Johnny Cash sent this letter to me in June 1992.
Letter courtesy of The John R Cash Revocable Trust
Text copyright © 2013 by Billy Ray Cyrus
Jacket photograph © Nancy Lee Andrews
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Publishing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477800720
ISBN-10: 1477800727
Credits appear on page 274.
His truth shall be your shield and your buckler.
— PSALM 91:4
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.
— NAPOLEON HILL
Expect a miracle.
— PAPAW CYRUS
This book is dedicated to the dreamers.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART I Country as Country Can Be
CHAPTER 1 “Life Ain’t Fair”
CHAPTER 2 Back When I Was Young
CHAPTER 3 A Series of Adjustments
CHAPTER 4 Silence Speaks Louder than Words
CHAPTER 5 A Higher Authority
CHAPTER 6 A College Education
CHAPTER 7 “My Buddy”
PART II Persistence
CHAPTER 8 “Buy a Guitar and Start a Band”
CHAPTER 9 Sly Dog
CHAPTER 10 Tarot Cards
CHAPTER 11 Too Rock for Country
CHAPTER 12 Baby Toys and New Cars
CHAPTER 13 “Roses in the Winter”
CHAPTER 14 “King of the Ragtime Lounge”
CHAPTER 15 “Opening Doors”
CHAPTER 16 “Some Gave All”
CHAPTER 17 A Big “Little Deal”
CHAPTER 18 “Don’t Tell My Heart”
PART III Be Careful What You Wish For
CHAPTER 19 “Achy Breaky Heart”
CHAPTER 20 Good Advice
CHAPTER 21 Storm in the Heartland
CHAPTER 22 “It’s About the Chase”
CHAPTER 23 What’s Meant to Be Will Be
CHAPTER 24 “Stand Still”
CHAPTER 25 “Amazing Grace”
CHAPTER 26 “I Want My Mullet Back”
PART IV Left-handed
CHAPTER 27 “She’s Hannah Montana”
CHAPTER 28 Spirit Mountain
CHAPTER 29 Dancing Fool
CHAPTER 30 “Ready, Set, Don’t Go”
CHAPTER 31 “Back to Tennessee”
CHAPTER 32 “Change My Mind”
CHAPTER 33 Hillbilly Heart
What you are…
AFTERWORD “Forgot to Forget”
DISCOGRAPHY
Credits
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
WHO KNOWS HOW THIS stuff works?
Not me.
I’ll tell you a story. In 1993, I was shooting a video for “In the Heart of a Woman,” the first single off my second album, It Won’t Be the Last. We made the video in the center of the Navajo Nation in the Grand Canyon. I had never seen a natural landscape any more dramatic, beautiful, or spiritual than Canyon de Chelly National Monument. Its towering sandstone walls and ancient dwellings are magical.
After the shoot, one of the tribe’s elders introduced me to a little boy who had Down syndrome. When I asked if he had an Indian name, he quietly answered no.
I noticed a picture of an eagle on his T-shirt and said, “Well, you’re Soaring Eagle.”
Suddenly, the elder bent down, scooped up a handful of dirt, threw it in the air, and said, “Huh, Soaring Eagle!”
The tribe repeated it. “Soaring Eagle.”
The boy’s face unfolded into a grin of pure joy. It was a beautiful sight, every bit as magical as the land where we stood.
Several hours later, I was back on a plane to Nashville and eager to see my soon-to-be wife, Tish, and our six-month-old daughter, Miley. Even though I was working on my second album, I was still riding the rocket of the “Achy Breaky Heart” phenomenon, and it was a crazy time for me. I don’t think I slept for a year, maybe longer. Indeed, by the time I got home from the video shoot, I had been up for a couple of days, and I guess I looked like it, too. Tish sent me straight to the bathtub and told me to use the soap.
Afterward, as I sat in the bedroom, re-acclimating to being home, I flashed back to that little boy I’d met in the canyon. I wanted to tell Tish about him, the way his smile had come from inside and taken over his entire being, and how fortunate he had made me feel about being a new daddy to a healthy baby girl.
Suddenly, those emotions turned into words. They filled my head, and I found a pen and piece of paper and wrote them down as fast as they came to me.
When they stopped, I had a poem. I titled it “Trail of Tears” and showed it to Tish.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think I’m going to buy a frame and hang it on the wall,” she said, and that’s exactly what she did. We later moved and the poem came down.
Almost three years went by before I thought about that poem again. It was late 1995, and I was enjoying the early morning on top of the hill by the fire I had built that sits in the shadows of my teepee. It’s like a church to me—where I escape and think and get in touch with timeless stories that emanate from the land. It’s a surefire place to get perspective on things.
I don’t remember why I went out there that particular morning, whether anything was bothering me, but I do recall myself thinking about the Indian families and children who had been marched across nearby land in the 1830s, along what became known as the Trail of Tears. The trail ran close to my land. I pictured those uprooted families—daddies and mamas like myself and Tish, and their children, tears in their eyes, fear in their hearts, many of them barefoot, marching through mud and snow—and that’s when I remembered my poem about that little boy, Soaring Eagle.
