“I remember that when we went to the beach for dinner, he would not laugh because he was on voice rest,” Lisa reports. “You can imagine how dry that date was. You take laughter out of a conversation, and that’s a pretty awkward evening.”
Still, a spark had flickered. When she was making a film in Toronto a few weeks later, he had his tour bus deposit him there when he had three days off.
“We went to dinner with Robert Stack,” Clint reminisces. “We went and saw Michael Bolton in concert. We went to Cirque du Soleil. She really brought me out of my shell, because you couldn’t have gotten me to go into a crowd of any kind at that point. I had become overwhelmed with just being recognized.
“Having a wife who has been famous longer than I have been turned out to be a big benefit for me. She recognized things that I was going through and helped me through them. She helped me to have a better life than I might have had otherwise, because she just refused to change her life because she’s a celebrity. She would just go and do. Period. I thought I was a pretty cool cat with my newfound fame, but really I was reeling trying to deal with it, and having so much anxiety just going to a mall or something. She got me out going and doing things.”
After filming finished in Toronto, Lisa was booked for an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Also on that broadcast was country star Tanya Tucker. She was a matchmaker, too.
Says Lisa, “I remember she said, ‘You know who’s really tough? Clint Black!’ That’s what we used to say, ‘He’s so tough,’ meaning ‘cool’ or ‘hot.’ Anyway, I had already been out with him, but we weren’t yet a couple to the public. So I went, ‘Really? Is he really?’ I just totally played dumb.”
Next, Lisa flew to Salt Lake City, Utah, to meet Clint at a show. By this time, both were completely infatuated.
“We had some serious discussions about our philosophies of life and where we were going,” says Clint. “I knew exactly who she was. I knew who I was, by that point. I had always said, ‘I’m not going to get married until I’m thirty,’ because I had this belief that you can’t know yourself before you’re thirty. So how can you know what you’re willing to say about the rest of your life? So I was twenty-nine, and it just hit me: ‘Why should I waste any more time thinking about this?’
“I had a show that night on the university campus, and it was a Sunday. The campus was empty, and we went for a walk. I knew that it wasn’t a chief objective in her life to get married. So I don’t think I would have been overconfident. The butterflies were there. [The proposal] was pretty exciting, and when she said yes, I couldn’t wait to tell the world.”
At a tour stop down the road in Tucson, Arizona, they brought their mothers on the bus to share the happy news. Observant reporters at the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) music-industry banquet in Nashville on September 8, 1991, noticed Lisa’s ring, cornered the couple, and announced their engagement in the next day’s newspapers. Lisa and Clint were married in a small ceremony on his Texas ranch house’s porch on October 20, 1991.
Clint Black was born on February 4, 1962, and raised in Houston as the youngest of four music-making brothers. As a teenager, he initially worked as a back-up musician for his brother Kevin, playing bass, harmonica, and guitar. In 1981, Clint started a six-year stint fronting his own band on the East Texas honky-tonk circuit. He was discovered by the manager of the rock band ZZ Top in 1987 and recorded his first Nashville album the following year.
He shot to fame in 1989 with such hits as “A Better Man,” “Killin’ Time,” and “Nobody’s Home.” He was named the Country Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year in 1990 and joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry on January 10, 1991.
“All these things were happening to me, my career exploding and all of this unprecedented success and all this stuff. And then you’ve been asked to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry. I knew a lot of the Opry stars, but I didn’t have that much Opry experience. I was inducted as part of a big CBS TV special [celebrating the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Opry]. There were three days of rehearsals, so I got to hang out with all of the different Opry stars, joking around, hanging around backstage.
“Everybody was there—The Jordanaires, Grandpa Jones, Minnie Pearl, and Roy Acuff. It was great. I got to hear all kinds of great stories. . . . I don’t want to sound corny, but I think the best way to describe it is, it was like you were being invited to join a family.”
To date, Clint Black has had thirty top-ten hits, thirteen of which became number-one hits. The most recent of those chart-toppers came in 1999, when he sang the marriage anthem “When I Said I Do” with wife Lisa Hartman Black. It won the couple an Academy of Country Music Award and a Grammy nomination.
