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Gretchen
Wilson
 The
moment Gretchen Wilson set foot on the stage she felt as though she
was having an out-of-body experience, but it was when she stepped
into the infamous circle where Patsy Cline had stood years before
that she really felt like she "was floating around the room,"
watching the unforgettable experience unfold. "It wasn't even real,"
she remembers. "It was like I wasn't even in my own skin. It was so
completely dead silent in there that you could almost hear yourself
breathing." Though it was barely more than a whisper, Gretchen
inherently found herself singing "If You've Got Leaving On Your
Mind." She couldn't help herself and singing that particular song
seemed like the natural thing to do. "I felt like I had an audience
in there," she recalls. "It was really weird. It was totally empty
and nothing but wood pews. It was like I was singing to a room full
of ghosts."
It goes without saying that Gretchen won't ever forget the chilly
November night last year when she stood on the stage of the historic
Ryman Auditorium - if only for a matter of minutes - but at that
moment she was living out a fantasy. "We were flying," she explains.
"It was one of those things where you wake up the next day and it's
just like, 'did I dream that? Did that really happen?'" Much like
Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, it was as if the Illinois native
had clicked her heels together. Rather than not being in Kansas
anymore, she was the furthest she'd ever been from her own childhood
back in Bond County.
Born and raised in rural Pocahontas - located 36 miles due east of
St. Louis along Interstate 70, where numerous trailer parks are
clustered among corn fields and pig farms - life in the '70s and
'80s resembled anything but a dream for Gretchen.
Well, I ain't never been the Barbie doll type/ no, I can't swig that
sweet Champagne, I'd rather drink beer all night/ in a tavern or in
a honky tonk or on a four-wheel drive tailgate/ I've got posters on
my wall of Skynyrd, Kid and Strait
Her mother was merely 16 years old when she had Gretchen, and her
father, unfortunately, had moved on with his life by the time she
was two. In a town, population 727, where a woman is lucky to work
as a waitress in a greasy spoon diner like the Powhatan Restaurant,
the common gathering point where Pokey Road intersects I-70. Across
the parking lot from the restaurant sits the 12-room single-story
Powhatan Motel. Its only competitors - Tahoe Motel and Lighthouse
Lodge - sit across the way, as does Denny's Auto Service, T/G
Antique Mall and Jackie's Country Store Gifts. Other than that, exit
36 doesn't offer much to the casual passersby - "It's basic, but
it's real. It's me" - and even the locals, at times, are hard to
come by, but it's a place where everyone seems to know one another.
More importantly, they not only know you by name, but they also know
your kinfolk as well as all your business.
"I wish I could say I've traveled more than I have," says Gretchen,
"but I pretty much stayed in one region and I'm sure there are a lot
of places like it. To me it just seems so normal around there. It's
my home. It's where I grew up. The faces around there look like my
kind of people. I look at faces in other parts of the country and I
don't get it right off the bat, but I look at anybody up there and
it just looks like home."
Some people look down on me, but I don't give a rip/ I'll stand
barefooted in my own front yard with a baby on my hip/ 'cause I'm a
redneck woman/ I ain't no high class broad/ I'm just a product of my
raising/ I say, 'hey ya'll' and 'yee-haw'/ and I keep my Christmas
lights on/ on my front porch all year long/ and I know all the words
to every Charlie Daniels song/ so here's to all my sisters out there
keeping it country/ let me get a big 'hell yeah' from the redneck
girls like me, hell yeah
As one could only imagine, being the daughter of a teenage mother -
"my mom made a lot of mistakes, but she was young" - life was
stressful, to say the least. Whenever they couldn't "make rent,"
which was every few months, they packed up what little belongings
they owned - "there were times we only had a little bit and times we
didn't have anything, but she always made sure that we had love" -
and moved on down the road only to find yet another trailer. The
steady course for Gretchen and her younger brother Josh, however,
were their grandparents, the late Vernon and Frances Heuer. Vernon,
an Army veteran, was a crotchety old man who lost a leg in World War
II. A product of the Depression Era, he obviously "didn't trust
banks much" and so he sacked away his earnings in a "mason jar that
he kept buried in the backyard." Frances, on the other hand, was a
peaceful woman. She loved her kids; she loved her grandchildren and,
in spite of Vernon's mean spirit, she loved her husband. And, truth
be told, he loved her. "My grandma was the mainstay," says Gretchen,
pausing to collect her thoughts. "She was the rock. When everything
was going crazy and falling apart and we were moving around, my
grandma had her head on straight. She lived a rough life and really
never had anything, but she always had love for everybody. It was
just a real comfortable place to be."
