My mother’s family was from Arkansas, right on the border of Louisiana and Texas. Just Southern, Southern, Southern. We’d go down and visit my grandparents in their house in El Dorado (that’s El Dor-AY-do, not El Dor-ah-do). My grandfather was in the oil business and the whole place smelled like oil. The whole town. We’d visit for a bit. And then we’d all pile into the pickup, four grown-ups on the front seat, all the kids in the open back, and just drive down the freeway, eighty miles an hour. I’m surprised we didn’t lose one of us, going so fast. We’d head over to my grandparents’ cabin in Strong, Arkansas, which was in the middle of nowhere. We’d spend most of the summer there. Fishing in the pond. Playing. Just being out in the dirt.
In El Dorado, my sister and I would spend time alone. In the bedroom we shared. Or the playhouse outside. The same pattern repeated again. Where Jennifer would talk to me. Sweetly. Gently. Her pants would slide off and I would follow her directions. Her instructions: Do this, do that. The words sounded nice, but there’s nothing nice about it. She wasn’t my friend. It felt like something was being taken from me. And I felt horrible. Just horrible. I would step outside myself and just watch. I’d become an observer. Passing through.
And then, after it was over, I’d eat. My Grandma’s white coconut cake. I’d sit at the kitchen table and fill myself up. Fill myself up with something that felt good. Tasted good. I’d give myself pleasure in the only way I knew how. Food. It never occurred to me to talk to anyone about this—about my sister or the way I felt. We didn’t do that in my family. We didn’t talk about things. Not ever.
My relationship with my sister went on this way for years. And it only stopped when I got up the courage to stop it. We were all of us going down to Arkansas one year, and before we got to our grandparents’ house, we stopped at a hotel in Eureka Springs. My sister and I were standing in the bathroom, brushing our teeth, and she hit me right across the face, really really hard. It was like pow! It didn’t make any sense at all. It was clear out of the blue. The television was on in the room. Bella Abzug was speaking at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. I was eleven years old. I just remember thinking to myself that this was all wrong. And that’s when it stopped. That’s when I said, enough. You have had enough of me. I stopped it. I removed myself from ever being in that situation with her again. I didn’t spend time with my sister alone. Not unless I absolutely had to.
But I still felt empty. I felt like there was this hole inside me that needed to be filled. So I looked for ways to fill it up. Food was one. Movies were another.
I’d watch a film and dream that life could be like that: a world where everything’s all nice and neat and people love each other, and then they’re sad and they’re angry and they’re happy, and then it either turns out okay or everybody dies. There’s always an ending in the movies, whether it is happy or sad. I thought, “That’s the way life is supposed to be.” I really believed in the fantasy of happily ever after and believed that you can find love that lasts forever. I believed in that Hollywood thing. Growing up, I had no other input on relationships, love, or life. Movies and television told me what it all should be and should mean. It was also a way that I could experience emotion. For two hours, sitting in a dark theater where no one else could see me—see me laugh, cry, or react to whatever was happening on the screen—I could escape the reality of my life and safely dream about my future. For those couple of hours, no one was going to say, “Don’t do that,” or “We don’t react that way.”
The one thing that did keep me safe, that gave me a feeling of comfort growing up, was music. Music took me somewhere safe—a place where I was happy and free and comfortable being myself. I knew from a very young age that music was something I wanted to be a part of. It was something that made me feel good and helped me escape to a place where life was how I always dreamed it should be. Where life was like the movies. Fairy-tale endings and unconditional love.
I remember hearing the Beatles for the very first time, in 1964. I was standing in my driveway and putting my ear to our tiny transistor radio. Even with the crackling, barely audible sound that the transistor radio made, I heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the first time, and I thought that I had heard the voice of God. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever heard, and it moved me in a way I had never before experienced. I became obsessed with music.
After that, I had the radio on constantly. Johnny Dohlens, WHB, Kansas City. They played everything on the radio back then. Rock. Pop. Everything. And I’d listen to it all. No judgment. I’d listen to my parents’ albums. They had everything from Neil Diamond to the Mamas and the Papas. Bolero to Janis Joplin and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. My sister had much cooler albums like Humble Pie, Led Zeppelin, and George Harrison. Music was complete pleasure. Just like my Grandma’s white coconut cake. I’d get completely absorbed into it, focused. I’m just completely there and the world goes away.
I’d listen to the music and I’d watch it, too. The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dick Cavett Show, The Red Skelton Show. I’d watch all the shows that had live music on them. And I’d watch the people singing the music. Making the music. Mick Jagger. The Beatles. But it was the Archies who were the most influential. I’d watch the Archies and then I’d get the neighborhood kids together, get all the pots and pans out, and do a show in the garage. I never wanted to be Betty or Veronica. I wanted to be Reggie. I always wanted to be Rock and Roll. I drew a big sign that said ARCHIES with a circle around it, put everyone in their place, and then we’d do a show. I was the lead guitarist of course. Jumping up and down with my badminton racquet. We’d play “Sugar, Sugar,” Tommy James and the Shondells and Steppenwolf. Every day after school became “Magic Carpet Ride” time.