Actually, Lisa was a professional singer before Clint was. Born June 1, 1956, she is the daughter of nightclub singer Howard Hartman and Hollywood publicity agent Jonni Hartman. Jonni, who became her daughter’s manager, recalls that Lisa told her she wanted to be a star as early as age four. As a kid, Lisa modeled, did local theater, and made commercials. At age sixteen, she fronted her own Houston rock band. She was discovered by noted pop songwriter Jeff Barry.
“I was doing ‘Proud Mary’ and all these songs with my band,” Lisa recalls. “He said, ‘I want to see if you can really sing.’ So he played me a song called ‘Room Without a Door’ that he had written. It was beautiful. It was a cool song. He said, ‘Can you sing this?’ And I did. In March of 1975, I went to L.A. In March of 1976, my first album was released.”
Lisa Hartman (1976), Hold On (1979), Letterock (1982), and ’Til My Heart Stops (1987) all appeared before Clint released his first album. None of them yielded any pop hits for Lisa, but that scarcely mattered, because her acting career caught fire instead. During the 1976–1977 TV season, she starred in the series Tabitha, a spin-off of the long-running hit Bewitched. In 1982–1986, Lisa rose to stardom as a “bad girl” on the hit nighttime soap opera Knots Landing. She had recurring roles on Love Boat (1979), Matlock (1988), and 2000 Malibu Road (1992). Most significantly, Lisa Hartman Black has become the queen of made-for-TV movies. To date, she has starred in more than two dozen of these, including 1987’s Roses Are for the Rich, 1981’s Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, and 1991’s The Return of Eliot Ness. Lisa and Clint costarred in 1998’s Still Holding On: The Legend of Cadillac Jack.
The atmosphere in the Black household in suburban Nashville is remarkably serene. Daughter Lilly was born in 2001, and both parents dote on her. Clint and Lisa never raise their voices to one another, seldom argue, and are still lovebirds.
“When he’s really stressed, I go into this calm,” Lisa reports. “When I’m really stressed, he goes into this calm. We’ve never exploded at each other. We’re both very strong, very opinionated, and a little bull-headed, but we’re very considerate of each other. We presume the best of each other. We never take each other for granted.”
Says Clint, “When Roy Rogers found out we were getting married, he said, ‘I’ll give you one piece of advice: Don’t ever go to bed angry.’ And it’s true.
“The joke I always say is that we figure out the things that irritate one another, and then I don’t do them anymore.”
In addition to maintaining his career as a singer, songwriter, and performer, in recent years Clint Black has become a Music Row business mogul as well. In 2001, he formed his song-publishing company, and it has had such huge hits as Blake Shelton’s “Some Beach” and Billy Currington’s “Must Be Doin’ Somethin’ Right.” In 2003, he became the coowner of the record company Equity Music Group. It distributes his discs as well as those of such favorites as Mark Wills, Carolyn Dawn Johnson, and the million-selling Little Big Town. He produced singer Buddy Jewell’s top-selling debut album. Clint also owns his own recording studio. He says he’s able to juggle all of this because of Lisa’s steadying presence.
“She recognizes my breaking points before I do,” he comments. “When the stress gets to be too much or I�
�m exhausted and have no energy to give, she says, ‘Look, you’ve done this and this and this, and you haven’t stopped. That’s why you’re feeling this way.’ . . . And then I’ll go into strategy mode: ‘How am I going to manage this?’”
CLINT AND LISA AREN’T the only Opry-and-Hollywood combination. In 2003, the show’s Brad Paisley married national television star Kimberly Williams.
Brad, a West Virginia native born on October 28, 1972, rose to stardom in 1999–2000 on the strength of such hits as “He Didn’t Have to Be,” “Me Neither,” and “We Danced.” After making forty-three guest appearances on the show, he was made a member of the Grand Ole Opry’s cast on February 17, 2001.
Like his fellow cast members Clint Black, Steve Wariner, and Vince Gill, Brad is a “triple threat” as a songwriter, singer, and hotshot guitarist. He has collaborated vocally with fellow Opry stars ranging from George Jones to Dolly Parton. His award-winning 2004 duet with Alison Krauss, “Whiskey Lullaby,” was cowritten by the Opry’s Bill Anderson.
