BABY GRACE
At twenty-seven I had baby Grace
I was born again when I saw her sweet face
And I knew she was the greatest thing I’d ever do
“Pocahontas Proud”
I guess you’d have to say that the period where I had my sweet daughter, Grace, while still trying to both earn a living and get ahead in the music business was simultaneously the highest and the lowest point of my life. Personally, it was one of the happiest times I’ve ever experienced, before or after. I loved the whole experience of having a child growing inside me and then being with that child day and night for the first six to eight months of her existence on earth. I had Grace at twenty-seven and believe it or not, I felt I was pretty old to have a baby. Where I was from, I was a late starter. My mother had me at sixteen. A lot of women in Southern Illinois started having kids long before they were twenty. It is just part of the rhythm of life there.
As I mentioned earlier, Grace was conceived on the very night that my dear grandma passed away, in fact, within an hour of her death, as I later reconstructed. I took that as an important omen in all of our lives. A couple of weeks after her passing and the small family funeral in Illinois, I started feeling really sick, put two and two together, and decided to go get a pregnancy test. I went to a walk-in clinic and had a professional do the test, and got the good news. I’ll never forget the old man who walked into the room and said, “Picked out any names yet?” I about passed out.
I wasn’t planning to have a baby, that’s for sure, and frankly, I was a little scared. It was something that I had wanted for a long time but it never quite worked out. At that point it was the furthest thing from my mind. I had gotten the divorce from Larry only a few months before and was now seeing Mike, Grace’s father, who was then one of the owners of the Bourbon Street Bar. We didn’t really know each other that well at the time and neither of us were ready to contemplate raising a child together. Mike worked until four every morning at the bar and I was still stuck in the in-between place in my career where I had to keep working like a dog if I was ever going to make it to the next level. It was a very difficult time.
Initially, I felt downright miserable. I saw myself as fat and ugly and pregnant, in other words, every negative emotion a woman goes through as her body and her life are being taken over by a pregnancy. At the same time, given my fragile emotional condition, I started feeling that my dream that led me to Nashville was slowly slipping away. Muzik Mafia aside, I thought, I hadn’t really gotten that far in the four years I had been in town, and here I was, pregnant! It’s even hard to sing in the shower when you’re pregnant, let alone on stage or in a studio. It affects your breathing patterns. You tend to run out of breath in the middle of a long musical phrase.
I felt like I was falling into a whole new life that I really hadn’t chosen. The responsibilities of motherhood can easily take over a young woman’s life. I saw this happen to girls all the time in Illinois; they’d get pregnant in high school by the boy they liked at the time, and their life proceeded to take a radically different path than the one they imagined. College was out, traveling was out, taking a few risks on their own was out. Marriage and babies and worrying about the next mortgage payment were in.
I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t ready to have a child but didn’t want to give her up. Nor did I want to give up on a career. I remember one extremely important conversation I had with John Rich about all this. We were sitting in his Dodge pickup truck, somewhere downtown, right off Broadway, after a showcase one night. I hadn’t been pregnant very long and no one really knew but Mike and me. I remember this little heart-to-heart talk like it was yesterday.
“I’m pregnant,” I said to John, “and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I feel awful about this. You and Sharon and others have worked so hard for me. You’ve set me up on showcases, you’ve gone into the studio with me to cut demos, you’ve drawn me into the Mafia, you’ve talked me up all over town, and now, here I am. I’m pregnant. I don’t want to let you guys down, but I don’t know how I can keep on. I think this is going to be the end of it. I’m afraid I’m going to be finished. I’m done.”
This was the moment of truth, I guess, where I had to decide what I was really going to do.
John is the son of a preacher. His father is a nondenominational Christian evangelist in Ashland City, Tennessee; he’s a speaker, a healer, and a visionary. It felt, sitting in that truck, like John kind of turned into his father. He had a very definite idea of the right way for me to proceed. First of all, he said, I was ignorant if I was to even consider the thought of an abortion. I had, of course, but only for a split second. He told me that with all the things I had lived through in my life, all the pain and worry and misery, I was certainly tough enough to handle being a mother and having a career at the same time. If anyone could, he said, I could. If anyone should, he said, I was the one who should.
