In 1999, Amy was one of the participants in his annual charity golf tournament, The Vinny. They were seen dining together, attending church together and, especially, golfing together. Vince Gill is so good at the sport that he could have been a professional. Amy Grant’s enthusiasm for golf helped draw them closer together. After several sightings of them on the links, she told the press that they were a couple, in late 1999.
He proposed the old-fashioned way, on bended knee. On March 10, 2000, Vince Gill and Amy Grant were wed outdoors at a farm in rural Tennessee, south of Nashville. She wore a cream-colored floor-length dress with a matching cape and flowers in her hair. He wore a black formal suit. They wrote their own vows.
“The view from the hilltop that day made me think I could see forever, which is how a man feels when he’s finally complete,” he said later. “I tell Amy all the time, ‘You have no idea how amazing it is to be whole again.’ There is just no overestimating the power of a second chance, which is what I feel I got by marrying Amy.”
Today, he reflects, “She just made things more peaceful. What’s beautiful about our relationship is we don’t argue. We don’t fight and yell or any of that. We really never have had any cross words.”
Vince brought Amy to the Opry on April 21, 2000. Although she’d grown up in Nashville, this was the Christian-music superstar’s debut at the city’s most famous institution.
AMY LEE GRANT’S FAMILY’S roots were in Nashville. She was born on November 25, 1960, in Augusta, Georgia, but the Grants moved back to the city when she was a girl. Her great-grandfather, A. M. Burton, was a multimillionaire philanthropist who founded the Life & Casualty Insurance Company. The firm’s skyscraper is one of the most prominent features of Nashville’s skyline to this day. Amy’s father, Burton, became a prominent Nashville physician, and her mother, Gloria, raised Amy and her sisters to be proper young ladies. Amy attended the elite Ensworth and Harpeth Hall schools and majored in English at Vanderbilt University.
While at Harpeth Hall, she began writing and performing pop songs with religious lyrics. The leader of her Bible study group took a tape of them to Word Records, which signed her at age sixteen. My Father’s Eyes (1979) and Never Alone (1980) paved the way for her breakthrough album, 1982’s Age to Age and its hit “El Shaddai.” She first crossed over from the Christian to the pop charts with 1985’s “Find a Way.” Then, 1986’s “Next Time I Fall” (a duet with Peter Cetera) and 1991’s “Baby Baby,” “Every Heartbeat,” and “That’s What Love Is For” made her a mainstream pop star. She continued to make the pop charts throughout the 1990s.
“I have become the most blessed man, I think, on this earth, to marry my best friend,” said Vince in introducing Amy to the Opry audience. “And I want her to come out and sing a song all about tomorrow. Would you please welcome Miss Amy Grant.”
She and Vince sang “How Great Thou Art” together. They brought the house down. The Opry cast was thrilled to meet her.
“They’re crazy about her,” beams Vince. “That community mind-set out there is really beautiful. She has a tremendously long history of her family in this town, and a connection that I think is as big a part of that place as anybody who’s gone through those doors. She was willing to meet all the people that make up my life, and vice versa. I’ve met so many of the people who shaped and formed her faith and her life. It’s been pretty neat for both of us. It’s broadened both of us in a beautiful way.”
On the home front, things were a little more strained. Vince’s daughter Jenny was a teenager during his divorce and remarriage. Amy’s children, Matt (born in 1987), Millie (born in 1989), and Sarah (born in 1992), all entered their rocky teenage years during the early years of their mother’s new marriage.
“It was not an easy road,” Vince admits. “There were a lot of issues. But I just told Amy, ‘Time is going to take care of all of this. It’s not going to be right today. Maybe not next year, not two years from now, but just with time all of these kids will see who you are. And your kids will see who I am. Regardless of what they’ve been told or taught to believe, they’ll see who I am, and they’ll see how I treat you. And time has been a great thing. Everybody’s great. I think everybody realizes that things are the way they ought to be.”
The birth of their daughter Corrina Grant Gill in 2001 was a major turning point. She blended the family in a profound way.