Fiddler and singer Alison is one of the reasons that bluegrass music has enjoyed its recent resurgence in popularity. She also led the invasion of female artists into this formerly male-dominated genre. Alison, born July 23, 1971, is a native of Champaign, Illinois, who became a child prodigy on the fiddle. She recorded her debut album when she was only sixteen. She became an Opry cast member on July 3, 1993.
In 2002, her “Whiskey Lullaby” duet partner scored his third number-one record with “I’m Gonna Miss Her (The Fishin’ Song).” Its video featured blue-eyed brunette Kimberly Williams. The story goes that Brad first spotted Kimberly in 1991’s Father of the Bride, her debut film appearance. After he broke up with his girlfriend, he wrote a song called “Part Two,” wherein he wished that romances could have sequels like Hollywood hit movies. Kimberly did, indeed, make Father of the Bride Part II in 1995. So Brad contacted her about appearing in his video for “Part Two.” Truth be told, it was a ruse to meet her. There was no video for that song.
Kimberly was born September 14, 1971, in Rye, New York. In addition to the Father of the Bride movies, she has been featured in such films as Indian Summer (1993), The War at Home (1996), Simpatico (1999), Shade (2006), and We Are Marshall (2007). She is best known for her work in the long-running ABC sitcom According to Jim.
After several telephone conversations, Kimberly asked Brad out on a date. He proposed in 2002, and they were married on March 15, 2003. She added his last name to hers in order to differentiate herself from a Playboy model also named Kimberly Williams. The Paisleys divide their time between homes in Los Angeles and Nashville, where son William Huckleberry “Huck” Paisley was born in 2007.
23
Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’
Charley Pride often says that his wife Rozene has more sense than he does, and she is the more educated and outgoing of the two. But the truth of the matter is that they’re both very bright and very dedicated.
“She went to college, and I only had an eleventh-grade education,” says Charley. “I always felt that I was sharp, and she is a pretty sharp lady.
“We only dated for five months before we were married. So sometimes things just happen, and they work out.”
And how. On December 28, 2006, the couple celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. What is the secret to having a fifty-year marriage?
“We don’t really have a remedy,” Charley says. “We’ve always done what fit us, what we thought we could live with. We try to give each other enough space. We try to let each other be themselves. Marriage comes down to two people being one. It’s not ‘Mine is mine, and yours is yours,’ none of that kind of stuff. We never fought over any money, which we didn’t have when we first got married.
“From the time we got married, we just kind of did it little by little. We just got used to each other more and more.
“She has a good sense of humor, and I think I do too. We get on each other’s nerves a lot of times. But deep down, we love each other. Plus, we kind of like each other quite a bit.”
As for Rozene, she thinks there are three secrets to a long marriage: “One is space. He has his space, and I have mine. His space consists of golf every day, and my space means going to the office and taking care of business so he can golf every day. Two is communication. Very important. He communicates. I listen. Three, the main reason for such longevity is that neither of us has died.”
As she indicates, throughout Charley’s career, Rozene Pride has been working behind the scenes on the business side of things. She coordinates his fan club and concert-tour activities. She handles the finances. She calls him “Pride,” not Charley.
“Pride’s career is definitely a full-time job for all of us,” she says.
“She runs the show,” he says with a chuckle.
In 1997, Rozene told Jet magazine, “Maybe part of our secret has been that we have worked together, and we each have our area. . . . I have no desire to be in the public eye. I am perfectly happy working in the background and doing what I can for him.
“Of course, we disagree at times, because we both think. If there are two people in the house and they don’t ever disagree, somebody isn’t thinking. I will admit that I am very strong willed, and so is he.”
Charley had to be strong willed to come from where he did and get where he is. Born Charley Frank Pride on March 18, 1938, he is one of eleven children of sharecroppers who farmed near Sledge, Mississippi. Charley says that the lyrics of his 1974 hit “Mississippi Cotton Picking Delta Town” are an accurate description of his youth.
“That song was written about my hometown by a guy who grew up there. His name was Harold Dorman. He’s passed away now. But he worked for the grocery store there in Sledge where we got our groceries every weekend. If you grew up at the time I grew up in Mississippi, you were cotton pickers. That’s about the whole ball game there.
