Born Country

by Randy Owen

  Anyway, the day Kelly knew things had changed, she was out in the yard collecting pine kindling to start the fire in our stove. She would take an ax, find some pine knots growing on the trees in the nearby woods, and chip them off for kindling. It was 1982, and I was on the road damn near all the time. Alabama had been signed with RCA for a while by then, and the music was getting out there.

  So Kelly was out front, fooling with the kindling, when a car pulled up and stopped. We didn’t have a fence or any other kind of barrier around the house, and she felt a little vulnerable. These people got out, and Kelly said, “Hello, can I help you?” And they said, “Excuse us, but is this where Randy Owen with that group Alabama lives?” She had to say yes, of course, and be as nice as she could be, but at the same time in the back of her mind was the thought, Oh, my God, if this is going to keep happening, I better figure out how to deal with it. A big change, she knew, was coming.

  Kelly had already gone through a whole series of difficult cultural changes just to get to this point in our life together. Just moving to Lookout Mountain and adapting to the ways of her in-laws there was a major transition for her. She had grown up in the suburbs of big cities and on military bases where everyone had air-conditioned houses, color TV, and a mall nearby to find anything you wanted. All of a sudden she is plopped into a fairly isolated, subsistence-based, highly religious community of people. She was used to going to bowling alleys, dance clubs, and drive-in theaters. They were used to church and weekend sing-ins of gospel music. They were two different worlds.

  As I mentioned, Kelly moved in with my parents right after we got married, so she had no time to adjust to this radical shift in her life. My parents, for instance, got all their water from a well on their farm. They weren’t tied in to the Fort Payne city water system. This meant that they had to ration the water they used because there wasn’t an endless supply. Kelly was used to taking long, luxurious baths and, especially in hot weather, lingering in the shower, maybe two or three times a day, for as long as she wanted. That luxury was now gone, along with grabbing a beer from the refrigerator or dancing in the living room.

  As she once admitted honestly, “In the year 1975, when we were married, I didn’t know that people still lived like this.”

  That being said, Kelly clearly loved my parents and respected their ways and tried to help them in any way she could. She’d fix meals, work in the garden with Mama in the summer, and learned a lot from Mama about canning and freezing foods in the fall. On weekends she would travel with them to area churches when they performed as the Owen Family. And she learned to take five-minute showers.

  But there were clearly differences between Kelly and my parents, from the way she dressed to her coming and going at her leisure, so we figured that the best way to keep peace in the family was to move to “the big city,” Fort Payne, all of six miles away. We rented a tiny, one-bedroom apartment attached to a house owned by an older woman named Ethel Posy. This allowed Kelly a little more breathing space yet kept her within shouting distance of all my family up on the mountain. When I was gone, Kelly had Mrs. Posey to keep her company, as well as Teddy’s wife, Linda, Jeff’s wife, Josie, and Lynn Vartanian, the wife of our drummer, Bennett. They all lived down in Fort Payne back then.

  We all adjusted to one another in time, as families normally do, and by the time we moved up to the little brown house, Kelly even learned a thing or two about living in the country and living with less, something my parents had done their whole lives. When you’re living on well water and a woodstove, you naturally become more resourceful, from growing your own vegetables to entertaining yourself without running to the mall every five minutes. And as we started to have a family, we created our own self-defined life for ourselves and our kids and learned to live beside my family and yet maintain enough distance so as not to encroach on one another. This can be tricky sometimes, and a lot of young couples solve family conflicts by moving thousands of miles away, but this was unacceptable to me. We definitely wanted our kids to have the experience of knowing their grandparents, learning from them, and understanding the incredible value of being bonded to both our blood family and to the land.

  Kelly, I must say, was remarkably grounded and self-sufficient for someone so young, let alone someone suddenly thrown into a completely different way of life. She called herself “a little home-body,” something she relished. She was excited to have the kindling gathered and the TV antenna pointed in the right direction when Alabama got off the road and we had a weekend to ourselves. I guess she wanted to make sure I came back home and didn’t get lost in the multiple distractions of a musician’s life.

  Early on, Kelly started getting the raised eyebrows and questioning looks when she told people that I was in Charlotte or New Orleans that night while she was sitting in a little brown house watching Jeopardy. “How can you just stay at home,” someone would invariably ask, “while he’s out there, traveling around, having all that fun? God, he’s in the middle of a giant, movable party, and you’re missing out!”

  Her response was usually the question: “Excuse me, but do you go to work with your husband?” And they’d go, “Well, no.” The point is, I was working. That was my job, pure and simple. If part of that assignment is having a good time at a nightclub, which it was, or dancing onstage or eating out with a local promoter or traveling to a new city and a new crop of fans, well, that’s the job description. That’s not the life Kelly chose for herself. She didn’t sing, play the guitar, write songs, or want to be on-stage. She was not trying to ride my coattails to her own musical stardom or celebrity fame. She was never looking for our family to do a reality TV show like Ozzie Osbourne or Gene Simmons. She wasn’t shooting for the cover of People.

