by Randy Owen
Plus, he was only fifty-nine. In fact, his fifty-ninth birthday had been two weeks before our visit. He was by all accounts still young and vigorous.
Kelly and I said our goodbyes and drove to Myrtle Beach in my yellow-and-black Camaro, the car we had dated in and that I still have out back. We were living in a trailer in Myrtle at the time, and so I dropped Kelly and baby Alison off at the trailer and went on down to the Bowery. That’s when they told me the police were looking for me. Something had happened back home.
This was long before cell phones, so I went back, picked Kelly and Alison up, and found a pay-phone booth to call home. My sister Reba answered the phone and told me the awful news: our daddy had just died. He’d had a massive heart attack and died quickly. We’d only been gone from the farm for about nine or ten hours. In the interim he had died.
I can still visualize that moment. The weather was terrible. It was raining hard, and I remember the rain blowing on the side of the phone booth. I walked out into the rain to tell Kelly the news—and cry.
I broke down in that phone booth,
talking to my family,
My heart was soaking wet, and
all I could do was cry.
There’s a lot to say in good-bye.
“THERE’S A LOT TO SAY IN GOOD-BYE”
BY RANDY OWEN, RICHIE MCDONALD, AND GREG FOWLER
We tried to get a flight out of Myrtle Beach, but the next flight wasn’t until late the next day. Leaving late that night in the pouring rain made no sense, plus I was too distraught to drive. The next morning we left the Camaro behind and got in the old blue beat-up band van, and with Teddy behind the wheel, the four of us—Teddy, Kelly, Alison, and I—drove the nine hours back to Fort Payne. When we came over the little hill to Mama’s house, I saw an ocean of cars. In fact, as far as you could see, up and down the road that led to her house, there were parked cars. There were also cars in the front yard and around the house. All the way from Myrtle, I kept hoping that when I got home, it wouldn’t be true, that my daddy had somehow snapped back to life. When I saw all those cars, I knew it was true. Walking into that house was probably one of the hardest things I ever had to do. It was just awful.
Photographic Insert
Randy’s parents, Martha and Gladstone Owen.
Randy in a hand-me-down toy car at their first house on Baugh Road on Grandpa Ernest Owen’s place. This is where Gladstone and Martha lived when they first married. The toy truck was left by J.C. and Roger Hope, Randy’s cousins, when they moved to Hawaii.
Randy with sisters Reba and Rachel. Randy holding a Supro guitar at the McMichen Place.
Randy at Chief’s in Greenville, South Carolina, with the “music man” guitar played on “My Home’s in Alabama,” “Tennessee River,” “Why, Lady, Why,” “Mountain Music,” and others.
Randy at the Bowery in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with “Bouncing Betty,” the world’s largest go-go dancer.
One of the handwritten letters that Randy and Kelly sent to radio stations.
Randy and Kelly Owen at Sesquicentennial State Park in Columbia, South Carolina.
Randy in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with Alison, while living in Benton’s Trailer Park, where the song “My Home’s in Alabama” was written.
Randy with Heath in 1983 signing autographs.
Randy’s two oldest children, Alison and Heath.
The early years.
Randy, Alison, and Heath at the 1988 Alabama State Junior Heifer and Steer Show with their champion bull.
Randy and Grandma Teague.
Randy with his mother.
Greg Fowler, Kelly, Randy, and Dale Morris.
Randy at June Jam.
Randy in his 1972 Chevrolet Camero.
Randy, Heath, and Merle Haggard.
Randy, Kelly, and Dale Earnhardt, with Steve Boland, Heath Owen, and Jeff Rucks in the background.
Randy onstage at June Jam, 1994. © Sheila Dykes
Edna Hill United Methodist Church. This is where Randy’s Paw Paw Teague married his grandmother.
Randy performing the song “Angels Among Us.”
The Owen family: (left to right) Kelly, Randa (seated), Randy, Alison, and Heath.