“Hard-luck backgrounds and poverty and such things, I’ve thought about that quite a bit. It’s like the old adage, ‘You never miss what you never had.’ I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I realized that other kids had bicycles and various different things that I never did get. But I just never believed in sitting around feeling sorry for myself. I always worked hard and felt that, yes, there was something else out there.
“I don’t really look back on that as hard times, because I had a lot of brothers and sisters. We fought, and we loved, and we talked, and we grew up together. It was one of those things you just accepted and did the best that you could do. I dreamed, yes, and I still do. I was gonna be the greatest baseball player that ever lived.”
He was captivated by the family’s Philco radio set. It taught him that there was a world outside the Delta cotton fields. Charley was enthralled by the radio dramas and by baseball broadcasts. Inspired by the country music he heard, he taught himself to play guitar. But in those days, sports were his true focus. He left Sledge at age sixteen to pitch and play outfield in what was then called the American Negro League. One of the teams he played for was the Memphis Red Sox.
At a Memphis restaurant frequented by the team, Charley met Rozene. She was a cosmetologist. He was smitten. He visited her at the beauty shop, asked her out, and courted her. Rozene was as urban and sophisticated as he was rural and backward. Even more impressive to him was her love of baseball.
As Charley put it in his autobiography, “She was smart, beautiful, independent and could explain the infield fly rule. What else could a guy want?”
But their romance looked like it might be nipped in the bud. Charley was drafted into the army in November 1956. A month into basic training, the new recruits were given passes to go back home for Christmas. Worried that he would lose her, Charley proposed to Rozene. They were married by a justice of the peace in Hernando, Mississippi, on December 28, 1956. Charley was still in the army when son Kraig was born, in 1957. In 1960, the family relocated to Helena, Montana, where Charley worked in mining.
“I didn’t work in
any mines. I worked in the smelter that took ore from the mines and processed the zinc and so forth out of it. I was singing locally there. [At a Red Foley concert] I went backstage and asked could I play the guitar. The promoter had heard me sing, so he said to me, ‘Would you like to do a couple of songs on the second half of the show?’ So I did. The songs I did were ‘Heartaches by the Number’ that Ray Price had as a big hit and ‘Lovesick Blues’ by the great Hank Williams. Red Foley and Red Sovine looked at one another and said, ‘It’s odd, but you ought to go to Nashville. You’re country.’ So that’s what I did.”
Second son, Dion, was born that same year, 1962. If Charley had not met those Nashville stars, he believes he probably would have settled down in Montana and raised his family. He’d broken his ankle at the smelting plant. When it healed, Charley gave baseball one last shot. He went to the 1963 spring-training camp of the New York Mets in Clearwater, Florida. But manager Casey Stengel turned him away without even letting him try out.
On the way home, going north, Charley decided to stop in Nashville. Red Sovine (1918–1980) had told him to look up Cedarwood Publishing, where he would be welcome to audition. When he did, he was heard by Jack Johnson, who signed Charley to a management contract. Daughter Angela was born in 1965, and Charley’s and Rozene’s Mississippi families hadn’t seen the new baby. While heading south to visit, he stopped to pester Jack about getting him a recording contract.
Jack Johnson convinced producer/songwriter Jack Clement to record Charley singing some tunes during the Prides’ southern sojourn. Jack Clement took the tape to Chet Atkins at RCA Records. By year’s end, Charley was an RCA recording artist.
“I guess when a history is written on country music years from now, I’ll be remembered because I signed Charley Pride, which was a great civic thing to do in those days,” recalled Chet. “There were no black country singers. Jack Clement came to me, my dear friend, and he said, ‘You gotta hear my singer.’ He used that ‘N’ word. A few days went by, and I thought, ‘Boy, that would be really different, that would be great.’ I called him and said, ‘Where’s that black guy you were gonna let me hear sing?’ So he brought this demonstration record of ‘The Snakes Crawl at Night,’ and I thought he was great. He’s got an edge to his voice. It sounded good on a bad jukebox. He had an edge like a Hank Snow or an Ernest Tubb.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 26