Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music: The Inspirational Stories behind 101 of Your Favorite Country Songs

by Jack Canfield

  I went to a church in Statesboro, Georgia, one time and there was a pastor who stood up and started telling a story about a mission trip he took to Russia. Several members of his church went to a remote part of Russia. While they were there, these Russians at this little tiny church said, “We heard this American song and we learned it and want to sing it to you.” So, they started singing, in broken English, “What A Difference You’ve Made In My Life.” Small world.

  What A Difference You’ve Made In My Life

  What a difference you’ve made in my life

  What a difference you’ve made in my life

  You’re my sunshine day and night

  Oh what a difference you’ve made in my life

  What a change you have made in my heart

  What a change you have made in my heart

  You replaced all the broken parts

  Oh what a change you have made in my heart

  Love to me was just a word in a song

  That had been way over-used

  But now I’ve joined in the singin’

  ’Cause you’ve shown me love’s true meanin’

  That’s why I want to spread the news

  What a difference you’ve made in my life

  What a difference you’ve made in my life

  You’re my sunshine day and night

  Oh what a difference you’ve made in my life

  Where’ve You Been?

  Story by Jon Vezner

  Song written by Jon Vezner and Don Henry

  Recorded by Kathy Mattea

  My grandparents moved from Minneapolis to Tucson when they were in their mid-seventies. They lived there until their early nineties. Then my grandmother fell and broke her hip. She also had what I think was dementia instead of Alzheimer’s, even though the symptoms are similar. My aunt went down and brought her back to Minneapolis and put her in the hospital there because she refused to eat. She was this short, strong-willed German woman and I think she just didn’t want to live like that. My grandfather stayed with my aunt up in Minneapolis. When that happened, I think this was the first time — except for maybe one trip earlier in his life — that they had ever spent a night apart.

  I had been thinking about moving to Nashville. So, I made a trip here, and I was here for about a week when, during that time, my grandfather had a seizure and they realized he had a massive brain tumor. It was benign, but it was too big to operate on. They put him in the hospital and he was in the same hospital as my grandmother, but on a different floor. When we’d go in to see my grandmother, she acted like she knew my dad but nobody else. And she hadn’t seen my grandfather since he had been put in the hospital. That went on for a week or two and one night, I said to the nurse, “Can I bring him up to see her?”

  “I don’t see why not,” she said.

  I wheeled him up to the elevator and there were these big glass windows. This was in the Metropolitan Medical Center in Minneapolis. My grandfather always had this boyish sense of wonder, as my dad did, and I think I do, too. He looked out over the city at night through those windows and he kept saying, “Look at that. Isn’t that something?” His eyesight wasn’t that great, but he could see the lights and the glare on the glass.

  I took him to my grandmother’s room and, as I wheeled him in, their eyes just locked. I could see that. She didn’t even look at me. She just looked right at him and he looked at her. She had kind of a scowl on her face. He picked up her hand and he started stroking her hair and he said “Look at them hair,” not “her hair,” but “them hair.” And he kept saying, “Nobody has hair like grandma.”

  She kept looking at him and finally she said, “Where’ve you been?” Almost like she was ticked off at him. That was about the only thing she said to him and, to our knowledge, it might have been one of the last things she said.

  I went back to Nashville and I told Kathy about it. We were just dating then. And I thought about putting it into a song, but it seemed almost too personal. I hadn’t been in Nashville that long, maybe two years. One day, Don Henry and I were writing and I told him about it and he said, “We’ve gotta write that.”

  I had some fears about it. I didn’t want to take advantage of it and I was a little afraid about what the family might say, but we went ahead and wrote it. We made up the part about being a salesman, and we changed their names. Their names were Bill and Bertha, so that probably wouldn’t work. Edwin was a cousin of my grandmother’s, and I’ve always loved that name. And Claire was just a name we loved.

  We put our songwriter hats on and tried to figure out a couple of other ways to work in the “where’ve you been” lines earlier in the song and we finished it. We wrote it really fast.

  I was writing for Wrensong at the time, and I played it for my publisher, Ree Guyer, and she basically just leaned against the door and slid down to the floor and sobbed when she heard it. I was a music major and I loved cello, so we decided to put a cello and a nylon string guitar on it when we did the demo.

  Kathy hadn’t heard the song, and there was a party for Kathy and Allen Reynolds’ first #1 single, which was “Going, Gone.” Afterward, I said, “Hey, can I play you guys something?” Kathy leaned over and mouthed the words “you did it” to me while Allen was listening. Interestingly, Allen didn’t want to record it. He thought it was too sad. And I heard stories about other people who heard it. I think Willie Nelson heard it and he cried, but he passed on it because it was too sad. People were afraid of it.

  Then I got invited to do an NEA (Nashville Entertainment Association) showcase at The Bluebird. Kathy came down, and it stopped the house. That same night, someone else cancelled and a new guy named Garth Brooks filled in for him and that’s the night he got his record deal. If you look at The Bluebird Café Scrapbook, that night is listed.

