Born Country

by Randy Owen

  We have about two thousand acres now, most of it contiguous, most of it connected to the past, and none of it getting prepared for new housing developments. Being the caretaker of all that land can be a big job. Many people have the misconception that if you just leave land to grow wild, it’s good for the local wildlife. That’s not true. Quail, for instance, flourish in an environment of small farms and especially those growing cotton and corn. The little chicks love to run out into the fields, eat the insects for protein, then scurry back to cover. If they have to run through a lot of tall, uncultivated grass to get to that food, their wings will get wet from the grass dew, and they’ll die before they get back to their mother. The same with baby turkeys. Mother turkeys are notoriously bad mothers and will drag their poults through wet grass in search of grasshoppers. Many of them won’t survive. If you have some mowed strips where they can move around easily, they’ll thrive.

  On the other hand, they all need woods for protection, so we have to maintain the woodland in a way that deer, for instance, can gobble down some of the wild broom sage in the fields, then hide out in the woods when they hear my truck coming down the road. I love to watch how the pine forests around here, no matter how much you cut them back, just come back thicker than before, with trees providing cover and nutrition for animals big and small.

  When the weather’s right, I’m outdoors, trimming trees, mowing grass, or maybe casting a line on one of our fourteen lakes. But my main activity, perhaps the most relaxing one for me, is looking at cows and calves. To get around, I usually take one of Daddy’s favorite old trucks I still cherish—the ’68 Ford Ranger or a ’71 dual-wheeled Chevy with a cattle bed. As I mentioned, we now have almost a thousand head of cattle, most of them registered, polled Herefords or Angus. And a lot of them are calves, maybe 170 to 200 at any one time. We watch them grow up and try to make sure they are healthy and disease free, and then many of them join other cattle for one of our two annual sales—the official Tennessee River Music Dixieland Delight Hereford Sale, on the Saturday before Memorial Day, and the official Tennessee River Music Dixieland Delight Angus Sale, on the first Saturday after Thanksgiving.

  As I’m writing this, we have just celebrated our twenty-fifth consecutive year of holding the Hereford sale out at the ranch, and by the time you’re reading this, we’ll have staged our seventh annual Angus sale. The Hereford auction was a big event, as usual, both a business gathering and simply a gathering of like-minded people, farm families and their kids and grandma and all the rest. Before it’s all said and done, there could be fifteen hundred people coming up here to talk highly bred cattle, inspect them, trade breeding tips, and even buy a few.

  They start showing up on Friday, our sales catalog in hand, to look at all the cattle we put on display before the actual sale. They walk around and take notes, and then we feed them some good old Southern cooking. They’re back on Saturday for the actual sale, which is run much like any kind of auction. The cattle are brought into a ring, lot by lot, and an auctioneer runs the bidding while ring men filter through the crowd and spot the bidders. One lot may have two or three animals in it. When we’re all done, we’ve sold around 75 to 100 registered cattle. Then we feed the crowd again and they head home.

  The annual Dixieland Delight sale is an important part of our cattle operation, but it’s also another excuse to invite a large crowd up to the ranch and wade into the community of people we feel so much a part of. We also have an annual Fan Appreciation Day every June where fans show up, and I thank them by putting out a big spread and singing a few of their favorites songs. Then, as I mentioned before, there is our annual golf tournament every April to help out Alabama Sheriff’s Youth Ranches. I don’t have it at the ranch—it’s usually held at a different Alabama golf course—but it has the same homegrown spirit. We’ve been doing this for twenty-one years now and will continue until I can no longer swing a golf club. This last year we had, among others, two Baseball Hall of Fame players, Johnny Bench and Gaylord Perry, “Nashville Star” winner Angela Hacker, two other rising Nashville stars, David St. Romain and James LeBlanc, and perhaps country music’s most unique celebrity, Big & Rich’s pal, Two Foot Fred.