He was absolutely right. He convinced me that night that the right course was the hardest course—do both things at once—and that I could pull it off. That conversation was a definite turning point in my life and a bonding moment for John and me. Whenever I get mad at him these days, whenever I’m ready to throw something at him, all I have to do to calm down is remember that little session in his pickup that night. It forever reminds me of how close we are.
The first thing, of course, was to have a healthy, happy baby and give her all the love and attention I could muster. Mike and I made the decision that he would keep working to provide an income and I would quit my bartending job and focus on my pregnancy. It was a wonderful thing for him to do, and the right thing, too. Hanging out in a smoke-filled bar night after night is hardly the healthiest way to go through a pregnancy, let alone putting up with all the drunks and lounge lizards giving you a hard time. I went home and tried, without much success, to keep up singing and songwriting during those nine months. Mike brought home the paycheck.
It was a hell of a delivery. Baby Grace weighed in at eight pounds, six ounces and she had a fourteen-and-a-half-inch head. She had her father’s head. I was in labor for sixteen hours and when it was over, my doctor told me right out, “You’re not made for having babies.” After sixteen hours of tough, tough labor, I understood.
Again, I had Grace when I was twenty-seven. Soon 27 became kind of a magical number for me. It seems to pop up everywhere. Stop and think about it. When I left Pocahontas, the population was 727. In the song “Pocahontas Proud,” I sing, “At twenty-seven I had baby Grace.” And what was my first week of record sales? 227,000 units.
By that point, I started spotting 27s everywhere in my life. The address to Hoosier Daddy’s is 12727 Rural Route 127. When I landed in Australia during a worldwide media tour on the heels of my first album, it was the very first time I had ever set foot on foreign soil, not counting Canada. When the plane hit the ground, the first thing I saw out the window was a big meat truck with a giant 27 on the side.
And on and on it goes. I’m now surrounded by 27s. One night in Los Angeles, we got a little crazy and ran across the street from the Viper Room Lounge to a tattoo parlor so I could get 27 tattooed on my ankle. If you come to one of my concerts and use your binoculars to look at me closely, you’ll see that around my neck I’m wearing a silver dog tag I engraved with 27. The people closest to me, on stage and in my personal life, are probably wearing one, too.
I don’t really know what it all means—I am not a numerology freak or anything—but I guess the number has become a sign for me. If I go too long without seeing or hearing a 27, I might want to rethink the path I’m on. Maybe I’ll have to do that around the time of my twenty-eighth album.
Remember that number, 27. It comes up later in the story.
Grace is of course the most important 27 of all. For the first six months of her life, I stayed home with her. I didn’t want it any other way. I was with her every day, every night, every meal, every burp, every diaper, every everything. It would have been devastating to me if I had had to go back to work right away and drop Grace off at a day-care center, like millions of working mothers have to do every day. If I was going to have a kid and have a career, I was going to do it right, and doing it right meant giving Grace my total attention during the early stages of life.
I got the name Grace out of a name book for babies. I looked up every name known to man and none of them felt right until I got to Grace. She clearly had “graced” me in her life and love. Given her connection to my grandmother, her second name is Frances. Frances happens to be my middle name, too. We have a lot of Franceses around the family now.
At a certain point, I felt it was time to leave my full-time involvement with Grace and get back to work. This was a really hard thing to do, as every new mother knows. In fact, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, to leave my child and go out for myself and my own career ambitions. It felt self-indulgent and still does sometimes. In those first couple of years, it was physically painful to be separated from her for any length of time. I tried to figure out every way in the world that I could keep her with me, wherever I was. Then, as now, she was the center of my life.
Mike and I never married, but we were together as long as I had been with anyone in my life. As I said, he supported me both before and after the birth of Grace. Then, as Grace grew and my attitude about working began to change, we made a conscious decision to switch roles. As long as I provided support for the family, Mike would quit his job and devote his time to raising Grace. As it turned out, this arrangement went on for another four or five years. Mike was, and is, a great dad. The fact that I could be sure that Grace was in good hands with him really helped ease my mind during the period and concentrate on getting a foothold in the music business.