With Gretchen taking care of her brother since she was 10, grandma's
house was definitely more comforting than Big O's, a
rough-and-tumble kicker bar five miles outside of town, set in a
cornfield clearing alongside Rural Route 127. With only an eighth
grade education, Gretchen was cooking and tending bar alongside her
mom at the age of 14. By the time she was 15 and living on her own,
she was managing the roughneck joint with a loaded 12-guage
double-barrel shotgun stashed behind the bar for protection.
Victoria's Secret, well their stuff's real nice/ but I can buy the
same damn thing on a Wal-Mart shelf half price/ and still look sexy,
just as sexy as those models on TV/ I don't need no designer tag to
make my man want me/ well, you might think I'm trashy, a little too
hardcore/ but in my neck of the woods I'm just the girl next door.
Living a life like that, it's no wonder Gretchen was influenced by
singers like Tanya Tucker, Loretta Lynn and, of course, Patsy Cline.
"I could feel the pain," she says, "and I could only imagine what it
was like to have an abusive husband and all the different things
that she sang about." A good many summer afternoons not spent
outside playing with her brother and Uncle Vern "doing what kids do"
were spent sitting on her grandma's bedroom floor with a record
player, listening to Patsy sing "Crazy."
If it was her grandma that impacted her musical influence, it was
the dad she never really knew who provided her with the musical
talent to sing. "My dad just picked around on the guitar and has a
quiet voice," says Gretchen, who made it a point to meet him for the
first time when she was 12. "His family, I'm told, had a little
traveling band. I think it was a gospel band." In any case, from an
early age Gretchen could sing, and she did so with no formal
training to speak of. While most singers talk of singing in the
church choir, as a child Gretchen's early experiences were mostly
spent entertaining what many would consider a tougher crowd. Long
before Karaoke machines, she got up on stage every night at Big O's
with a microphone and sang along to various CDs for tips. After all,
the extra $20 would really come in handy when it came time to put
food on the table.
I'm a redneck woman/ I ain't no high class broad/ I'm just a product
of my raising/ I say, 'hey y'all' and 'yee-haw'/ and I keep my
Christmas lights on/ on my front porch all year long/ and I know all
the words to every Tanya Tucker song/ so here's to all my sisters
out there keeping it country/ let me get a big 'hell yeah' from the
redneck girls like me, hell yeah.
Before long, singing to CDs was a thing of the past and so was
serving drinks. Gretchen found herself fronting a cover band and for
the first time she felt like maybe there was a life for her outside
Bond County. "Each man creates his own destiny," she believes. "It's
up to you what you're going to do with your life. It's not up to
anybody else." Taking control of her own destiny, if you will,
Gretchen had bigger plans than spending the rest of her life singing
in a cover band. She had a goal of some day moving to Nashville.
Gretchen's unceremonious arrival in Nashville was in 1996; she puts
it in such a matter-of-fact way: "it became apparent to me really
fast that I wasn't going to be able to make a living and pay my
bills playing on Broadway." Somewhat discouraged after a brief
encounter with a local musician, whom she happened to recognize at a
Nashville music shop, she thought long and hard about how to go
about realizing her dream. "I looked at him," she recalls, "and
said, 'I'm brand new to town. What's my first step? How do I do
this?' He pretty much laughed at me and said something that didn't
make sense. He said, 'well, you have to create a buzz.' I thought,
'what the hell good does that do me?'" It would take her four long
years to figure out what he meant and, in the meantime, she did the
one thing she knew how to do in order to make ends meet: she got a
job slinging drinks down in Printers Alley at the Bourbon Street
Blues & Boogie Bar. It may not have been the start she envisioned,
but it sure beat the alternative - packing up and moving back home.
A few years later Gretchen still had no luck at all in terms of
getting a record deal. Now a mother with a beautiful daughter named
Grace Frances Penner - "one of my biggest regrets is that my grandma
never got to see my little girl" - life was about to change one
Friday night when Big Kenny and John Rich walked into the bar. They
were there to "have a few cocktails" and thus got to hear Gretchen
belt out a couple of tunes with the house band. "John followed me up
to my little cubby hole bar upstairs with his trench coat and cowboy
hat and I think his exact words were, 'hey, how come you ain't got a
record deal yet?' I looked at him in disgust& threw him a business
card and a little homemade demo and said, 'I'm busy. I'm working
right now.'"