  Even when the Tennessee River Music ranch isn’t full of people, it’s still a zoo. We have three horses that technically belong to Randa, but we take care of them while she’s in college, plus two dogs, a yard full of chickens, a menagerie of cats, a flock of Canadian geese, and all of those ponds full of fish. And, oh yeah, a thousand or so cows. Kelly had a tribe of goats for a while but had to let them go because she didn’t have time to properly tend to them.

  We also make it our mission to rescue stray dogs we find on the highway. Kelly or I will pick them up and bring them home, get them checked out by a vet and neutered or spayed, then put them up for adoption. Right now we have six rescue dogs boarding with us, waiting for new homes.

  So the ranch makes for a lot of work and returns a lifetime full of pleasure and satisfaction. Physically and mentally, I needed a long break from both Alabama and the music business in general, and the ranch was an idyllic retreat. There was no break in my ongoing obligations to St. Jude, Country Cares, the scholarship program for young Alabama farmers, my board position at Jacksonville State University, and other like ventures. But in all of these areas, I was no longer beholden to the collective pressures and responsibilities of that musical institution called Alabama. I was now solely in charge of my own life.

  I think it was inevitable that after a long resting period, I would get back to music in some way. It had been in my blood since my daddy handed me that first Stella guitar. I had never really stopped writing songs. If a song idea came to me while out working on the ranch, I would come home and fool around with a new lyric or melody. In the middle of the final tour, for instance, my beloved Paw Paw died at age ninety-three, but only later did I have a chance to commemorate his life in a song. The song is called “Good,” and in part it says:

  For 73 years he raised seven children

  With the help of Mama’s mom

  But on the day he was buried

  There at Mount Zion

  I thought he’s in a real good place

  I never thought I was totally dried up or ready to “retire,” whatever that means these days. I also felt then, and continue to feel, that Alabama’s days are far from over. Since the Farewell Tour, I have produced two inspirational albums, and I’m sure there’s a lot more work in us as a group. After my hiatus, though, I felt I still needed to spread my own wings a little. I needed my own new direction.

  Like most things in my life, that new direction—my first solo album—came about organically. I came to realize that in order to be an active presence and force in the work I was doing with St. Jude and others, I had to stay current. There was some research done at St. Jude that indicated that a lot of people they were trying to reach had never heard of Danny Thomas. At first I found that shocking, until I thought about it for a minute. A seventeen-year-old today wasn’t even born before Danny passed away and would only know about Make Room for Daddy if he or she sat in front of the cable network TV Land all day.

  For Country Cares alone, I had to stay current with country radio in order to ensure the continued enthusiastic participation of hundreds of country DJs. Audiences are forever changing. Every year country music draws in new, younger listeners. A new audience demands new music, and I felt it was time to deliver some.

  It’s like that old Paul McCartney joke. “Who is he?” one teenager asks another. “Oh, you remember—he was once a part of that group Wings.” The Beatles, to them, was ancient history.

  By the time I released the first single—“Braid My Hair”—off of my first solo album, it had been almost eight years since I had sung a brand-new song for country radio. Plus, I had never performed onstage as a solo act—never. I was pretty sure I could pull it off, but I wouldn’t know until I tried it. New act, new music, maybe even a new haircut—sounded like the right th
ing to do.

  I talked to Kelly about it, and she was definitely on board. Dale Morris had the brilliant idea of matching me with John Rich as a producer. Besides being the nattily dressed half of one of the hottest groups in country music, Big & Rich, John is probably the most prolific songwriter-producer in Nashville at this writing. And after sitting down with him, I realized he was a lot like me. He had a fierce determination to be successful and was willing to try damn near anything to make something new and fresh. With Big & Rich, it was the idea of adding new lyrics. With Gretchen Wilson and “Redneck Woman,” it was the raw, unadorned energy of one tough, no-BS woman. With Randy Owen, it turned out, it was the very personal approach of the album we created together, One on One.