The words came right back to me, only this time I heard them with a bluegrass melody reminiscent of the old Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe records that had provided the soundtrack to my early childhood. Up there, all by myself, I put words to music and sang that song for the first time ever.
I had a show that night in Canada. On the plane, I noticed guitarist Don Von Tresse, who had written “Achy Breaky Heart,” had brought a mandolin. I had never played mandolin before, let alone a right-handed one. But I picked up Don’s beautiful little instrument, turned it around for my left-handedness, strummed once or twice, and said to the guys in my band, “Listen to what I wrote today.”
Too many broken promises
Too many Trail of Tears
Too many times you were left cold
For oh so many years
Too many times you walked away
And was made to feel ashamed
And though you only tried to give
You were often blamed
How can this world be so dark,
so unfair, so untrue?
How did the cards of life
fold right on top of you?
God in Heaven, hear my prayer
If you are still above
Send the children hopes and dreams
And lots and lots of love
For this I only ask of you
To conquer all their fears
And let them soar like eagles
Across the Trail of Tears.
I played the poem exactly as I had heard it. And now it was a song, and the guys in my band were into it.
Ordinarily, we rehears
e a new song for a few weeks, if not longer, before adding it to the set list. But I was eager to share “Trail of Tears,” and so we worked it up during sound check and performed it that night. As I told the audience, I needed to share it with them. Why else would that song have come to me?
For me, sharing music is what I’m all about. As I write this, it’s been twenty years since “Achy Breaky Heart” became a multi-million-selling smash hit around the world, transforming me in blinding speed from a hard-working barroom country rocker into a household name. Since then, I have released thirteen albums, more than a dozen hit records, starred in two hit TV series, made two handfuls of movies, and recently starred on Broadway in the hit musical Chicago. Best of all, I have been married to the love of my life for nearly two decades and raised five children in a business where few people do either one.
I’m not saying it’s been a smooth ride. From the beginning, I battled for respect from Nashville, and like a lot of people, I’ve also battled myself.
I have asked why a kid from Kentucky who wanted to be a pro baseball player started to hear voices telling him to buy a guitar, and then started to hear songs, and then ended up with the life I have today. On the one hand, I followed my dream and worked hard and never gave up. On the other hand, I don’t claim to understand a thing.
I’m not the best songwriter. I’m certainly not the best singer, either. What I do is bring honesty to my music. I also bring a conviction that sharing my music is my purpose. I honestly can’t think of any other way to explain what’s happened to me thus far in my fifty-one years. In this book, you will see what I mean. I will share stories from the whole extraordinary ride—the good, the bad, the off-key, and the stuff that still doesn’t make sense. You’ll learn about my family and our crazy life. You’ll see that I’m a guy who occasionally needs to disappear into the woods till my head clears. And you’ll read a few stories that might make you believe, as I do, in a power greater than any of us.
I’m constantly asked how I write songs, and I never have a satisfying answer. I don’t know that any songwriters do. Telling you about “Trail of Tears” is about as close as I can get. As I said earlier, I don’t know how this stuff works. All I know is, I have lived the majority of the songs I’ve written. They are my truth. This book is a lot like those songs. The stories ain’t always pretty, but they’re real.
PART I
Country as Country Can Be
CHAPTER 1
“Life Ain’t Fair”
LIKE ANYONE ELSE, I can think of a hundred different things in my childhood that shaped me in one way or another. But one moment stands out as decisive and defining not just for who I became but also for the ways it caused me to look at the world, the way people behaved, and what I was going to understand about myself.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s car. I was about ten years old, a stocky boy with long, dark, floppy hair and a smile I was reluctant to break out. I was still a kid, but growing up fast.
I was clearly all boy, a good athlete and given to finding trouble if it didn’t find me first. Still, my dad, Ronald Ray Cyrus, recognized I was a little sensitive on the inside—more thoughtful than soft—and I had been going through a bunch of stuff that had me thinking. It was beyond my control, and what I would call a worst-case scenario for me and my brother, Kevin Lynn.
(By the way, everyone called him Kebo, and I was known as Bo. For some reason, my dad always called us by those nicknames, and they just kind of stuck.)
Anyway, my feelings were no secret to my dad. A few years earlier, he and my mom had split, and even more recently my dad, who had remarried, had filed to get custody of me and my brother.
It had been a mess, and now my dad was taking me for a drive so we could talk. I have a hard enough time expressing myself at age fifty-one, and back then it was even harder. My dad noticed I was on the verge of tears, and struggling emotionally.
“What is it, son?” he asked.
I took a deep breath to summon my courage.
“Why can’t we just be a normal family?” I asked. “Why’s everything always messed up?”
My dad pulled over to the side of the road and put his truck into neutral. He looked into my eyes. To his credit, he told me the truth.
“Son, life ain’t fair,” he said. “It ain’t fair. Once you understand that and accept it, the better off you’re going to be, and the sooner you can move forward.”