For months John tried getting in touch with her and for months
Gretchen ignored his calls until someone finally said, "Look, you
should really return his call. He might be able to help you out."
Oh, John helped her out all right. He not only introduced her to his
circle of friends - "they started to use me singing on some demos" -
but he also taught her how the Nashville songwriting community
really works, "how they write, break for lunch and then come back
and how they come up with ideas and how to contribute to a
songwriting session." Gretchen also became a member of the Muzik
Mafia, a loose-knit group of singers, songwriters and musicians who
get together to jam (and party) every Tuesday in a local Nashville
nightspot. It was in front of her peers - very honest peers - that
she honed her songwriting style.
I'm a redneck woman/ I ain't no high class broad/ I'm just a product
of my raising/ I say, 'hey y'all' and 'yee-haw'/ and I keep my
Christmas lights on/ on my front porch all year long/ and I know all
the words to every ol' Bocephus song/ so here's to all my sisters
out there keeping it country/ let me get a big 'hell yeah' from the
redneck girls like me, hell yeah/ hell yeah, hell yeah/ hell yeah/ I
said hell yeah!
Having become quite the songsmith, Gretchen has written or
co-written upwards of 80 tunes, some of which she's penned with
John. "We have almost that kind of brother-sister relationship," she
explains. "When we sit down to write a song it almost takes on a
life of its own. I guess he just knows me so well that it's almost
like I'm writing with myself. He knows who I am and what I want to
say." As one would expect, she has a lot to say about the life she's
lived. In fact, not since Loretta Lynn and perhaps Dolly Parton has
a female artist in country music been so brutally honest in song
about her own lifestyle and the people around her. "What I'm doing
has definitely been done before, it just hasn't been done in a long
time," Gretchen says. "It's not perfect and it's not glamorous."
"I had to struggle here," she continues, "and all the people who did
turn me down and the all the things that happened, it couldn't have
worked out more perfectly." She signed with Sony Music Nashville and
its newly-appointed label head, John Grady, is adamant that Gretchen
be portrayed as she is. "It would be hard for me to be more excited
about a new artist than I am about Gretchen Wilson," says Grady.
"The industry known as country music needs her desperately. Thank
God she's signed with us." Gretchen immediately went in the studio
with producers Mark Wright and Joe Scaife with John Rich
co-producing. The resultant Here For The Party perfectly sums up
Gretchen's quest for getting her music out to the masses. She's not
Faith Hill and she's not Shania Twain, but that's what separates her
from the others and better positions her to speak to a majority of
the population that has long since been without a voice.
The synergy building between Gretchen and John Rich has reached a
crescendo - that's precisely why the two were enjoying a late night
in downtown Nashville celebrating their pending success, when they
decided to walk over to the Boogie Bar to catch last call. As he had
for 10 years, John walked up to the side door of the Ryman and
proclaimed, "One of these days this door is going to open," when
lo-and-behold, he gave it a yank and much to their amazement it
actually opened. With blank stares on their faces, they stepped
inside and walked down the ramp leading to the famed stage, only to
find it empty except for a small stand with an acoustic guitar that
had a pick hooked in the strings. "I think I stopped halfway down
the ramp from where I came in and just looked at it," she remembers.
"I tried to soak it in and realize, for a moment, where I was. After
thinking about it for 10 seconds, I charged it. I knew it might be
my only opportunity for a long time. I knew it was my only
opportunity to do it that way." John struck a chord and the
impromptu 1 a.m. one-song concert began in earnest. "Obviously I
didn't play to a roomful of people," she admits, "but it felt like I
played to a room full of important people. It was almost like I was
standing there proving myself to the old country singers. Those
two-and-a-half minutes when I was actually singing the song, I mean,
I couldn't even open my eyes. I was just trying to take it all in. I
was just trying to live in the moment."
And next time Gretchen plays in the Ryman Auditorium, she'll be
invited to come in the artists' entrance.
Check out these Gretchen Wilson products:
Gretchen Wilson - Here For The Party (2004) -
$13.48   
   
 
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