  She rarely tells people, but Kelly never had the desire to go to college like our kids did. When we met, she taught dance and loved to dance and was focused on a career as a dance instructor. A competing interest to that, one that finally rose to the top, was the idea of living in the country and raising a family. One of her most endearing memories of her childhood was visiting her grandmother in rural Georgia and doing farm things like feeding chickens and helping with the dressing of the big hog that her grandmother would kill every year. And being second of a family of six kids, she was always taking care of youngsters. Early on she realized a fundamental truth about herself—she loved the simplicity of being at home, taking care of that home, being a wife and mother, and running a farm. This was her form of one woman’s liberation.

  Kelly claims that she has never resented my gadabout life. For one thing, she knows up close how unglamorous it often is. There’s a good reason why we often refer to ourselves as “road dogs.” Eighty some people, on the road constantly, walk into an empty hall, turn it into a hi-tech music show: we play, the crew tears it all down, and we go on to the next town. It’s an exhausting routine. Half the time, we are literally dog-tired.

  But the other reason Kelly doesn’t envy my music life is because she feels what she’s accomplished in motherhood is the equivalent to what I’ve accomplished in the music business. She has told our children that if she were dying, she could pass on knowing that she raised three wonderful kids. Three kids who know how to treat people and respect others, and who are humble and God-fearing. That was her job, and she pulled it off very well.

  That attitude is a world or two away from the attitude of someone who feels entitled and superior to others because her husband sells a lot of records and appears on TV. As Kelly once said, “Our life would not have worked had I become a selfish mother, resenting my husband’s fame and notoriety and trying to be in the limelight, which I’ve never done. So, you know, it worked for both of us. I feel like I’m a professional at what I did and am still doing, and he’s definitely a professional at what he does.”

  Plus, Kelly loves the fact that old high-school friends from South Carolina, the ones who were so excited that she was going to marry a could-be country singing star, now tell he
r she hasn’t really changed at all. To her, that is a high compliment. She never learned to play the stereotypical role of celebrity spouse. She may have aged a little, but her character and countenance remain as they always were. She’s still the Kelly of the ’60s and ’70s, though she can now hang out backstage anytime she wants to.

  Part of my own sense of being a professional, something again that goes back to the way I was raised, is that I try to keep my music life and my family life separate. I try to keep work away from home and home away from work. It’s not always easy to do, but it is a healthy and necessary separation that I constantly strive to maintain. When I come home, I intend to have a good time being a father and husband, maybe even a better time than being the lead singer of Alabama. Growing up, the kids had little or no interest in the machinations of the music business and certainly wouldn’t understand my obsession with it. They understood throwing a football around the front yard or hopping in the truck and seeing what the cows were up to. Families come and go among professional musicians, and the only way to keep one, I’ve come to learn, is to give it every bit as much time and attention as a career. This probably applies to a lot of other professions, too, but musicians are itinerant workers, moving from place to place, and that can put an incredible strain on a “normal” family life.

  During all that time when they were growing up and Alabama was doing two or three hundreds dates a year, the stress was constant. But the truth is, when I got home, my kids would unstress me. It didn’t matter to them if the record of the moment went to No. 1 or not. Or if the album of the moment went platinum, or whether or not we sold out the arena in Chicago. To them, it was simply a matter of Daddy’s gone, but now Daddy’s coming home! And we’d fool around and have a great time, a million miles away from the “business,” and at night, the three of them would all get into bed with us, camped out on my arms. I’d be completely uncomfortable, but they’d be down for the night. And I can remember, at those moments, just looking at them and seeing how beautiful they were—how healthy and intelligent and grounded—and the accumulated stress of work would just fly out the window.

  I didn’t really see how they saw things until much later in life. We all figured out one day that each of the kids—Alison, born in the mid-’70s, Heath, born in the early ’80s, and Randa, born in the late ’80s—experienced one specific phase of the Randy Owen/Alabama story arc. Alison, who we call to this day Sissy, was the pre-Alabama kid—she remembers living in the trailer park in Myrtle Beach and taking a bath in a bucket. She remembers cold nights in the little brown house on the mountain. She remembers, at a tender young age, a story I told her about playing the song “It Never Rains in Southern California” forty straight times at a club in Fort McClellan, Alabama, one night because a military guy she describes as “a freak from Southern California” was missing home and willing to give us a tip every time we played it.

  Alison, like the other kids, spent most of her growing-up years on Lookout Mountain and, like the others, considers hers a “normal” childhood. In her young mind, what I did for a living only slowly dawned on her. I was gone a lot, sure, but to her, I could have been in sales or marketing and had a lot of out-of-town customers. Heath and she thought it was fun when I came home. Kelly would pick me up at the local airport, and the two kids would hide in the back until we were halfway home, then jump out and scare me. Plus, Alison took her cues from her mom: “I never got sad when he was gone because Mom was always at home. She was fun and energetic, and we always had things like sports going on. And my mom didn’t sit around saying, ‘Oh, this is bad, this is so bad.’”