  After John and I sat down and wrote a couple of songs together, I still had to be convinced that this solo thing was the right move. I mean, what if I went out there to perform and people didn’t really want to see me sing by myself? So with the help of Dale, Barbara, Marc Oswald, and Shawn Pennington, we put together a crack new band and went out and did a dozen or so concerts in a variety of venues, from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to the Alabama Theatre in Myrtle Beach. When I got back home, I was totally convinced that this was what I needed to do.

  In order for the album to be all that I wanted it to be, I felt like I needed a song that might really stand out as an anthem of sorts for all the kids I’d tried to help over the years and all the ones who still needed our help. Then I remembered a song that had miraculously come my way a few months before.

  The song was called “Braid My Hair.”

  The two men who wrote “Braid My Hair”—Chris Gray and Brent Wilson—were frustrated when they first tried to get me to listen to their song. At the time, I was taking my long holiday from the musical life, and recording anything was the furthest thing from my mind. So, hitting a brick wall with me, they did an end around and sent it to my mama. They were not the first people to do this, but my mama rarely listens to the songs that are sent to her, and the ones she does listen to, she never likes. Usually sending a song to her is a waste of postage. I wouldn’t recommend it.

  Well, this song she listened to and liked. As Chris later said, “If you want to get a song published, go to the best song plugger in the business—Martha Owen!” Mama gave me the CD and said, “You know, you might want to listen to this one.” I was shocked to hear her say that—she had never recommended a song, period—so I said, “Tell me more.”

  “It’s about a little girl,” she said, “who is losing her hair because of cancer, and she wants to grow it back. It’s real sweet.”

  It was more than sweet. It was awesome. Here are the opening lyrics:

  She could be the first female president

  Or be the doctor whose experiment

  Finds the cure to what she’s in here for

  But right now treatments keep her sick in bed

  That baseball cap never leaves her head

  I loved the song and had never heard anything quite like it. It grew out of Chris’s experience working as a teacher in a children’s hospital, helping young patients keep up with their schoolwork while undergoing chemotherapy and other treatments for cancer and other serious ailments. He knew all about hair loss during chemo and knew that every young girl who suffered through that experience dreamed of again having hair to braid. As soon as he mentioned that to Brent, they had the hook—“braid my hair”—for a great song.

  I wanna go to school, make a friend, be able to run again

  Take off my mask and just breathe in the air

  But most of all, I’m gonna braid my hair

  I reached Chris and Brent in Nashville and found out that they had never had a song recorded before. They said they obviously wanted me to do the song after following my activities with Country Cares and St. Jude. I told them I didn’t have anything going at the time, but that I would be in touch if I did.

  After I decided to make a solo album, I knew this song was a perfect fit, so I called them immediately, and, thank God, no one had yet recorded it. At that point we decided the song was so close to the everyday reality of the kids at St. Jude—many of whom are undergoing chemo and losing their hair—that it was only natural that St. Jude profit from its release. It would fit nicely into the latest annual Country Cares campaign, a way, really, of invigorating the whole effort. We decided to premiere it at the same time we launched Country Cares again, and we ended up working a deal where the hospital will receive 100 percent of all publishing royalties earned by the song, as well as have a piece of the action of every digital MP3 download of the song. Handing over the publishing was a generous gesture on the part of Chris and Brent, but their hearts were definitely in the right place or they wouldn’t have come up with such a moving song in the first place. I can only hope this propels them into superstardom as a songwriting team.

  In the midst of all of this—finishing the new CD, One on One, releasing the single of “Braid My Hair,” and easing back into performing—I got a call from John Moses at St. Jude with another incredible blessing. As a former recipient, John was allowed to nominate his own candidates for a very prestigious award called the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. The award is given annually by the National Ethnic Coalition to American citizens they deem to have made significant contributions to the United States while maintaining their ethnic or ancestral identity. Unbeknownst to me, John submitted my name as a candidate, and I was chosen.

