up on that first record. Out of those hundred-plus songs we cranked out in that very intense period, seven made it on that first album, which is not a bad batting average for a relative beginner songwriter like I was at the time.

  From that first audition with John Grady, I wanted to make sure that everyone involved knew what they were getting when they signed me up. I didn’t want to pretend to be one thing, then throw them off when a different musical persona suddenly appeared. Well, if they had any questions about that, they were answered when I went in to sing this little anthem we wrote called “Redneck Woman.” I remember the very day I played it for a roomful of executives. They about fell out of their chairs. They were very divided—half of the record company was scared to death of the song and the other half knew it was a hit. Thank goodness the “hit” guys won out.

  The people who had to go out and sell the song to radio stations were a little worried about the language. I cussed a lot in that song. In fact, we counted up the cuss words—I say “hell” twelve times and “damn” twice. Some people didn’t think that was appropriate language for wholesome country radio. The theory among a lot of researchers and marketers, I guess, is that country radio is only listened to by middle-aged soccer moms, and those moms don’t want to be driving the kids to practice in their minivan and hear lyrics like “Let me get a big ‘Hell yeah!’ from the redneck girls like me.” My own view is that there are a lot of hardworking redneck women out there who get up at dawn, work a job all day, and then take the kids to soccer in a pickup. And the word “hell” would not be a shock to their ears. In the end, for those of you who think about these things, one “damn” got changed to “rip,” but all the “hells” stayed.

  I loved shooting the “Redneck Woman” video. I got to go muddin’ in a four-wheeler in a riverbed and it gave me a chance to include my friends, from Big O to Kid Rock, and to meet a few idols at the same time.

  I first met Kid Rock at a party at John Rich’s house. It was John’s birthday and he was anxious to use the occasion to play the demo for “Redneck Woman,” which we had just cut. He played it and Kid Rock, among others, went nuts. I remember him calling his brother on the phone and saying, “Dude, you gotta hear this song. It’s off the hook. I mean, it’s like Loretta Lynn off the hook!”

  So we got to know each other after that and I invited him to be in the video. I knew he was friends with Hank Williams, Jr., so I asked him if he could get Hank to do a bit in the video, too. He hesitated at first, then went after Hank. Hank, I’m happy to say, said yes.

  In a trailer on the “Redneck Woman” film set was the first time I had ever met Hank Jr. and it was a little awkward. The inside of the trailer was part of the video and I decorated it with a lot of personal mementos. I brought in a deer head for the wall and placed the urns of my grandparents on top of the TV set. I just figured they should be there, just like I try to include them in every family get-together. That may seem a little country, but they are always in our hearts and the urns remind us of that at every turn.

  So I walk into the trailer to say something to Hank Jr. and can’t really think of a thing to say. I mean, what do you say to a legend like Bocephus? He was close to the TV, so what I finally said was, “Hey, be careful there. Don’t bump that TV. That’s my grandma and grandpa sitting up there.”

  He kind of looked at me, pulled his glasses down to the edge of his nose, then looked at the urns and then the pictures of Grandma and Grandpa I had placed beside the urns, then looked back at me and said, “By God, you are a redneck, ain’t ya?”

  And then we started talking. I guess the fact that I had brought my dead grandparents to the video shoot was enough for him. He knew at that moment that I was a real person.

  If you know that video, you’ll also know some of the other stars who dropped by that day. When I sing “I know all the words to every Tanya Tucker song,” I wave to Tanya herself, sitting in the audience. Big & Rich are there, too, of course. To me it was like a marriage of the past and the present.

  The idea was to release “Redneck Woman” as a single to radio stations, then follow that a few months later with the album Here for the Party. It is not uncommon in the country music business to have a single come out eight to ten weeks before the CD that includes that single. If the single hits, it builds demand for the album. That’s a lot better marketing strategy than just putting out an album that no one’s ever heard of.

  So we released the single in December of 2003 in what is called a soft release. This means that a lot of radio stations got to hear it and hopefully begin playing and promoting it right after the holidays. The strategy seemed to work. According to Marc Oswald, we had so many radio stations putting that song out so fast that it was like a call to action. The phones started ringing off the walls at the stations, mostly from women, I’d guess, who instantly identified with the song. Then the video came out right on top of the airplay and only added to the buzz.

  The whole thing was like a musical tidal wave. It came out of nowhere and just hit everywhere at once.

  A lot of people have speculated on why this song got the huge, almost instantaneous reaction that it did. The song is unique, but it follows a country music tradition of sorts—a male tradition—that announces that it is just fine to be an unapologetic redneck, from Merle Haggard’s classic anthem, “Okie from Muskogee” to David Allan Coe’s “Longhaired Redneck.” The difference is, I think, this is a redneck woman putting out this “Hell yeah!” point of view and singing directly from her own life and experience. Marc Oswald’s theory is that through that song, I gave a new face, and a new attitude, to the lives of millions of silent, largely unknown women just like me. Women who also didn’t feel like “the Barbie Doll type” and enjoyed buying things “on the Wal-Mart shelf half-price” were happy to hear someone sing about their lives. All I know is that when I say in concert, “Can I get a big ‘hell yeah’ from the redneck girls like me?” I hear a sea of female voices—and even a few male ones—yelling back at me.