Acceptance of life’s hard knocks was a way of life for my kinfolk. They came out of the mountains of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia and settled along the banks of the Big Sandy, the Little Sandy, and the Ohio Rivers. I would get to know the region well when I played the bars and honky-tonks there. It was known for railroads, steel mills, coal mines, and farms, cornerstones of the industries that built and fed America—and the Cyrus men labored in all these fields.
My dad was a rigger for Armco Steel in Russell and Ashland, Kentucky, when I was born on August 25, 1961, the second of Ronald and Ruthie Cyrus’s boys. My mom was a big-hearted woman from the Appalachian hills, a little spitfire barely past five foot who played piano by ear and had been such a talented performer in high school that her senior class had named her “Most Likely to Succeed and Run a Hollywood Studio.”
On the day I was born, my papaw Eldon Lindsey Cyrus, who stood several inches over six feet and weighed well over 200 pounds, perfect for a fiery Pentecostal preacher, looked through the glass partition of the hospital nursery and tried to read the name on my ID bracelet. It said BABY BOY CYRUS. But he thought it said BILLY RAY CYRUS.
“What a perfect name!” he declared.
Since my mom’s father was William and my dad’s middle name was Ray, it made sense to him.
“But it actually says ‘Baby Boy Cyrus,’” my mom corrected.
He didn’t listen. He had already made up his mind.
All of my earliest memories from our home at 2317 Long Street in Flatwoods, Kentucky, are related to sports, church, girls, being rebellious, and music—most of all music. On Saturday nights my papaw Casto, my mom’s father, and my uncle Clayton came over and played bluegrass and folk classics such as “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey,” “Rolling in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” and Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” My mom was on piano, her father played fiddle, and her brother played guitar. Sometimes my dad hit on a little drum while my brother and I listened and sang and jumped around.
When they took a break, we switched on the radio and listened to the Grand Ole Opry, though I remember one night at my papaw Casto’s home when everybody laid down their instruments, turned up the radio, and listened to a heavyweight boxing match between the champion, Sonny Liston, and a very confident Olympic gold medalist named Cassius Clay. One other thing I remember about that night—my papaw had a gas fireplace where the heat came out of the floor. I stood on it too long and burned a hole in my sock.
My papaw Casto was a character. He worked for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, riding in the caboose. He enjoyed a beer or two, or three, and inevitably called me over to ask if I wanted to hear something funny, which usually meant an off-color joke.
“Did you hear the one about a little bee?” he once asked.
“No, sir,” I said.
He pulled me close and dropped his voice to a whisper.
“A little bee flew across the sea and landed on a martin pole, stretched his neck, shit a peck, and closed up his farting hole.”
Another time, he asked, “Did you hear about the guy who gave a speech to ten thousand people?”
I shook my head.
“Ten thousand people!” he continued. “Ten thousand people… ten thousand people. Can you imagine? Then some old wino in the back hollered, ‘Hey, buddy, what about ten thousand people?’ And that ol’ boy looked up and said, ‘Ten thousand people… and that damn bird had to shit all over me.’”
That one still makes me laugh.
On Sund
ays we went to the tiny white Pentecostal church where my papaw Cyrus preached. Eldon Lindsey Cyrus filled that church with the spirit of the Holy Ghost and gospel hymns. As I said earlier, he was an imposing man, with a commanding presence, and when he pointed to the little sign in front of his pulpit, EXPECT A MIRACLE, you believed him. I did.
He was a rebel in his youth. He probably would have ended up in the steel mills or coal mines if fate hadn’t steered him in another direction. He drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and chewed tobacco, all considered sins back in those days. Then one day when he was out riding his horse with a huge chaw tucked inside the cheek of his mouth, he felt the calling of the Lord. He heard a voice from beyond or high above tell him to become a preacher.
He immediately spit out his chaw, rode home, and took steps to become an ordained preacher. He spent the rest of his life spreading the good word. And the words he preached were taken straight out of the Bible. I looked up to him, as did many people. He found a lesson in everything, as did my dad, but as a kid, I especially liked listening to my papaw, thinking it was cool that he had talked to God, and I took every opportunity to ask, “Papaw, tell me about that time you heard the voice of God.”
Sunday was also the day we listened to my dad’s gospel group, the Crownsmen Quartet. My dad had many talents. He was strong, smart, wise, tenderhearted, and charismatic. He was also one heck of a gospel singer, a very passionate and respected entertainer. His quartet was renowned throughout the tristate area for their southern gospel harmonies. Whereas most gospel groups sang one emotional, inspirational ballad after another, the Crownsmen Quartet were known for their high-energy performances.
Starting when I was four years old, my dad would bring me onstage and have me join them on “Swing Down, Sweet Chariot.” I know you are probably thinking isn’t that “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”? But my dad’s group sang, “Why don’t you swing down, sweet chariot / Stop and let me ride / Swing down, sweet chariot, stop and let me ride / Rock me Lord, rock me Lord / Come Ezekiel / I gotta home on the other side…”
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