“What’s beautiful about Corrina is she gives everybody in our family the connection. My daughter has a sister, and Amy’s three kids have a little sister, and it’s ours. So she kind of connected all of us.
“She’s just a little twin of Amy. She’s full of kindness and sweetness. She cares about animals and all things and people, too. Her prayers at night should be songs or books. That she would think of what she thinks of is pretty inspiring.”
Corrina’s birth coincided with Vince and Amy’s blossoming as a beloved couple in Music City. Both of them have long been noted for their civic involvement and commitment to charity work. Their collaborations as artists have endeared them to throngs of fans in recent years.
Vince and Amy were together on holiday concert tours in 2001, 2003, and 2004. He played guitar in her touring band in 2002. They costarred on Christmas TV specials in 2002 and appeared together on a PBS Independence Day special in 2004. Amy sang back-up vocals on Vince’s 2004 single “In These Last Few Days.” He appeared at the Nashville Symphony gala honoring her in 2006. She toured with him in 2007. He coproduced her albums Legacy Hymns & Faith (2002) and Rock of Ages Hymns & Faith (2005). Since the latter won a Grammy Award, Vince is unique as someone having earned Grammys as a singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, and record producer.
“Working together in the studio is really easy,” he says. “It’s never hard if you’re respectful. To me, that’s the whole key to working with anybody, but especially with your best pal.
“I don’t think she has any idea of how great she is. There’s beauty in that. It was interesting that she asked me to do them [traditional hymns]. I never heard of them, you know. She said, ‘This is what will be neat. You won’t have forty-five years of singing this in church to guide your wife on how to do this song.’ I’m sure I ruffled a few feathers with some of the more soulful and funky grooves I put on some of these old hymns.
“If I write any songs of faith, I have to go to her and ask, ‘Is this really accurate or not?’ She’s a great help. We don’t write a lot together. Once again, that’s as much a respect factor as anything else. She had a twenty-five-year career before I showed up. And I did too. Just because we got married, we don’t have to be Sonny & Cher.
“But I think people sense it, could feel it, and can see it, that we are two people who are just so amazingly right for each other.”
16
Funny Love
Blessed with a droll, dry wit, the husband of the Grand Ole Opry’s most famous comic was just as funny as she was. Sarah Ophelia Colley, known to millions as Minnie Pearl, married pilot Henry Cannon in 1947, and they were still together when she passed away forty-nine years later. Lost without her, Henry died the following year. Theirs was truly one of Nashville’s greatest love stories.
“The fact that Henry is one of the funniest men I have ever met makes him even more attractive,” Minnie reflected. “He thinks funny. He has a dry wit, and his timing is absolutely perfect.
“We will be having a discussion about something, and he’ll make one of his wry observations, and I will absolutely fall out. He’s not trying to be funny. I’m very conscious of people who try to make me laugh, and Henry has never done that. It’s just his natural way of expressing himself—and has been since the day I met him.”
She once observed, “I’ve always said that he is funnier than me.”
He was also completely and utterly unimpressed with show business, which could lead to hilarious consequences. During a 1952 trip to New York, the couple went to see the hit musical Guys and Dolls.
“Henry was seated on t
he aisle,” Minnie recalled. “Just as the overture started, I heard whispering all around me. I knew someone famous had arrived. Being from the country, I turned to look. There stood Elizabeth Taylor at her most devastatingly beautiful. She had just married Michael Wilding, and she was absolutely glowing. I said, ‘Henry, Henry, here comes Elizabeth Taylor!’ ‘Oh mercy,’ he mumbled, and turned around and stood up to say hello. He thought it was someone he had met and was supposed to know!
“He had no idea who Elizabeth Taylor was. I tugged on his coat and said, ‘Henry, sit down! She’s a movie star, the most beautiful woman in the world!’ He said, ‘Well, she does look pretty good,’ and then went right back to his program.”
When Minnie met Henry Cannon, he was a pilot who owned a charter-airplane business in Nashville. At the time, neither of them was an innocent youngster. He was a twenty-nine-year-old veteran of World War II. She was thirty-four and had been a theater professional for more than a decade.