  To me, the song is an expression of pride. It takes the word “redneck,” a slur word, and turns it on its head. Anybody who works hard, raises a family, lives modestly, or sends a son or daughter off to the military can find something to relate to in that song. The original “red neck” came from spending all day in a hot field behind a horse and plow. I never pushed a plow, but I know what spending twelve hours a day working behind a bar and pushing beer bottles feels like. And I could have been in New York working that bar as easily as in Pierron, Illinois. Or I could have been raising six kids in a trailer in Greenville. On one level, all people in these circumstances, man and woman, feel the same pride in our lives. Let me get a big “hell yeah!”

  In the four months between the release of the single, “Redneck Woman,” and the release of the album, everything changed. The single was number one on the country charts for six weeks. It had reached that top spot faster than any song in the history of country music. It was a rocket going straigh
t up. A couple of months before nobody outside of Pocahontas, Illinois, and a few friends in Nashville knew who I was. They had never heard my name. Now, suddenly, on the basis of one song and a pending album release, everyone in the universe of country music knew my name. I don’t think anybody is prepared for their life to be whipped around like that and begin to move at such lightning speed. I know I wasn’t.

  It was all mind-boggling. It was a shock to both my life and my lifestyle. And everyone else’s around me. It took me at least a year to stop spinning. And it was full of irony. First of all, at the point when “Redneck Woman” was becoming a smash hit, I was broke. In fact, I was more broke, I think, than I’d ever been in my life. I was retired from both of my Nashville money-making enterprises, bartending and demo-singing. I mean, hell, I was now the artist other songwriters were making demos for! Unfortunately, royalties on records don’t just come in a couple of days after people start buying the records. It takes a while, anywhere from nine months to a year or more, before they slip a royalty check under your door. With funds from a small signing bonus from the record company and an advance from my management company, I had been living and supporting Grace while I wrote and recorded the first CD. But at the time my career was taking off like a moon shot, I was cash-poor.

  Plus, I was on the road promoting the record, constantly. I did, among other things, a nationwide radio tour. For four grueling weeks I had to go from radio station to radio station, playing a song or two right there in the studio and talking about myself. Sometimes the radio stop would be a redneck barbecue on the roof of the station with fifteen or twenty call-in winners and some overcooked ribs. Then you wipe your mouth and head to the next town and the next station.

  This was not only physically hard but mentally hard as well. I was ripped away from my family, on a bus with a bunch of people I didn’t know all that well, and I was being asked to do things I was in no way prepared for. They don’t teach you how to be a public figure down at Big O’s. The truth is, I was scared to death. Scared and exhausted. I was overworked and wasn’t getting enough sleep. At the same time I was trying to adapt to a lifestyle that was new, unpredictable, and foreign to the way I had lived for the previous twenty-nine years.

  I was prepared to get up on a stage or even in a radio station and sing, but I wasn’t prepared for much else involved in being a “rising star.” I wasn’t prepared to be a friggin’ model. I wasn’t prepared for glossy photo shoots. I wasn’t prepared for hair stylists and makeup artists hovering around and fooling with my look. For all I knew, by the time they were through, I’d look like a person I didn’t really know. I might turn into a prettied-up fake version of myself.

  But most of all, I think, I wasn’t prepared for the media. I wasn’t prepared to sit in that radio station or in front of a TV camera and answer any and all questions thrown at me. I was deathly afraid of sounding stupid or silly or to have nothing come out of my mouth. I wasn’t a talker. I didn’t have anything earth-shattering to say to the world. I was a singer, sure, but really I was just an ordinary person—a single mom with a three-year-old daughter and hopefully a good job I could continue. I didn’t realize how much I’d have to share my personal life with curious reporters everywhere. I still had a bit of the hard shell that Big Kenny pointed out, and it made me very uptight and self-conscious to talk about myself like that.

  I remember my very first “phoner,” i.e., an on-the-air telephone interview with a radio station somewhere out there in America. I was sitting in my house and I called a Seattle radio station and talked to a DJ with a show called Ichabod Crane in the Morning. I was so scared that I could hardly breathe when I called in. I knew the show was live and any goofy thing I said would be instantly broadcast to all of Seattle.

  Today people like Marc Oswald will tell you I handled it all like a pro—that I had a witty or punchy answer to every question thrown at me. But I can tell you, in all honesty, I didn’t feel like a pro. I felt like a girl from Pocahontas, Illinois, who had suddenly been thrown into this fast-paced, think-on-your-feet-and-always-smile media circus. I guess, in my own mind, I was somewhere in that circus between the trained bear and the lady on the high wire.