  The awards ceremony was held on Ellis Island in the Port of New York, and the list of recipients on hand was mind-boggling. Among the 106 honorees were seven prominent Indian Americans in fields from broadcasting to medicine; former U.S. senator and Native American Ben Nighthorse Campbell; actor Gary Sinise, Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump, active in working with disabled war veterans and the founder of Operation Iraqi Children, a group sending school supplies to Iraqi kids; General Duncan McNabb, Vice Chief of Staff for the U.S. Air Force; and Rwanda-born Jacqueline Murekatete, who saw her whole family slaughtered in the 1994 genocide there and now works to end genocide everywhere. Every age, race, ethnicity, religion, and culture was represented there—all of them Americans, all of them dedicated to improving the lives of others—and I felt so humbled to be in their presence. I felt like I wasn’t there just representing myself and my family but also my ethnic and cultural origins—from the rural farm life of DeKalb County to the state of Alabama and the region of the American South that I love so much.

  And so, a trip to Ellis Island and a new solo venture aside, I’d guess you’d have to say that I’m back to pretty much where I started. I live where my parents lived and their parents lived, and I live with the constant daily reminder of the exact places where my daddy and I would pick cotton all day or the exact road we would take to First Monday in Scottsboro or the exact woods where we would walk and he’d point out the difference between a post oak and a white oak. I don’t live in the past, that’s for sure, but I certainly live with the past. And that’s the way I’ve always wanted it.

  There’s still a lot for me to do in this life. With the One on One CD out there, there’s still a lot more music to make, more money to raise for St. Jude, and a hundred other worthy causes, and even a few more cattle to breed and sell on auction day. Not too long ago someone asked me why, after all those years with Alabama, I was out writing and performing music again. I thought for a minute, then answered, “Well, I want to keep making new music and keep going until I’m old enough to play the halftime show at the Super Bowl.”

  There’s always a new dream around every corner. I plan to keep on playing as long as people keep on listening.

  On top of it all, there is life with Kelly and our wonderful kids and hopefully, before too long, some grandkids. Pretty soon I’ll be the Paw Paw in the family. I’ll be the old guy telling stories of singing schools and my daddy and Buck Owens harmonizing on “Love’s Gonna Live Here Again” at six in the morning and the time I cut my thumb off or got stuck under the house tryi
ng to gather some chicken eggs. And when I start to forget some of the details—or someone asks me if “chert rock” is a real word—I’ll have this book to look things up.

  I’m sure one day one of those grandkids will ask me, in so many words, “Why you, Paw Paw? Why, among the thousands and thousands of guitar-loving rural kids in the American South, were you and Teddy and Jeff so extremely fortunate? Why were you given a path out of poverty and handed such a rich and plentiful life?”

  And I’ll say something like, “Because that was God’s plan for me. He’s had His hand on me the whole time. And you know what? He’s got a plan for you too. And I can’t wait to see what it is.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to: God, who’s “brought me safe thus far.”

  My late father: the friend I miss daily. I can’t overemphasize his impact on my life. Thanks “G.Y.”

  My mother, Martha: who, along with Daddy, “G.Y.,” got the most out of the least of finances. Thanks to them for the true love I saw shared by two incredible Christian parents who walked the walk and talked the talk.

  My grandparents: who raised large families (twelve and seven, respectively) and farmed the soil, living a faithful, married life till their deaths. Especially Paw Paw Teague for the “I’m proud of you son” conversations.

  My sisters: Reba and Rachel, who shared the love of our parents.

  The military men and women: who have served, are serving, and will serve our great country.

  Dale and Earline Morris: who are part of my heart and family.

  My buddies at Dale Morris & Assoc.: Barbara, Sue, and Jamie.

  The “Ro” team: Marc Oswald, Shawn Pennington, Sheila Hozhabri, Will Hitchcock, Steve Boland, Craig Campbell, Jennie Smythe, and all the folks at Broken Bow Records.

  The road crew: Jim Henson, Paul Scodova, William “Eto” Farley, Jere “Hollywood” Galloway, and Will Stinson.