“I forgot to take it. So I took two the next day. It doesn’t work that way.
“We knew we couldn’t afford to have a baby, but God knew differently. It was mixed emotions, because I was so grateful and so excited and yet so scared, because this was at a very critical time for us. If we could get three [show] dates a month, minimum, we could hang on and pay the bills.”
“We didn’t make any money from her career for quite a while,” Ken explains. “Every dime she made went back into the business, back into the show. That’s why I went to work as a pilot for the State of Tennessee.”
“We didn’t have any maternity insurance, because we weren’t going to get pregnant,” Barbara continues. “We found out that, back then, babies cost around $800 if you shared a room with somebody. We managed to save $800. But then I had to have a Caesarian section, $1,300. We had to pay for Matthew on time!”
“Several times, we tried to give him back,” Ken quips. “We’ve not paid. You take him back.”
Not long after son Matt’s birth in 1970, Barbara Mandrell had her first big solo hits, “Tonight My Baby’s Coming Home” (1971) and “Show Me” (1972). She was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry cast and became a member in July 1972.
“When I first started doing the Opry, Roy Acuff didn’t know who I was any more than the man in the moon,” she recalls. “But I was very fortunate, because Tex Ritter was still with us. I had known Mr. Ritter since I was eleven. He gave me probably by far the most incredible introductions I’ve ever received in my life.
“Because of their scheduling, they began putting me on Roy Acuff’s portion of the show. As we got to know each other, we became so close. When he and Bud Wendell inducted me, I thought, literally, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’
“I remember, one night [in 1982] the song I had out was ‘Till You’re Gone.’ It had a saxophone part in it. But I wasn’t going to sing it on the Opry, because I didn’t want to do it without playing my sax.”
At the time, the Opry frowned on bringing “noncountry” instruments onto its stage. And of the show’s cast members, no one was more traditional than Roy Acuff.
“All of a sudden, there was a knock on the dressing-room door. Daddy says, ‘Mr. Acuff wants to see you.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but what he said to me was precious. He said, ‘I want you to go get that saxophone, and I want you to do that hit song of yours right now.’ I said, ‘Mr. Acuff, I don’t need to. I can do other songs.’ He said, ‘No, you got that hit record, and you go play it.’ He totally made me [take the sax onto the Opry stage]. I couldn’t believe it. Mr. Acuff introduced me, and I did the song. If somebody else would have told me that story, or if I hadn’t lived it, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Barbara scored a major breakthrough with the sexually frank “The Midnight Oil” in 1973. To this day, it is considered a landmark recording in the annals of female country music. “This Time I Almost Made It” (1974) and “Standing Room Only” (1975) continued her momentum.
After daughter Jaime’s birth in 1976, Barbara’s career went into overdrive. “Married But Not to Each Other” (1977), “Woman to Woman” (1977), “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed” (1978), “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” (1979), “Years” (1980), and a flurry of other hits led to 1981’s “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” another of her signature songs.
She was named the Country Music Association’s (CMA) Female Vocalist of the Year in 1979 and 1981 and hosted her own NBC network variety series, Barbara Mandrell & The Mandrell Sisters, costarring Louise and her youngest sibling Irlene, in 1980–1982. Barbara became the only woman in history to win back-to-back Country Music Association (CMA) Entertainer of the Year awards (in 1980 and 1981). She developed one of country music’s flashiest stage shows, spotlighting her multi-instrumental abilities on steel guitar, sax, banjo, drums, bass, and mandolin. By 1983, she had added dazzling choreography and was a triumph in Las Vegas, billed as “The Lady Is a Champ.”
But it all came to a crashing halt for country music’s “golden girl” on September 11, 1984. While out on a shopping trip with Matt and Jaime in her silver Jaguar, Barbara was hit head-on by a Suburu driven by a teenager. He was killed. Barbara and her children were spared by their seat belts, but she suffered a broken right femur, a shattered right ankle, a nearly destroyed right knee, and a severe concussion that affected her personality for months.