  In 1988, Kathy won Single of The Year for “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” and in 1989 she won Female Vocalist and her new record had just come out. We heard “Where’ve You Been?” on the radio coming back from the CMA Awards in 1989 and, exactly one year later it won Song of the Year at the CMA.

  Kathy played it at Austin City Limits and they had to stop taping because they couldn’t get the people to sit down. The show producer, Terry Locona, came up and he said, “I’ve never seen that happen.”

  It actually only got up to #13 on the country charts, but it crossed over. It was the first country song in a long time to cross over and it hit #15 on the Adult Contemporary charts. Later, it won an ACM award and a Grammy. It then won the Nashville Songwriters Association International Song of the Year and then I won NSAI Songwriter of the Year that year.

  Kathy gets a lot of “Claires” and “Edwins” who come up to her and tell her how much that song meant to them. I get a lot of people who come up to me and say, “I remember exactly where I was when I first heard that and I had to pull over,” and things like that. It’s kind of strange. It’s almost like 9/11 or the Kennedy thing. I’m not putting it up at that level of course, but we hear a lot about that song.

  Where’ve You Been?

  Claire had all but given up

  when she and Edwin fell in love

  She touched his face and shook her head

  in disbelief she sighed and said

  “In many dreams I’ve held you near, but now at last you’re really here

  CHORUS:

  Where’ve you been?

  I’ve looked for you forever and a day

  Where’ve you been?

  I’m just not myself when you’re away”

  He asked her for her hand for life

  and she became a salesman’s wife

  He was home each night by eight

  but one stormy evening he was late

  Her frightened tears fell to the floor

  until his key turned in the door

  CHORUS

  They’d never spent a night apart

  For sixty years she heard him snore

  Now they’re in a hospital

/>   in separate beds on different floors

  Claire soon lost her memory

  Forgot the names of family

  She never spoke a word again

  Then one day they wheeled him in

  He held her hand and stroked her head

  In a fragile voice she said…

  CHORUS

  Wichita Lineman

  Story by Jimmy Webb

  Song written by Jimmy Webb

  Recorded by Glen Campbell, Dwight Yoakam, James Taylor, and others

  One night I was getting a special award at the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York. They told me Billy Joel was going to sing “Wichita Lineman.” I thought, “Wow, this will be great. I’m going to get to sit back and hear Billy Joel’s version of this.” He came out on stage and started playing it, then he deconstructed the song line by line. He said, “When the guy says, ‘I need you more than want you,’ that’s kind of a dis toward the girl, isn’t it?” Then he sang the next line, “and I want you for all time,” and he said, “Well, I guess he really is crazy about her,” or something to that effect. He was just kind of probing the song to try to understand it better, as many of us songwriters do. I don’t know if I really understand the song’s appeal.

  I grew up in Oklahoma, and I was around that whole world of humming wires and the trucks and trains on their endless journeys across the Plains states. I remember the sound of the wires and looking up and seeing these men working on them. I also remember seeing them from the perspective of the front seat of an automobile, cruising along in the Panhandle at 60 miles per hour and seeing a little dot on a pole and seeing him come closer and closer until you are on him and then he’s gone in an instant. Sometimes he would be talking on a little telephone. It’s a lonely, romantic, prairie gothic image. I definitely tapped into it and used it with “Wichita Lineman,” which is also a love story about a guy who can’t get over a woman.

  I was living in a house on Camino Palmero in Hollywood. Glen Campbell and Al DeLory had asked me to come up with another song after “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which was a hit for them. They were in the studio, and they needed a song. I was living in a kind of communal environment with 25 or 30 of my best friends, and there were a couple of clowns who came into my music room and spray-painted my piano green, I think, because of “MacArthur Park” — “all the sweet, green icing flowing down.” They thought it was pretty funny. So I spent the afternoon trying not to brush up against the piano and writing a song at the same time. That whole afternoon was a comedy, with a sticky green piano and several desperate calls from the recording studio.

  I remember getting the first verse and a part of the second verse and then thinking, “I don’t know if this needs a bridge or a chorus or another verse or what.” But I decided to just put it down and send it over to the studio to see if they liked it so far. If they didn’t like it, there was no use spending any more time on it.

  When they called from the studio, they said they wanted another “town song” like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” I told them I didn’t know if I could really do that. I thought maybe I could connect it a little more subtly. I knew I could do a cheap imitation of “Phoenix,” but that’s not really what I wanted. Or I could do a “By the Time I Get to Phoenix II” which is more of what I tried to do, just swinging the camera in a different direction to see what it would see.

  I didn’t hear anything from them for a while, so I assumed they didn’t want it. I ran into Glen some time later and said, “So whatever happened with that ‘Wichita Lineman’ thing? I guess you didn’t like it, huh?”

  He said, “Didn’t like it? We recorded it.”

  I said, “What do you mean you recorded it? That wasn’t finished.”