One way in I found, was the demo business. Demo recordings are huge in Nashville, an ongoing year-round cottage industry. There are literally thousands of both aspiring and veteran songwriters working on new songs every single day in that town. Some are holed up in a cheap apartment somewhere, working away, like the way John and I got together to write “Redneck Woman” and other tunes. A lot of professional songwriters are in little rooms and cubicles in the big publishing offices on Nashville’s famous Music Row, trying like hell to come up with the next hit for Reba McEntire or Brooks & Dunn. It’s a tough trade being a songwriter in Nashville. It’s kind of like being a Hollywood star, I guess. For every real star you see on Entertainment Tonight, there are thousands of actors struggling to pay the rent.
Even if you are an established pro, the work is hard and unpredictable. Published songwriters on Music Row turn all the songs they have written in a given period to the publishing company they are attached to. The publishing company listens to them and says, “All right, out of the twenty songs you wrote this month, we think five of them are awesome. So we’ll reject the other fifteen and concentrate on the five we think might appeal to and get cut by a popular performer. Now we’re going to give you, say, five or six grand to get a band together, go into a studio, and cut a demo of these five songs. And get them back to us by next Tuesday.”
And that’s where I came in. I was the female vocalist on the demos of one or all of those songs. Let’s say they wrote a song that they thought was perfect for Martina McBride or Trisha Yearwood. They’d call me and say, “Hey we got this song. We need a key from you, because we’re going to track it in the studio on Monday at ten A.M.” Then I’d show up at three P.M. the same day and put my vocal on it. Then they’d mix it, give it to the publisher, who would then take it to Martina McBride’s record company and play it for someone in the A&R (or Artists & Repertoire) department.
The record company guy might reject the song himself or send it to Martina’s producer, who might reject it, or to Martina herself, who might reject it. Or Martina and the producer could really like it, but have no place on her current album for it. So, for that poor little song, there are a lot of hurdles to clear before it ever shows up on a CD or country radio.
This is all very serious business, because there is a lot of money—millions—in publishing a song that becomes a giant hit and maybe even a popular standard for years to come. Because of this, being a singer-songwriter can give you a lot more staying power in Nashville than just being a performer. It gives you at least two sources of income—publishing and recording.
Now back to my own demo work. It wasn’t too long after I had Grace that I started getting an increasing number of calls to sing on demos. Sometimes I might be in a studio with John or another one of my cohorts recording a demo of their song, and someone at the studio would say, “Hey, you’re good—let me jot your name down.” It was a word-of-mouth business and like everything in Nashville, at first the calls were few and far between but then began to pick up. Pretty soon I was one of the primary “go-to” girls when it came to demo-singing. It was how I supported myself and the family before I finally got my own recording contract.
There were only a few female demo vocalists at that time who could sing well and give a certain song a certain style and passion that might appeal to a certain star. If you are a songwriter who’s pitching a song to Trisha Yearwood, you want the demo to sound like Trisha Yearwood so that she can hear herself singing that song. If you sing on enough demos, you can learn a lot of different singing techniques. That was another part of my musical education before I landed a deal.
The way the demo recording business works, they pay you per song, which means, they pay you the same whether it takes you five minutes or five hours to get that song down right. I got good at doing a great demo quick. This really helps if you’re trying to get back to your toddler or if you have that toddler right in the studio with you. It also means you can record more songs in a given day or week. And I did a hell of a lot. I bet there are probably three thousand songs sitting around on Music Row with my voice on them. For a while there, I was damn near the Queen of the Demos.
It’s kind of funny, but now, years later, I can turn on the radio and hear a song that I originally recorded as a demo. I can even hear how the artist singing it borrowed some of the licks that I had come up with for the demo. It doesn’t bother me now—it’s all part of the process of getting a song demoed, sold, and recorded. God knows I’ve been influenced by singing styles and licks that I’ve heard over the years, from Tanya Tucker to Nancy Wilson.
And I would take my little Grace with me to every demo recording session I could. I would haul her from studio to studio in her little car-carrier seat. I called it her “pumpkin seat.” I’d often put her in one of those glass-enclosed acoustical vocal booths that are completely soundproof. I’d close the door while I recorded a track so that she wouldn’t ruin the take by crying or making a racket. She could see me through the glass and I could see her while I was singing. Soon Grace and I were doing five or six demo sessions a week. I wasn’t getting rich but I was making a decent living and I was getting my name out there, not just as a demo singer, but as a singer, period.