Randy and Hamlet 2 behind a Chevy pickup given to Randy by friend Leo Corley. The truck was operated on the historic R.W. Jones Hereford Ranch in Leslie, Georgia.
Randy, Kelly, Randa, and crew with Randa’s Grand Champion Hereford Female at the 2008 Junior National Hereford Expo in Kansas City, Missouri. That fall Randa headed off to Auburn University and became a pre-veterinarian major.
Randy with kids at St. Jude.
When we entered, we saw the family and a room full of friends gathered around an open casket with my daddy lying in it. It was part of my parents’ beliefs that you bring the body of the deceased home and not take him or her to a funeral home. Kelly had only seen this happen once before, with the death of one of her great-great-grandmothers in Anderson, South Carolina. This time, Kelly just backed away and watched our family go through the greatest suffering we had ever experienced together.
We buried Daddy next to his parents at the cemetery in Adamsburg only a few miles from his house. We pass it every time we take that route into Fort Payne. Daddy used to love to collect laurel flowers when we’d be out walking in the canyon and bring them home to Mama. So now, whenever the laurel blooms in the spring, Kelly will make a point of gathering some and placing them on his grave. It’s a ritual we rarely let pass, no matter how busy we are.
I go down to the gravesite every chance I can, and it’s never far away in my thoughts. I’m liable to tell Kelly, “You know, I stopped by Daddy’s grave today on the way back from town.” I usually think of it on my grandparents’ anniversary or Father’s Day or Daddy’s birthday. The day of his passing is always a day of remembrance for me. I often retreat from the family and just keep to myself. Even now, twenty-eight years later, I tend to be pretty moody and testy on that day. I try to apologize to others when I act that way, but I don’t apologize to myself. It’s just a tough day, period. Despite all the good things that happen in this life, there are some wounds, I guess, that never quite heal, no matter how much time has elapsed.
Whenever I pull up to my parents’ house to visit Mama, I can still see my dad, in my mind’s eye, coming out of the barn or getting off his tractor in a nearby field. In some ways, it’s comforting, knowing there is a certain continuity between his life and my own. In other ways, it’s painful. It’s a painful reminder of what wasn’t to be.
Every time I sing the words to a largely autobiographical song like “Tennessee River,” I see him again. Beginning when I was about three or four, Daddy used to drive me over to Scottsboro, Alabama, about thirty miles from home, every first Monday for a big open sale called First Monday. They sold and swapped everything—dogs, cows, cats, goats, sheep, hunting knives—you name it. People would come from all over, and even area politicians would show up at First Monday to press the flesh. For a country kid like me, it was like going to Lake Winnepesaukah for a day.
Coming off of Sand Mountain near Scottsboro, you could see the majestic Tennessee River flowing by. That’s where the song of the same name, “Tennessee River,” came from—taking in that view on the way to First Monday, along with another beautiful view when Daddy would take me along to Chattanooga to the auction barns. It was a very happy time in my life, and when I’m singing the song onstage, Daddy is sitting in the car seat right next to me. He is built right into that song.
My grief for my father runs deep, I think, because of the abrupt way he died at such an early age and at that particular time in my life. More than just a loving and caring father, he was my greatest supporter, especially when it came to music. He’s the one who gave me the courage and confidence to do something like I set out to do. It was so crushing that he died before I got the break that would have brought him such joy and satisfaction.
My sister Reba tries to comfort me by telling me th
at we don’t understand the reason why Daddy, a man who never hurt anyone and was such a great spirit, had to die, because we are not supposed to understand. That’s where your faith comes in, she reminds me. You just have to live on faith that God knows what He’s doing and that Daddy’s death was part of God’s plan, a plan that we are not privy to. Daddy, says Reba, is now in a better place and is present in all of our lives. The Bible says that God sends a ministry of angels to watch over us, and now Daddy is part of that ministry.