Her subsequent 1990 best-selling autobiography Get to the Heart went into extensive detail about how wild her mood swings became during her recovery. Ken’s patience and love were put to the test. Her head injury caused her temper to rage out of control, and she snarled, screamed, and cursed at him while he tried to nurse her back to health. Opry star Bill Anderson shared his stories about caring for his brain-injured wife, Becky, and that helped Ken to understand what his wife was going through.
Son Nathaniel was born in 1985, and the following year Barbara staged her comeback concert. Friend and fellow Opry star Dolly Parton opened for her at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. Barbara had a pin in her leg and a brace in her boot, but she danced anyway. Even today, she limps at home when she’s having a bad day. But Barbara Mandrell has never done so onstage.
By the 1990s, she was playing Vegas and touring steadily again. Through it all, father Irby Mandrell remained firmly in control as his daughter’s manager. Ken says he never felt in competition with his powerful father-in-law.
“He was the boss at what he did, and I did what I did,” Ken states. “He handled all the road things, and I didn’t. I didn’t book the hotel rooms and all that kind of stuff. I had nothing to do with it. When they bought the tour bus, Barbara and her dad designed that bus, and I had nothing to do with it.”
But as Irby’s health declined in the early 1990s, Barbara asked Ken to step into his management shoes. It was not, he notes, an easy transition for him.
“Her dad had open-heart surgery, and he was off the road for five months, to start with. I went on the road for five months. I quit my job at the State of Tennessee to do that. And I absolutely hated the road. That bus is so tiny to me. Of course, it was a huge world to Barbara. That is where her world was. She lived there. I hated every moment of it on that bus.”
Barbara remembers, “When Daddy retired and Ken moved in the last few years of my career to replace him, what was neat was he asked me if it would bother me if he went back to college. I said, ‘No, it doesn’t bother me.’ So even though he was a busy man, he went back to get a degree in business management. Yet he had already become my manager.”
Ken enrolled in Belmont University in Nashville in 1992–1993. He was, needless to say, the oldest student in his class. But he was also the best.
“It was coming up on the time for him to graduate,” Barbara recalls. “But he had to go to New York with me for something concerning my career. So he wasn’t there when he won the school’s highest honor, Business Management Student of the Year. Why? Because he was managing! I loved it. I did tease him when I saw his graduation picture. I said, ‘You look like one of the professors!’
“You can imagine that there have been many times when he’s been introduced as ‘Mr. Mandrell.’ Or people will say, ‘How does it feel to be Mr. Mandrell?’ Now, there aren’t a lot of men, believe me, who wouldn’t be bothered by that. And there are some that would really crush.”
Secure, steady, and good-humored, Ken Dudney is not one of them. During the height of her fame, he presided over her massive fan-club gatherings of three thousand or more with the aplomb of a circus ringmaster. His charm and wit have endeared him to everyone in her orbit.
Barbara Mandrell retired in late 1997. But she’s just as driven as ever, seeking perfection as a gardener, interior designer, and crafts-person. She and Ken still bicker with one another. And they’re still in love.
“You not only forgive, you forget,” says Barbara of their spats. “There have been times when I absolutely wanted to walk out or l
eave him or kick him out or get him to leave me. It’s over. That’s it. I mean, that mad.
“But when it got right down to it, there was no way. I couldn’t imagine life without him. To me, it’s because God is with us. He helps us to see what’s important. We keep our word. We promised ’til death do us part.
“It is so deep that there are no words for it. I’ve told him this over and over again. And it hasn’t been too long ago that I told him again: I really hope I die first, because I cannot imagine my life without him. We are One.
“He is very witty and very funny, and I love to watch him make people laugh a lot. Sometimes he doesn’t make me laugh when he’s trying to make me laugh. It makes me mad sometimes, because I’m usually the thing he’s joking about. But that’s one of the things I fell in love with, his sense of humor.
“But most important, truly in my mind, is that God is a part of this. Ken loves our Lord Jesus Christ. He got saved and found the Lord when he was twenty-one years old. I also love it that he is such an exceptional, great father.