“I had been on my own for a long time and had already become set in my ways,” she recalled. “I was also as stubborn and independent as the dickens. Considering all this, it’s amazing to me that there was never any question as to who wore the pants in our family.”
She added, “I think women deserve to have as much pay for an honest day’s work as men, but I don’t go all to pieces over women’s lib. My husband is the boss in our household. He tells me what to do, and I like it that way.”
After he married her, Henry was shocked to learn that she had no investments or even a savings account. He sold his company, eventually flying Minnie to all her shows, and became the entertainer’s business manager. From that time on, they were practically inseparable.
That Minnie was irresponsible with money is somewhat surprising, because her father had a lumber business that was wiped out during the Great Depression. She was born Sarah Ophelia Colley on October 25, 1912, in Centerville, Tennessee, a small town west of Nashville. Her mother had been the belle of nearby Franklin, Tennessee, and had raised all five of her daughters to be well-educated ladies. Sarah Ophelia, the baby, was doted on, pampered, and praised when she played the piano and play acted. Her mother took her along on shopping trips to Nashville, which is where the little girl unwittingly witnessed her future.
“I used to go to the Princess Theater,” she remembered. “Back then, you could put a child in a theater and leave ’em there while Mama did her shopping. Elviry Weaver used to come there and do her act with her ‘brothers.’ I sat there and learned every one of Elviry’s lines.”
Elviry Weaver was vaudeville’s pioneering rube comedienne. Minnie was also influenced by the shenanigans of Lulu Belle, a star of the National Barn Dance on NBC radio, and the films and broadcasts of the hokum comic Judy Canova. All of these groundbreaking country-comedy women would eventually be featured in Minnie’s Nashville museum.
Because of the reversal of her father’s fortunes, there wasn’t enough money to send the baby to college when she became of age. There was just enough to put her through Ward-Belmont ladies’ finishing school in Nashville for two years. After failing as a drama, piano, and dancing teacher in Centerville, she hit the road in 1934.
The Wayne P. Sewell Company of Roscoe, Georgia, sent actors to towns throughout the South to organize community theatricals with amateur talent in conjunction with Lion’s clubs and the like. The aspiring thespians would work from scripts purchased from the firm.
In the winter of 1936, Sarah arrived in northeastern Alabama to put on a production of a trifle called Flapper Grandmother. She boarded with a mountaineer woman and became fascinated with the way she talked, her folk expressions, and her rustic stories.
“When I got to the next place, I got to tellin’ people about this woman. By 1938, I was ‘doing’ her, but I hadn’t named her. So I just picked out two nice women’s country names,” Minnie and Pearl.
The costume was the result of $10 spent in a thrift store in Aiken, South Carolina—the organdy dress, the white cotton stockings, the Mary Jane strapped shoes, and the famous tacky hat with its flowers. Once when she replaced the silk flowers, Minnie mistakenly left the price tag on them. During her show, it dangled down. And that $1.98 price tag completed the ensemble.
The Sewell roadwork eventually dried up. She limped home to Centerville as a twenty-eight-year-old failure. It was up to Minnie to support her now-widowed mother. Desperate for any kind of theatrical job, she auditioned her comedy persona at WSM in November of 1940. Worried that this woman with a “drawing-room” upbringing might seem to be mocking the Opry’s rural listeners with her Minnie Pearl character, station officials scheduled her debut on the show for 11:05 p.m., when many would have turned off their radios or left the auditorium.
After Minnie finished her routine, her mother offered this encouragement: “Several people woke up.” But three hundred pieces of fan mail arrived during the next week. Minnie was offered a job. Two years later, in February 1942, she was put on the NBC national-network portion of the Opry.
“I have never gotten over the debt that I owe the Opry,” she said. “I was a failure at twenty-eight. The Opry was a marvelous break for me that I will always remember. The Opry pulled me out of the slough that I was in. Or whatever that word is. The miasma?
“When I came in 1940, most of the people who listened to the Opry were considered country people, hillbillies, at that point. Most people believed that nobody listened to it except country people. Nowadays, you don’t know where you’re gonna find a country fan. The Opry, and country music, have become worldwide. That’s very exciting to me.