  We made a conscious decision not to disrupt our kids’ routines to accommodate the road. It was, as much as humanly possible, always the other way around. We rarely pulled them out of school to go on tour. They knew we took school seriously and that they should too. They might travel with us in the summer to a show or two, but not if it seriously interfered with set summer activities like sports. If there was a wall in my mind between work and reality, there was one in their minds too. This is what I do. This is where you live and what you do.

  Inevitably, my public life slowly seeped into their private lives. Alison remembers being with me on one occasion when she was very young and a girl with purple hair with a pink stripe down the middle came up and said, “You’re Randy Owen of Alabama, aren’t you?” To Alison, it was a revelation that the purplehaired crowd liked our music. She also remembers going to a show in Birmingham when she was seven and holding the hand of her Paw Paw Pyle. There was an opening act of some kind, and Paw Paw said, “Boy, that was sure loud.” Alison looked at him and said, “Paw Paw, just wait until my dad comes out.”

  Alison has my overachieving genes, I guess. She lettered in five sports at Fort Payne High School, was the class valedictorian, received a basketball scholarship to Jacksonville State, and now works in Nashville in the film-production business. Oh, yeah, she also plays the guitar and writes songs.

  In high-school sports, it was at best an irritant to have a famous father. Some kid from another school would score on her and then say, “Hey, how was that for some mountain music!” or something less repeatable. The strangest moment for her came at a state girl’s basketball playoff game. With two minutes left in the game, Alison’s team was up by only two points, and things were incredibly tense. Alison was on the sideline, about to throw the ball inbounds to her teammates, when the referee holding the ball looked over at her and asked, “Is your dad really Randy Owen?” I guess this issue was pressing on his mind, and he needed an answer before the game was over.

  All my kids developed the strategy, once they knew what was going on, of trying to keep their identities separate from mine, at least upon meeting people for the first time. They did the very opposite of what many celebrity kids might do, which would be to announce who they are as a way of focusing attention on themselves. My kids didn’t want that added attention. If you genuinely connect with someone and become friends, they’ll find out soon enough. As Alison puts it, “A new friend will say, ‘I really like that singer,’ and I’ll blurt out, ‘Oh, yeah, she’s really nice. I sat behind her at the American Music Awards.’ Then it’ll all come out, and she’ll say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And I’ll say, ‘Because I’d like you to know me before you know that.’”

  In order to try out life without the complications of being Randy Owen’s daughter, Alison moved to Atlanta for a few years to live on her own. She got a job at Seattle’s Best Coffee and spent hours wandering around the attached Borders bookstore. She loved getting a job without someone saying, “Alabama? I love Alabama! You’re hired!” In a multicultural, multinational city like Atlanta, just talking to the next customer walking in the door was an education. Now that she has relocated to Nashville, I guess you’d have to say she likes the city life.

  Heath, born in 1981, got tagged early with the nickname Little Man, and it stuck. He never knew a time when Alabama wasn’t big. Alison recalls the time when Heath was in kindergarten and we had an old Victorian house in Fort Payne where we lived at the time and still occasionally stay today. The house was right across the street from Heath’s elementary school and allowed us to stay close to the kids’ daily lives. One day as I was walking Heath from school, I noticed he was crying. I said, “Hey, what’s wrong, son?” Heath took a long breath, then said, “Those boys over there said they were glad you didn’t win that award last night!”

  You can imagine what it would be like to grow up on display. Heath remembers, not too long after kindergarten, when he was out in our big front yard playing catch with Alison, and they looked up and saw ten or fifteen cars parked along the road right outside the fence of the yard. Dozens of people piled out of the cars and lined up along the fence, waving and shouting and snapping pictures as fast as they could. Heath’s reaction: “There’s something weird going on here.”

  The first time the weirdness really hit him, he claims, was on a family trip to Disney World. It w
as 1983, and I had decided, in my then-naive fashion, that it was time to take a family vacation. Heath, all of two or three, was up on my shoulders as we were leaving the Polynesian Resort to spend the day on Main Street, USA. No sooner had we entered the lobby than what to him looked like thousands of Japanese tourists surrounded us. They all recognized me at once and began to press in for a better look and a Kodak memory. Heath went berserk. It was like a horror movie to him, and was not that much different to me. As he bawled, we hustled him back to the elevator and away from the crowd. So much for a quiet family vacation.

  Heath, like Alison, never introduces himself as, “Hi, I’m Heath Owen, son of Randy Owen.” He hates the preconceived notions people have about what he should be like as the son of a celebrity. People assume he will be arrogant, self-absorbed, flashy, throwing money around, and spoiled. Turn on TV and that’s what you see. I’m sure those Hollywood stereotypes do a disservice to a lot of kids whose parents just happen to be actors or performers. They have nothing to do with my kids.

  Heath prefers to meet people who don’t know who Alabama is, but he grew up here and now lives and works in Nashville, like Alison, so there aren’t a whole lot of people around who fit that bill. His favorite story about Growing Up Owen took place while he was a starter on the varsity baseball team at Samford University in Birmingham. Heath had aspirations at one point of playing in the majors and was even invited to tryouts with the Cardinals and the Cubs. Unfortunately, like a lot of young players, he suffered a career-ending injury before he even had a career.