  Glen just looked at me and said, “Well, it is now.” Glen just put this big, fat guitar solo in the middle of it that repeated the last line, and came out sounding pretty minimalist and slightly unfinished. But something about it obviously worked.

  Wichita Lineman

  I am a lineman for the county.

  And I drive the main road.

  Searchin’ in the sun for another overload.

  I hear you singing in the wire.

  I can hear you echo through the whine.

  And the Wichita lineman,

  is still on the line.

  I know I need a small vacation.

  But it don’t look like rain.

  And if it snows, that stretch down south,

  won’t ever stand the strain.

  And I need you more than want you.

  And I want you for all time.

  And the Wichita lineman,

  is still on the line.

  Wind Beneath My Wings

  Story by Larry Henley

  Song written by Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar

  Recorded by Bette Midler, Gary Morris, Lou Rawls, Gladys Knight and others

  I was at the writers’ office on Music Row one day and I walked past Jeff Silbar’s office. He was strumming his guitar, and after a particular chord, I said, “Play that again.”

  He said, “Play what again?”

  And I said, “That chord you just played. I just want to hear it one more time.” And when he struck that chord, my mind went, “It must have been cold there in my shadow.” I wasn’t even sure what it meant really.

  This was around 1982. I had been working on “Wind Beneath My Wings” for a couple of years and I couldn’t figure out how to get it started. We wrote a little bit on it that night. We wrote the first couple of lines and the first line in the chorus, I think. Then Jeff’s mother came in and he had to go with her somewhere. I was leaving for Texas the next day to go fishing. And I couldn’t get the song off my mind. It was driving me crazy. I kept trying to write it in my head. I stayed up all night trying to write that.

  The next morning, my friend and I went fishing. We were about 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. We’d been fishing for an hour without a bite and I told him, “I don’t think we’re going to catch any fish.” Then I said, “Do you have a piece of paper and a pencil?” He brought me a paper sack and a pencil. And I finished “Wind Beneath My Wings” on that paper sack. Then I signed it and gave it to his wife and said, “Keep this because it might be worth something someday, because I think it’s the best thing I ever wrote.”

  When we demoed the song, Roger Whittaker happened to be cutting and Chet Atkins was producing him, so our publisher took the song right over to him. He was the first one to cut it. I don’t think he released it as a single, unless it was released in Europe. Then we did a mass mailing to everybody who we knew was recording, and they all cut it!

  We thought Lee Greenwood was going to have the biggest single on it, but then Gary Morris heard about the song and he sent somebody from Warner Bros. over to get a copy of the tape. The next thing we knew, Gary Morris was going to put it out as a single. I didn’t even know who Gary Morris was at the time, but he did a great job on it. I won Song of the Year for it, and Gary won Single of the Year, too.

  Then, in 1989, they were looking for songs for the movie Beaches, and Bette Midler was going to star in it. I think her hairdresser told her about the song. The next thing I knew, they called me and told me Bette had cut our song. By that time, it had been cut so many times I didn’t get that excited about it anymore. I knew they were going to use it in a movie, but I didn’t even know if the song fit with the movie. I had a few songs that were in movies before and nothing really ever came of them.

  When I heard Bette’s version, I didn’t really like the way she had changed the lyric. She changed a couple of the lines and she made it fit the movie. And after it came out in the movie, it charted on the pop charts. It came out at like #50 and then it moved up very quickly. By the time it got to about #20, I thought, “Well, maybe it’s not so bad that she changed the lyric after all.” By the time it hit #1, I had completely forgotten what I was even mad about. And it did fit the movie perfectly. The next year, the song won a Grammy
.

  A few years after that, a friend and I were taking a pot-bellied stove to a church in the jungle in Hawaii. We went into the church and put the stove down and I looked up on the mantle of this church and someone had written down the lyrics to my song on the mantle of this church. I said, “Where did you get that?” He told me somebody had mailed it to him from Brazil. He didn’t even know it was a song; he just thought it was a poem. And I said, “Let me sign that for you. I wrote that song.”

  He didn’t want me to have it. He thought I was lying, I guess. But I finally did take it apart and signed it for him. But just to think that I found the lyrics to my song out in the middle of the jungle like that was incredible to me.

  Wind Beneath My Wings

  It must have been cold there in my shadow,

  to never have sunlight on your face.

  You were content to let me shine;

  you always walked a step behind.

  So I was the one with all the glory,

  while you were the one with all the strength.

  A beautiful face without a name

  A beautiful smile to hide the pain.

  CHORUS:

  Did you ever know that you’re my hero,

  and everything I would like to be?

  I can fly higher than an eagle,

  ’cause you are the wind beneath my wings.

  It might have appeared to go unnoticed,

  but I’ve got it all here in my heart.

  I want you to know I know the truth

  I would be nothing without you.

  CHORUS

  You Had Me From Hello

  Story by Skip Ewing

  Song written by Kenny Chesney and Skip Ewing

  Recorded by Kenny Chesney