One day, my father came home with a real guitar for me. I hadn’t even been asking for one. He just brought it home. I didn’t know that he knew I was playing the badminton racquet. It was a Stella, by Harmony, which is actually a pretty good first guitar for a kid in Kansas. He bought it at Tarbot’s Tune Shop in town. I would go down there late in the afternoons after school, and I would see my guitar teacher, Mr. Don Raymond, an old big-band jazz guitarist. I’m sure he had been a fabulous musician in his day, but a tragic accident cut off the fingers on his left hand, right at the knuckles. So he learned to play with his right hand. I was eight years old and it was pretty scary to look at his fingers, or what used to be his fingers, but he was a serious musician and he taught me to be a serious musician and to take my lessons very earnestly. I learned all of the notes on the guitar, one by one, string by string, every day, until I actually learned a song. It was a simple song, but it was the first song I ever learned and pretty soon those notes turned into chords and my chords turned into more songs. Before I knew it, I was playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Sugar, Sugar.” Playing them for real. I was making the music. Not pretending anymore. I realized that once I had learned three basic chords, I could play just about anything. This opened up a whole new world to me—a world where I could perform and create. A world that was mine, that would accept me for who I was. Give me what I wanted. I became inspired and I found some peace in the process. Words began to flow from me and, at age ten, I wrote my first song using three silly little chords: “Don’t Let It Fly Away.” I rhymed words like love with above. I rhymed bus with Gus.
My mother’s parents, Earl and Annie Lou Williamson
My sister and me, sharing another happy birthday
One of the only photos I have of my whole family together, Christmas 1998
After a horse show (left to right): me; my nephew, Joshua; Mom; my niece, Jessica; and my sister, Jennifer
My sister and me, at her high school graduation, with Dad
I found solace in my music that I didn’t have before I learned to play. I would go into our basement and play my guitar to fill up my loneliness. My mother wouldn’t really talk to me, and she wasn’t too keen on my playing the guitar. But I played every day. And I would play when we trav
eled to Arkansas to visit my grandparents. I dearly loved my grandmother. She had that whole maternal nurturing thing that my mother didn’t. She’d open all the drawers in the kitchen, pull out all the tools and the whisks and things. And she’d say, “Just go. Play.” She would listen to me play the guitar, those same three chords over and over, and she was actually listening. She’d sit in her living room and listen to me sing and play song after song after song. After a few more trips, Grandma would still listen to me, but from then on, she was lying down in her bed. Unbeknownst to me, she was terribly ill. She had been stricken with cancer of the ovaries and breasts, and eventually her body was so riddled with it, the cancer metastasized everywhere. But she would listen joyfully all the same, lying there in her bed, and I played happily for her. When she would simply tell me that “Grandmother’s not feeling well,” I knew that it was time to let her get her rest.
My final visit with Grandmother was in the hospital, before she died. My visit needed special arrangements because children under the age of twelve were not allowed in the hospital. But I was this woman’s granddaughter and I had showed up, with my guitar, to see my grandmother. I wanted to play my music for her, sing for her—comfort her. The nurses made an exception for me, and I was able to go into her room and sit beside my grandmother on her bed. I sang a new song I had just written—well, more like plagiarized—from a children’s book. It was called “The Good Little Sheep.” I sang to her with all of the tubes running in and out of her body—and with my grandmother in a state of semiconsciousness.
THE GOOD LITTLE SHEEP
The good little sheep run quickly and soft.
Their colors are gray and white.
They follow their leader nose to tail,
For they must be home by night.
I am sure that there were other verses to it—something about wanting to be a good little sheep. For all of her pain, my grandmother still listened. She listened to me. And when I was done, she turned to me and said, “When I die, will you put that song in my casket and bury it with me?” I kind of understood what was happening and what was going to happen. I felt a connection with my grandmother that was unique for me at that time in my life. She loved me unconditionally, and she was the only person I felt protected by as a child.
Of course, I couldn’t express any of these emotions. I didn’t know how. But I remember the feeling when she asked that question, that moment of physical realization that tingles through you when you know something important is happening. But there’s no outlet for it. It’s a life-and-death moment and I had no idea how to handle it. None of us did. So we don’t handle it. We bury it. And move on.
So I looked at my grandmother and said, “Okay.” I packed up my guitar and we went home, back to Leavenworth. One night, not too long afterward, I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and became extremely ill. I stayed home from school that next day, and my mom came home and told me that my grandmother had passed away in the middle of the night. When my grandmother died, it was like everything just went clunk! I was in the sixth grade. I had given up being frightened of my sister and all of my raw, unharnessed emotion would, forever forward, be placed into my song writing. All I could think about on our way back to Arkansas for her funeral was her request to be buried with the lyrics to my song. I didn’t want to go view her casket. I couldn’t face seeing her lifeless body. So I wrote the lyrics down on a piece of paper and gave them to my aunt, who assured me that she would place them in the casket for me. At the funeral and in the limousine, all I could envision in my mind was that piece of paper and those words in her casket with her for all of eternity. I don’t remember if I cried. I can’t recall seeing my mother cry. We didn’t do much crying in my family. That would have been a show of emotion, something we never did.