Demo-singing was definitely a way in for me, along with the association with the talented people in the Muzik Mafia. Because of my spreading reputation in the world of demos, I had a chance to do a number of showcases for industry decision-makers. A formal showcase is different from the in-office kind of audition that I did for John Grady that landed me my first deal. A showcase is a stage performance for invited recording company A&R executives and managers and songwriters and anyone with any clout that you can get to come out on a Thursday night and hear you sing a set of songs. If you’re going to throw a showcase, you have to spend some money, most likely money out of your own pocket. Even if your musician friends pitch in to help, there are unavoidable costs in mounting a public audition like that. Unfortunately none of the showcases that I sweated over, prepared for, and performed ever led to anything. I actually met my manager at a private party and got a contract in a sterile office at eight o’clock in the morning. Go figure.
From demo studios to riding with me on my tour bus to hanging out backstage at huge municipal arenas, Grace has grown up around musicians, stagehands, truck drivers, and a host of other people associated with a life in music. It is terribly painful to this day to have to tell her that Mommy has to go away for days or even weeks and do her work, leaving the one she loves most at home. It’s not pleasant to get a phone call saying, “So, where are you tonight, Mommy? When will you be home? Will you be home soon? I got a lot of stuff to show you . . .”
Given the circumstances, much of this separation is unavoidable, but there are ways to minimize it and I’m trying to find every one in the book. It’s imperative, for instance, that Grace has a good relationship with her father, which we’ve all tried to maintain. And, also, with all the traveling in our lives, it’s important that Grace feels like she has a real home, with her own room, her own pets, her own friends, and a few loving relatives in shouting distance. I know the other way for a child to grow up—the way I grew up—and I don’t want Grace’s life to be that fragmented, full of stress and often lonely.
Even so, there have been times when she has rebelled against this back-and-forth separation. I remember one specific occasion after I had become “an overnight sensation” that brought this home in a big way. We were at home at the time and Grace was walking across the living room from her bedroom. One of my videos came on CMT, for probably the fiftieth time, and Grace stopped to catch it for a moment. Then she looked at me and her daddy, rolled her eyes, took a deep breath, and announced:
“I am so sick of Gretchen Wilson.”
I knew exactly what she meant—she was sick of Gretchen Wilson the singer, the performer, the interviewee, the business. I remember at the time hoping I’d never, ever hear, “I’m sick of Mommy.” As long as it was “Gretchen Wilson,” at least for the time being, that was fine. There are days where I get a little fed up with all this “Gretchen Wilson” craziness myself.
When Grace is on the road with me, she kind of takes over, creating her own little world in the backstage dressing room and making friends with anyone in sight. For instance, as we’re doing this book, she is six and she is infatuated with the lead guitarist in my band, Dean Hall. She’s crazy about Dean. She acts like a fourteen-year-old girl around him. She writes him little notes and stuffs them in the hole in his guitar. Dean saves them and when Grace comes with us on the road again, she’ll ask, “Do you still have that note?” and he’ll say, “Sure.” It’s their own little friendship game.
The advantage of all of this for Grace is that she meets and gets to know all kinds of people, often strange, one-of-a-kind people. The show business environment she is privy to is sure a lot different than growing up in the isolated world of Pocahontas, Illinois. There are strange people there, too, of course, just not as many, I guess.
Because she is around so many different people, she is not lacking in social skills. She is not the shy, retiring type. She loves to be the center of attention, especially on the road, and she loves the camaraderie of the band and crew. I like to say that she has never met a stranger. She loves everyone.
Typical of the way Grace encounters the world is the first time she met Fred Gill. Fred is a dwarf who is both an amazing entrepreneur—his ventures include the Funkey Monkey tavern in Seymour, Indiana—and an integral part of the Muzik Mafia community. His official title is “Ambassador of Attractions” for Big & Rich. He is all of three feet, two inches and a wonderful free spirit. We affectionately refer to him as “Two Foot Fred.”
Well, the first time Grace met Fred, she was a little freaked out. She looked at me in a kind of scared way and said, “Mommy, why is he so little?”
I said, “I don’t know, baby, he’s a dwarf.” Always tell your kid the truth, I strongly believe, even if it is at times a little confusing.
So Grace walked up to Fred, made a little small talk, and then just asked him straight out, “So, why are you so little?”