“When we were falling in love, ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ by Tony Bennett was a hit,” Barbara recalls. “We both worked in Daddy’s band. On breaks, we’d dance, and when that song played, we just loved it.
“The deal we made is—and he’s kept to it—no matter where we are, and no matter what’s going on, if we hear that song, he is to turn to me and ask me to dance. No matter what. I don’t care if it’s in an elevator or where it is.”
For their twenty-second wedding anniversary, she gave him a tiny cable car that was a music box. It plays, of course, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Sure enough, the first time they played it in their candlelit screened porch, he asked her to dance. When the music box wound down, Barbara and Ken woke from their private reverie to find that Matt, Jaime, and Nathan had all slipped from the room to give them their romantic privacy.
Barbara and Ken rededicated their vows on their tenth anniversary and again on their twenty-fifth.
“What are you doing on the fiftieth?” asks Ken. “I will do it then, too.”
“I’ll race ya,” Barbara replies.
5
Tribulation and Triumph
The 1980s were not kind to Bill Anderson. The decade began with the loss of his longtime recording contract. Then his fabled songwriting went into eclipse. The following years were marked by tragedy, illness, and death. A financial disaster capped his litany of tribulations.
“One day I was riding into town—and I remember exactly where I was—I was turning off Old Hickory Boulevard in Hermitage and turning onto the interstate, and I actually wondered if I had enough money to go to the grocery store to buy some groceries that I needed,” recalls Bill. “And I remember thinking, ‘Golly, Bill, how did it come to this?’”
Twenty years of concerts and touring, more than fifty hit records, years of television stardom, more than forty hits written for his fellow artists, membership in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, nearly fifty record albums, and glittering fame on the Grand Ole Opry stage—had it all been for nothing? He had built his career as a young man. Now he was in his forties, and everything seemed to be in tatters.
Bill’s twenty-three-year recording contract with Decca/MCA came to an end in late 1981. But it was his self-imposed retirement from songwriting the following year that was far more spirit crushing.
“I had written a female song that I thought was really good,” Bill remembers. “I took it to a major record producer for a major label. He had three or four of his cohorts in his office. I went in there and said, ‘I think I have a hit song for a girl singer.’ In front of all his friends he said, ‘Well, who do you want me to play it for? Kitty Wells? Haw-haw-haw!’ And everybody laughed.”
Kitty Wells had been a huge country star in the 1950s, but by 1982 she had long since disappeared from the popular charts. Without even hearing the song, the producer had written it off as belonging to a bygone era.
Stung and humiliated, Bill recalls thinking, “Well, they’re laughing at me now.”
“That really hurt me. It wasn’t like he did it in private. It was in front of a whole bunch of people. I can sit and talk about it even now and still feel how bad that hurt with all those people in that room laughing at me. My spirit had been crushed. After that, I just didn’t have the heart to write songs anymore. My heart was not in it, because my heart had been broken.”
Bill’s songwriting heartbreak was only the beginning. In 1984, his wife Becky was critically injured in an automobile accident. She suffered severe brain injuries and spent weeks in a coma. She subsequently endured years of rehabilitation. The experience drained Bill emotionally and financially. In addition, he had to become “Mr. Mom” to their six-year-old son Jamey.
“The morning I told him about his mother’s wreck, he said, ‘The bad news is Mama’s in the hospital. The good news is you and I get to spend more time together.’” Father and son did, indeed, bond powerfully during the next few years. After each of his appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, Bill said, “Good night, Jaybird,” to his boy over the radio airwaves.
In January 1985, Bill was felled by agonizing back pain. For months, he could barely get out of bed in the mornings. Later that year, his best friend died.
“Jimmy Gately and I had more than an employer-employee relationship,” Bill says. “We had to for it to last almost thirteen years. Most musicians are gypsies at heart and not many are willing to stay in one job for that long. . . . But Jimmy was special.”