I understand Reba’s message, but I felt utterly defeated when Daddy died, and I had no desire to rush back to work to chase the Alabama dream. It now seemed trivial and meaningless. Signing a big record contract, having a hit song on the radio, playing before a big crowd, being on TV—if I couldn’t share this with Daddy, it seemed all that less important. It might be hard for other people to understand this bond and how it colored every aspect of my life, especially in this day and age when fathers, through divorce, personal ambition, or neglect, are often absent from a lot of kids’ lives. Maybe I’m a throwback to an age when sons yearned to emulate their fathers and consider their father’s approval to be a high mark of personal achievement. Throwback or not, that’s how I felt then, and still do.
So I entered a very tough emotional period I guess you’d call “life after Daddy.” I was used to his calling me at 7:30 in the morning, a time when he was headed out to trade cattle or buy fertilizer and a time I was usually just getting to sleep after playing music until 2:00 a.m. and then fooling around with my friends. “You’re not asleep, are you?” he invariably asked.
But now that he was gone, the funeral was over, and all the relatives went back home, the music was again front and center. Everyone else connected to Alabama felt my sorrow, but they also knew our professional time was right now. I was in this totally dejected mood while dealing with all the pressures of people calling and telling me that now was the time to do this, go here, write this, call this radio station—that is, all the things you do to get a music group off the ground. Before long I found myself back on-stage, singing “My Home’s in Alabama” or “Tennessee River,” but now I was trying to keep from breaking down while I was singing the words. It was a weird juxtaposition of elation and grief, of feeling good to be performing and at the same time feeling bad to be performing, but I guess I was able to manage that emotional confusion because I was still young and had the psychic where-withal to handle the inevitable depression.
I had absolutely no time to grieve my father’s passing, which meant the sadness got buried and became a permanent undercurrent in my life. I didn’t have the luxury of taking off for six months and letting it sink in. I didn’t have two days. I was back onstage, an audience full of brand-new Alabama fans was screaming and jumping up and down, and I felt like the loneliest guy on the planet.
In my mind, I had no choice about going back to work. It was clear this might be my only chance in life to make it in the music business and, in fact, fulfill my daddy’s own ambition for me from the moment he sat me down to learn to play the guitar. It was my only chance to get away from the poverty that I had lived with growing up. Poverty doesn’t make you a good person or a bad person, but it does make you a poor person, and those days of hand-me-down clothes and peas and okra for a month were still fresh in my mind. And growing up poor, as anyone who has been there will tell you, you never throw anything away, and that includes a career in country music.
Against my instinct to withdraw in the face of Daddy’s death, I had to deliberately push myself in the other direction and remind myself over and over again to keep going. I had to will myself on-stage every night, no matter how I felt inside. This was my chance, as well as Teddy’s and Jeff’s chance, and I wasn’t going to be the one to blow it. The upshot was that some of the saddest days of my life occurred before some of the biggest crowds we ever drew.
How fast were we moving at this tragic juncture in my personal life? By May 16, 1980, two weeks to the day my daddy had his heart attack, ”Tennessee River” made it to No. 1, the first No. 1 song of forty-two for Alabama. On May 18, we had a concert in Columbus, Georgia, and then went on to perform at the Charlotte 600 NASCAR race in North Carolina on the 25th. In quick succession after that, we did a show in Greenville, South Carolina, an RCA showcase for executives, and a television appearance on the Ralph Emery Show in Nashville, followed by another in-studio radio appearance in St. Louis. And we were just warming up.
If you ask my sisters or mother why I continued on at this point, they’d probably sum it up as bullheaded stubbornness. Reba contends I got that trait from Mama, a woman never afraid to push herself until she got what she wanted. Reba also claims I have more faith than anybody she’s ever known and a stronger belief that God’s will will be done, and she also claims that people look at her like she’s crazy when she says those things. I’m flattered that she thinks I have that much faith, whether she’s crazy or not.