Without skipping a beat, Fred looked her in the eye and said, “’Cause that’s the way God made me.”
Grace came right back with, “Oh, okay. You want to see my new trick?”
It was that simple. Case closed. The innocence of a child can blow you away from time to time and point out how we adults can be so messed up when it comes to people who are different from us. My grandpa thought all Italians, not to mention every other ethnic group on earth, were not to be trusted. Thankfully, Grace, growing up in a world full of all kinds of strange and wonderful people, won’t have the same blanket prejudices.
Grace has changed me in so many ways. Although I had drinking problems in the past, for instance, I don’t think I’ll have another one as long as she is in my life. Since she arrived, I realized that I was no longer living just for myself and my own wants and needs. I was living for her, too. In the simplest of terms, it was not all about me anymore. This is a very good thing to remember when you get caught up in a star-making business where the person on the pedestal is often led into thinking that he or she is the center of the known universe. Grace walks into the room and that kind of egomania goes right out the window.
The bottom line is, Grace is my life and music is my talent and passion. I think music can be a wonderful, healing thing. It can change people’s lives sometimes, and certainly change their mood or outlook during times of trouble and stress. And it is a wonderful thing to be able to stand on stage and do what I do for a living. But, having said that, the ultimate reality in my life is my daughter. That’s who I really am. I’m a mom first, a singer second.
Through careful planning, keeping my priorities straight, and maybe a little luck, I’ve been able to stay close to my precious daughter and still be the “Gretchen Wilson” that sometimes irritates her. It is not always easy, especially right after my career took off like a shot, and I’m sure Grace still has some complaints at times about our unusual life together and apart. But, with the help of my extended family and the people I work with who understand how I feel about Grace, we’ve made it work pretty well up to now. I think I’m doing, and will continue to do, everything I can to see that my daughter can grow up with more advantages, and in a healthier environment, than I did. Just like my grandma, my mom, and me, she’s a redneck woman, too, and will probably, sooner or later, show us just how far a redneck woman can go.
Having centered my personal life around Grace, the next big step in my career—meeting my managers—also involved children, ironically. Longtime music promoter and manager Marc Oswald, who was already handling the career of Big & Rich, held a kind of barbecue-pool party at his house in honor of a group of people in Nashville, including himself, who had adopted young orphans from Russia. John and Kenny were invited and brought me along. I didn’t know Marc but I knew him by reputation. He had promoted massive country shows, produced a lot of network television, and knew his way around Nashville. John had been telling Marc about me and they both thought this was the perfect occasion to introduce me to a bunch of insiders, including legendary manager Dale Morris. Dale’s clients include Alabama and Kenny Chesney. It was an honor just to meet him, let alone end up being represented by him.
So I went to Marc’s party and kind of hid behind John and Kenny in a setting where I knew very few people. To quote Marc, “She hadn’t been to too many pool parties, at least not where the pool was in the ground.” Along with Big & Rich, I got up and sang a couple of songs. Even amidst all the kids and craziness of that party, I must have made an impression, because it wasn’t too long before both Dale and Marc began to help guide my career. Today they are my co-managers and are involved in every aspect of my professional life.
The big meeting at Sony with John Grady came about through the Sony A&R man at the time, Mark Wright. It was Mark’s job to find “artists” and develop their “repertoire.” I had met Mark at another failed audition at another label and though the label head politely ran me out of his office, Mark liked what I was up to. When he moved to Sony, he remembered my name. Through two local contacts, Cory Gierman of Muzik Mafia fame and Greg Perkins, a tavern owner and friend, I got a meeting coordinated by Mark Wright to go in and meet John Grady.
At the very last minute, not wanting to walk into the high-powered meeting all by myself, I called Dale Morris and asked if he would come with me and represent me as management. He said yes, I’m happy to report, and the rest, as they say, is history.
When I look back, I owe a lot of people a lifetime of gratitude for helping me get to that particular, life-changing, in-office showcase. I could say, for instance, that I got my record deal specifically because of Mark Wright. But that would leave out a roomful of people who got me to the place where Mark introduced me to John Grady. John Rich, Big Kenny, Sharon Vaughn, Cory Gierman, Greg Perkins, and a bunch of others had been setting up showcases for me and spreading my name around for a long time. So who got me my big break? I’d have to say, in all fairness, every last one of them.