Before joining Bill’s band as the guitarist, fiddler, and show-opening “front man,” Jimmy Gately had been a regular on TV’s Ozark Jubilee and had written such hits as Webb Pierce’s “Alla My Love” and Sonny James’s “The Minute You’re Gone.” He was older and more experienced than Bill, so in the early years, he was the star’s mentor. Bill and Jimmy cowrote “Bright Lights and Country Music,” which serves as Bill Anderson’s theme song to this day. By the 1980s, the two men were fishing buddies and regular golfing companions.
“The last conversation we had was on the telephone in early 1985,” says Bill. “Jimmy had just returned home from a stay in the hospital, and I was confined to my bed with back pain. . . . His heart had been causing him some problems, but he felt sure the doctors had everything under control. He sounded happy to be back with his family and assured me that he’d be up and around in no time.”
Less than two weeks later, on March 17, 1985, Jimmy Gately was dead at age fifty-three. Bill recalls that he “cried like a baby” when he heard the news.
In the spring of 1986, Bill’s twenty-five-year-old daughter Terri was diagnosed with cancer. She survived and has remained cancer-free. But at the time, it was another agonizing episode in Bill Anderson’s spiral of misfortune. As the decade ended, he learned that the failure of his PoFolks restaurant chain might ruin him financially.
“When the PoFolks restaurant thing collapsed on top of all this, the despair was certainly there,” he comments. “I had been so naïve. My name was on all of these restaurant leases and all of their equipment leases [as a guarantee]. When they all fell in my lap, I thought you had to pay one hundred cents on the dollar, so I did. Then there were no dollars left. Then I found out I could have paid fifty cents on the dollar, thirty cents on some of them. That’s the way I got out of the rest of the debts.
“I thought it was never going to end. I fought lawsuits and all kinds of stuff. It cost me two or three fortunes, but I finally paid off everybody I had to pay off. I should have had much better financial advice. I flunked two subjects in school—math and music!
“I don’t mean to sound like I’m this much of a hero or something, but I just kept fighting my way through it. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other. . . . I had to work the road. I’d take dates on the road where I’d almost lose money or would just barely break even, hoping I could sell enough pictures and albums. When you’re broke, you want to come home with whatever you can come
home with.
“I guess maybe I was so focused on all the things I had to do that I didn’t have time to sit around and wallow in self-pity. I know there were times when it was awfully rough, but I am just not a ‘woe-is-me’ kind of guy.
“When Becky was in the hospital and going through all of that, I had reconnected with a Sunday-school class and my church group. I had started going again. I’ve never been a religious fanatic. I’ve never worn it on my sleeve. But I have always had a deep and abiding faith. I’ve always felt there was somebody looking out for me. So my religion helped sustain me.
“And you’ve got to realize that there were other things going on in my life at that time. It wasn’t like I was doing nothing.” Throughout the decade, Bill Anderson was a major television presence, both on network and cable shows. Even so, his financial situation was precarious.
“In the back of my mind, I knew that if it finally came down to absolute push and shove, that I could sell my songs. I knew that possibility was there, but it would be like giving your kids up.”
That was certainly a devastating thing to contemplate, because songs and songwriting are at the very core of Bill Anderson’s being. Born on November 1, 1937, in Columbia, South Carolina, he was devoted to country music even as a tot.
“My mother and dad told me that I could find country music on the radio a long time before I could tie my shoelaces,” Bill reports. “There was no television. I turned on my radio, my little theater of the mind, and I listened to those artists and to those songs, and there was something in there that spoke to me. The songs that I really liked were the story songs, the songs that painted pictures with words.
“I was a big Hank Williams fan. And I noticed on his records that he not only sang the songs, he wrote them.
“I was about ten or eleven years old when I wrote my first song. It was called ‘Carry Me to My Texas Home.’ I had never been west of Carrollton, Georgia, at the time, but Texas sounded like something a true country artist ought to be writing and singing about. I was fifteen years old and in the tenth grade at Avondale High School [in Atlanta] when three buddies and I decided to form a band.”
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 5