My faith was sorely tested in the aftermath of Daddy’s death. I just didn’t give a damn about life in general. If I was going to become an alcoholic or a drug addict, that would have been the perfect time to jump in feetfirst. Despite the assurances from my deeply faithful family that this was part of God’s unknowable plan, I didn’t get it. It seemed like a cruel joke to me. Maybe, I often thought, I’m just being selfish. Maybe I wanted Daddy to live so I could look good in his eyes. I know I feel bad that I never got to do anything for him, whether it was to take him on a long airplane flight, buy him a new tractor, or play beside him on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. What I always longed to do was to give him $20,000 or whatever and say, “Here you go. Now go out and buy some registered cattle and do whatever you want to with them—breed them, sell them, or just put them out in a pasture and stare at them.” If I could have done just that one thing, I could have lived a lot easier with his death.
On the gospel record that the Owen Family made, I sang solo on one song, as I said, the old Southern folk tune called “Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.” Johnny Cash mentions in his autobiography that this was one of the songs he remembers from growing up in Arkansas. Daddy was still alive when I recorded that song, but it conveys a sense of regret, which I carried with me long after he died, a sadness summed up in lyrics like this:
If God would but grant me the power
Just to turn back the pages of Time
I’d give all I own if I could but atone
To that silver haired Daddy of mine.
I never really lost my faith in God, as I look back now, but I’ll always feel a little bit swindled. And I’ll never have an answer for the question, Why? That’s probably what bothers me more than anything else. Why?
In the throes of all of this, there were loving people around to give me comfort and the strength to go on—Mama, Kelly, our three-year-old, Alison, and by the next year, 1981, our son, Heath. In the amazing way that kids sometimes see things, Heath would tell me as a toddler that he knew his grandpa. He’d never gotten to see him or be around him, but in his mind, he was sure he knew him. Alison did know him, and she and I talked about him a lot, so you can see where he got the idea. His grandpa was a living memory in our house. At one point I sat down with Alison and Heath, and we wrote a little song about Grandpa called “I Miss You, Papa. Everybody Misses You.” Heath was all of eighteen months old at the time, but he sang along because he missed him too.
I also got solace and support from other people in the family, particularly my Mama’s father, Paw Paw. One of the proudest moments of my life was when I was sitting in his house over on Mill’s Creek in Cherokee County—he was in his mid to late eighties at the time—and he turned to me and said, “Randy, I’m proud of you, son.” I was a little shocked because I didn’t know he even knew what I did for a living, or cared about it. Apparently he sat around that old wood-burning stove of his and listened to the radio and was totally up-to-date. And I was deeply moved.
Following Daddy’s death, after a period of mournin
g, Mama decided she wasn’t ready to give up the Owen Family singing group. By this point, Reba’s kids had grown up and could better take care of themselves, and Rachel’s husband, Ricky, also supported the idea of keeping the family group going. So Reba joined Rachel and Mama as the core of the new Owen Family. Rachel was now a proficient bass player, Reba played tambourine, and Mama remained on the piano. Ricky now drove the old van when they made their short jaunts back and forth to local churches and served as their all-around roadie and stage technician. Rachel had a daughter, Mary, who learned to play the drums at a very young age and by all accounts turned into a star performer. In essence, Mama found a way of maintaining the kind of life she had always enjoyed. She worked around the farmhouse, kept working sewing toes down at the sock factory, and played gospel music with her two daughters while her “wayward” son was off making a name for himself.
All during the rise of Alabama in the 1980s, the Owen Family continued to play small country churches and perform at sing-ins all in that 75-to 100-mile radius of DeKalb County. But as time went on, it became harder and harder to get the group together. Mama was getting older, and both Reba and Rachel had growing kids to take care of. Also, Reba and her husband, Verlon, became an integral part of the Alabama road show, handling our ever-burgeoning merchandise concession when we were on tour.