After the funeral, I wrote what I consider to be my first real song. It came from somewhere in my heart, somewhere in my soul, somewhere that had just been opened up inside of me. It was about a war orphan—something I didn’t think that I knew anything about, but the truth is, I knew all too well the feeling of being an orphan. I have felt alone and abandoned during my whole life. The song was called, “Lonely Is a Child.”
LONELY IS A CHILD
Trees are swaying in the wind
Things are so free
But I sit here waiting
For her to come home to me.
Lonely is a child waiting for his mother to come home,
Lonely is a child waiting for his mother, but a mother has he none …
When the war came to this land
Many years ago
She disappeared from my sight
And I just want to know
Where is she
A lot of my earliest songs were sort of sad and lonely. I would write about either the kind of love I never knew, or how I was pining for something or someone who had left me. Even as a teenager. Oh, and there were the typical teenager suicide songs. I was obsessed with dying and writing songs about dying. I went through a phase, around the eighth grade, of telling people that I was terminally ill. It got me attention and sympathy, which was exactly what I was looking for. I would have taken any show of emotion from another person. It’s strange to look back. I was never personally thinking of suicide, but I was surely looking to be noticed as a teenager. I can still feel an incredible sadness, a need for emotion, and a sensation of being in my adolescent pain. Things were so bleak in my head that I even went so far as to call a troubled-teen hotline and attend a group therapy class to talk about my dark feelings. I met a girl there whose soul was even angrier and more abused and tortured than mine. She just sat in the corner and didn’t talk to anybody. I went home and wrote a song about her. I completely understood that type of darkness and agony. It’s an adolescent feeling that can bring on the idea of suicide. I am too ego-driven to have ever gone through with suicide—that’s for sure. I guess I just wanted someone to notice me and it came out in the lyrics to the songs I wrote as a teen. One song is called “Stephanie.”
STEPHANIE
Stephanie, oh Stephanie,
What pain do you see?
What’s in your eyes?
You sit down, you have a smoke
But never a word have you spoke.
Stephanie, all the lines are dead—
I wish I knew what’s goin’ on in your head.
Reach out, oh reach out to me.
Oh Stephanie, can’t you see—
If you ever need, I am here.
Stephanie, what lingers in the hallway
In the dark corners of your mind?
And the writing that is on the wall—does it say it all?
What will I find?
What key unlocks your door?
What do you tell yourself when
You’re crying for more?
But maybe someday when your soul’s set free
And the sun beams through, maybe then I may see.
Stephanie, pick up the broken pieces of glass
On your windowsill to the world.
I know inside the dark stormy shell
There’s a bright shining beautiful pearl.
I kept playing my guitar and I started to sing for my friends. We would sing and play together. Linda Stuckey and Chris Luevane, who were in my class in school, learned to sing “Lonely Is a Child,” and we began to perform as a group. We were so sincere, so sad, and so in the sixth grade. Chris called me up one day all excited about an upcoming talent show at the Leavenworth Plaza. She was certain that we ought to sing in it and so we did. We got up on stage and sang from the deepest part of our sixth-grade hearts. It was incredible. It seemed like thousands of people were watching. There were really about fifty. All the friends and relatives of the people in the talent show, probably. The MC was a man named Bob Hammill. He was a ventriloquist with this Charlie McCarthy sort of doll. He’d do a bit and then introduce the next act. The Shortz Sisters, who sang country music all done up in their spangly country-western
gear. The Shroyer Sisters in their little pink outfits, doing their acrobatic act. Very exotic. Back bends and splits and the whole thing.
And then it was our turn. Chris and Linda and I walked out on stage. And I stared out at the audience. It was my first time in front of an audience. My heart was beating so fast. I’m dizzy and I can barely breathe. And then I hit the first note and I play. And Chris and Linda just disappear. There’s just me and the audience. And the music. When I finished, there was applause. I walked off stage and it was the most connected I’d ever felt in my entire life. Connected to heart. Connected to want. Connected to experience. It was like a drug. A drug that made me alive.
Little Tommy Williams won the talent contest with his rendition of “Okie from Muskogee.” But we were finalists and were given a trophy. A very small trophy. Years later, I was presented again with that trophy while visiting Leavenworth for my tenth high school reunion. The trophy is in the photograph on the back of the Breakdown album. I keep it in my display case at home, right next to my Grammy Awards.
Soon after the talent contest, Bob Hammill called and told us he was putting together a variety show with some of the other acts from the contest, the Shortz Sisters and the Shroyer Sisters, something he could take around town, perform at old folks’ homes, the V.A. center, all the prisons. Prisons have the most enthusiastic audiences: 2,000 people who want to be entertained. You might say they’re the ultimate captive audience. Once, we were stuck inside a prison for an hour because there was a stabbing or something, and all the prisoners were locked down. But as soon as it got cleared up, off we went, into the auditorium. It was hilarious, really; these little girls performing for criminals. The Shroyer Sisters in their little leotards doing splits and backbends always got a very enthusiastic response from the inmates.
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