  Nowadays, all these media encounters no longer faze me. It’s taken quite a while, but I’m really comfortable with them now. I just speak my mind. I may not say what you want me to say, but I’ll answer your question in my own peculiar way. My nerves no longer get shaky when they turn that camera on and start peppering me with questions. The irony is, I do get a little nervous now before going out on stage to do my regular ninety-minute show, a show I’ve done hundreds of times. What if I forget a lyric? (It’s happened.) What if I trip and fall? (It’s happened.) I’m surrounded by a band of great musicians and a group of never-fail technicians, but I still get butterflies waiting backstage for my name to be called.

  Starting out, I was relaxed on stage and nervous in media situations. Now it’s just the reverse. Somewhere along the line, I made a complete one-eighty.

  With regard to the media, I just realized one day that there was nothing to be uptight about. The only people who really care what I say or do are the people who are listening to me, and those are by and large people I know, understand, and feel comfortable around. Those are the people who like my music and come to my concerts. Whether they are sitting in a seat in Row 14 or sitting at home watching me on the tube, they are the same people. Why should I feel self-conscious around them? They are just like me, and vice versa. Nobody else really cares.

  In the midst of all of the early craziness surrounding the release of “Redneck Woman,” we decided to return to Pocahontas to do a photo shoot for the first album and also take documentary footage of the Big O world I had sprung from. We all piled in a bus—Marc Oswald, John Rich, songwriter Vicky McGehee, my makeup pal, Candy Burton, a still guy, a documentary crew, and a few other stragglers, and took off for Pokey. We did everything we set out to do in three days working seventeen- and eighteen-hour days. It was one of those trips that made me stop and wonder just what the hell I had gotten into.

  I was not in the press much at that point, but everyone in that area knew who I was and had heard that I was coming back to town with some fancy-dan Nashville types. One of the things on the agenda was to shoot me performing in a local bar like Big O’s. The real Big O’s was gone by then but Hoosier Daddy’s, Mark Obermark’s other bar over in Carlisle, was the perfect setting for this honky-tonk performance. The place was a tight fit—you could almost touch the ceiling by stretching out your arm. The crowd was rowdy and the drinks were good, but the ventilation sucked. Although it was January outside, inside Hoosier Daddy’s it was a hundred degrees and the smoke was so thick that you sometimes had trouble seeing the person you were talking to two feet away.

  Marc loves to tell the story of John’s particular entrance into the Hoosier Daddy’s world. John, still in Nashville-land, had decided to wear one of his prize possessions—a full-length raccoon fur coat, the kind of coat you might see P. Diddy wearing to the Grammy Awards. John had probably picked it up at a yard sale or the Salvation Army for fifty bucks, but he loved that coat. I was nowhere around when John, in his fur coat and red cowboy hat, decided to make an entrance into Hoosier Daddy’s. According to Marc, who was right behind him, the whole crowd just stopped and stared at him, like a Martian had just landed in their tavern. It was like one of those scenes from a movie where the music stops and everyone starts to get up, ready to attack. John and Marc were smart enough to get the hell out of there, high-tail it back to the bus, and lose the John Shaft apparel.

  I remember what I wore that night—tight blue jeans and a pair of black leather boots that came up over my knees. Marc said the boots looked like something Wonder Woman would wear, but they felt right at home at Hoosier Daddy’s and I had a great time performing in front of the people I had known all my life. Maybe some of their parents were there at the Hickory Daiquiri Dock when I thrilled them with my killer karaoke routi
ne.

  That trip was important for another reason. It reinforced in my mind what I knew best and what I should be writing songs about. I had already written a few songs like “Redneck Woman” that identified exactly who I was, but there were more to come. Back from that trip to Pokey, John and Vicky kind of looked and me and said, “Here’s what you need to say. Hell, you’re missing it because it’s your life and it’s boring to you, but this is what you are. This is who you are.”

  Vicky McGehee is the greatest writer on earth when it comes to titles. One of my all-time favorites—“When It Rains”—is on that first album. Well, as we talked about that visit to Illinois, it was Vicky who came up with the title “Pocahontas Proud,” and we got right to it. After a kind of Waylon Jennings opening groove, the first line said it all: “I was raised in Pocahontas, Illinois.” Following were straight-out autobiographical lines like . . . “At fifteen I was tending Big O’s Bar, I’d sing till two A.M. for a half full tip jar . . .” It was a piece of the life portrait I was beginning to include in a lot of early songs. As John had said, I was singing about my rough spots and the audience that soon came to my concerts knew just exactly what I was talking about.

  Like I said, I started writing songs like mad after the record deal happened. But all of those hundred or so songs I came up with in those early days were someone else’s stories. They weren’t mine. They were either generic country songs with no specific reference to one person’s reality or they were songs that meant something to the writers I was working with. People can sit here all day and tell you that a hit song is one that rhymes correctly, or has an instant hook, or is radio-friendly, whatever that means. To me, a hit song is something complete different from that. It’s a song that the audience believes.