“And when I walk out onto the stage, the Opry audience is different from any other audience. There’s a special feeling that you get from an Opry audience that you don’t get, for example, when you tape a TV special in that same hall. The Opry audience is people who have sent in for those tickets and have come here especially for the Opry. Some are there for curiosity, but I think the majority of them are there because they care.”
She always greeted them the same way. “HowDEEE! I’m jest so proud to be hyere!” she’d holler with her arms flung wide.
Delighted crowds shouted “HowDEEE!” back at her for fifty years.
Minnie Pearl initially gained fame as a member of Pee Wee King’s touring troupe during World War II. On the road, often entertaining men in the armed forces, Minnie became brasher, louder, more uninhibited, sillier, and a little racier. She played the man-hungry “old maid” with a glint in her eye. She was the homely wallflower with an eternal optimist’s outlook. She was plucky and foolish.
She gossiped innocently about the fictional residents of Grinder’s Switch. Miss Lizzie Tinkum, Brother, Uncle Nabob, Aunt Ambrosy, Mrs. Orson Tugwell, Doc Payne, Moonshine McGinny, Poker Face Perkins, Hezzie, and the rest of her “neighbors” populated her corny jokes. And the cornier she was, the more embraced she was.
Although she hadn’t grown up with country music, Minnie Pearl soon came to love her fellow Opry cast members. She even romanced them.
“There had been several love affairs in my life—naturally—before I met Henry. He would be the first to say that a woman who didn’t marry until she was nearly thirty-five was bound to have had some romances. I did, and I’m glad that I did. I profited from all of them. I cried some, but that helps me appreciate ‘the good life.’ Only by comparison can you come to a point where you can say, ‘This is the one!’ I’m glad I felt deeply for one of the musicians who joined Pee Wee in 1943. He taught me to truly appreciate this beautiful, pure country music. . . . The sound of the fiddle . . . still sends me.”
At this same time, her future bridegroom was seeing the world. Born on August 11, 1912, Henry Cannon grew up in a well-to-do family in Franklin, Tennessee. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in World War II and served in the Pacific theater. Henry’s best boyhood friend married Minnie’s Nashville roommate in 1946, and the couple immediately began a matchmaking campaign. While still in Japan, Henry was bombarded with
letters about Minnie. At the boardinghouse for women, Minnie was nagged about meeting Henry.
“Henry was no more interested in meeting me than I was in meeting him,” she recalled. “I was perfectly satisfied with my social life, and I was tired of friends trying to marry me off. I was having the time of my life! If some people saw me as an old maid at thirty-four, I figured that was their problem.”
In May 1946, Henry came home from the war. He and Minnie were introduced at a party at the newlyweds’ apartment one night after an Opry performance. Sparks did not fly. They continued to meet at such get-togethers throughout the summer. All the while, the newlyweds kept pressuring them to date one another.
“They weren’t about to give up, even though it was obvious no great explosion had taken place between us. He was attractive, and the more time I spent around him, the more I realized that he was one of the funniest men I’d ever met.”
At one party, Henry impulsively kissed her and instructed her to get rid of the man who was her date that night. She obeyed. After her date dropped her off at home, Henry pulled up in his car to take her back to the party. They kissed again in the moonlight.
“Baby, after the Lord made you, he sure must have buffed his nails,” said Henry. Back at the party, he announced, to Minnie’s surprise, “We just made up our minds we’re going to get married.” They had never even been on a date.
Nevertheless, after Minnie finished a concert tour with Ernest Tubb, she married the love of her life on February 23, 1947. Only a few close friends were in attendance. The bride wore a beige gabardine suit rather than a gown of white.
Initially, she tried to give up her gypsy touring ways. But every time she played the Opry on Saturday nights, she realized how desperately she missed traveling to shows. When she confided this to Henry, he understood completely. And to her surprise, Henry was completely at ease among her country-music buddies.
“Although he’d never been around show people, he fit in perfectly. . . . He has such a natural, spontaneous sense of humor. All my friends thought he was much funnier than me. . . . They admired his honesty and his kindness and the fact that he wasn’t impressed by celebrities.”
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 19