CHAPTER 9

NO BAD FOR A BARTENDER

Not bad for a bartender

Or an eighth grade education

Pretty good for a backwoods girl, who had to make it on her own

I’m on the stool side of the bar these days buying everyone a round

Ain’t it funny how the tables turned

Not bad for a bartender

“Not Bad for a Bartender”

The night after the morning I sang in John Grady’s office and he handed me the note that said “NOW,” John Rich and I were out celebrating and we ended up in front of the Ryman Auditorium, the longtime spiritual home—almost the Vatican—of the Grand Ole Opry and, in a way, a shrine to all of country music, back to the days of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, “The Singing Brakeman.” Standing in front of the Ryman is like standing in front of a Gothic cathedral. It seems ancient and sacred, and it’s usually empty these days and kind of quiet and ghostly.

Anyway, just for the hell of it, John and I went around to the side and tried to open the door. To our surprise, it was unlocked. So I look at John and say, “So, you want to go in?” John immediately replies, “Let’s go.”

The place was totally empty. We look around and see nothing but this dark, all-wood theater converted from an actual church that was originally built in 1892. On the empty stage, though, we spot a guitar just sitting there. John picks up the guitar, strums a few chords, and begins a song so familiar to me that I just opened my mouth and start singing. The Patsy Cline classic, “Leavin’ on Your Mind.” It was a magical moment for me. Here I was, standing on the stage of the Ryman, just like Patsy, and singing a song I felt I was born to sing, just like Patsy. It was like Dorothy arriving at the gates of Oz after that long trek down the yellow brick road. I even repeat that image in the song “Not Bad for a Bartender”:

Swinging doors and cleaning floors is all I’d ever known

Then out of nowhere somehow I found my yellow brick road

And now I was in Oz. As I was singing “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” a security guard showed up, ready to hustle us out of the building. Either out of politeness or because she liked the sound of my voice singing that familiar ballad, she let me finish the song. Then she tossed us out.

Later we went back to the Ryman, having gotten all the proper clearances, and filmed a fantasy version of that moment for the video for my song “When I Think About Cheatin’.” We even added the exact date of that original “break-in”—August 27, 2003, 1:04A.M. Like in the real story, John finds a door open and he and I mount the stage to do a song. This time it’s my own “cheatin’” song, told from a woman’s point of view and sung in front of an old-time Opry microphone. Both the stage and the audience are haunted with the ghostly presence of some of the great performers of the Opry. Through the magic of special effects, as I sing, I am surrounded by the likes of Conway Twitty, Roy Acuff, Little Jimmy Dickens, Hank Sr., Floyd Cramer, and of course, Patsy Cline. In the video, you can actually see them in the room. In reality, I just felt them, strongly.

Later, on my second CD, we introduce the song “One Bud Wiser,” with another nod to the Opry. “Ladies and gentlemen,” John Rich says in his best old-timey voice, “Welcome to the Grand Ole Opry here in Nashville, Tennessee. All the way from Pocahontas, Illinois, it’s Gret-chen Wilson!” We thought it fit the song perfectly. “One Bud Wiser” sounds like a classic Opry tune, doesn’t it?

I guess at the moment when John and I first got up on that empty Ryman stage and I sang “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” I felt in my heart that I had finally been invited to join those great country performers, at least for one record distributed by Sony. I had just made a long, strange journey from a Patsy Cline song playing on my grandma’s record player back in Greenville, Illinois, to a Patsy Cline song on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. If I hadn’t reached the top of the mountain, I was damn close.

Now, of course, all I had to do was to write, sing, and record a damn album, something I’d never done before. At that point, I hadn’t written any of the songs that people now associate with me. I hadn’t written or co-written “Redneck Woman,” “Here for the Party,” or all of the songs that were part of that first album. I guess it took actually signing that deal for me to say to myself, “Holy s**t, girl, this is it! You got to write those songs. You got to say what you want to say—and you’ve got to do it right now!”

I sat down to start writing and I wrote every single day for the next three months or so. I wrote lyrics the old-fashioned way—by hand. I’d be hauling Grace around with one arm and trying to scribble down a lyric going through my head with the other. I wrote with John, Vicky McGehee, Rivers Rutherford, George Teren, and Big Kenny—anyone who could help me put a part of me into a three-minute song. I think I wrote a hundred songs in that first month. Most of them are in a drawer someplace, but the ones that clicked, like “Redneck Woman,” ended up on that first record. Out of those hundred-plus songs we cranked out in that very intense period, seven made it on that first album, which is not a bad batting average for a relative beginner songwriter like I was at the time.

From that first audition with John Grady, I wanted to make sure that everyone involved knew what they were getting when they signed me up. I didn’t want to pretend to be one thing, then throw them off when a different musical persona suddenly appeared. Well, if they had any questions about that, they were answered when I went in to sing this little anthem we wrote called “Redneck Woman.” I remember the very day I played it for a roomful of executives. They about fell out of their chairs. They were very divided—half of the record company was scared to death of the song and the other half knew it was a hit. Thank goodness the “hit” guys won out.

The people who had to go out and sell the song to radio stations were a little worried about the language. I cussed a lot in that song. In fact, we counted up the cuss words—I say “hell” twelve times and “damn” twice. Some people didn’t think that was appropriate language for wholesome country radio. The theory among a lot of researchers and marketers, I guess, is that country radio is only listened to by middle-aged soccer moms, and those moms don’t want to be driving the kids to practice in their minivan and hear lyrics like “Let me get a big ‘Hell yeah!’ from the redneck girls like me.” My own view is that there are a lot of hardworking redneck women out there who get up at dawn, work a job all day, and then take the kids to soccer in a pickup. And the word “hell” would not be a shock to their ears. In the end, for those of you who think about these things, one “damn” got changed to “rip,” but all the “hells” stayed.

I loved shooting the “Redneck Woman” video. I got to go muddin’ in a four-wheeler in a riverbed and it gave me a chance to include my friends, from Big O to Kid Rock, and to meet a few idols at the same time.

I first met Kid Rock at a party at John Rich’s house. It was John’s birthday and he was anxious to use the occasion to play the demo for “Redneck Woman,” which we had just cut. He played it and Kid Rock, among others, went nuts. I remember him calling his brother on the phone and saying, “Dude, you gotta hear this song. It’s off the hook. I mean, it’s like Loretta Lynn off the hook!”

So we got to know each other after that and I invited him to be in the video. I knew he was friends with Hank Williams, Jr., so I asked him if he could get Hank to do a bit in the video, too. He hesitated at first, then went after Hank. Hank, I’m happy to say, said yes.

In a trailer on the “Redneck Woman” film set was the first time I had ever met Hank Jr. and it was a little awkward. The inside of the trailer was part of the video and I decorated it with a lot of personal mementos. I brought in a deer head for the wall and placed the urns of my grandparents on top of the TV set. I just figured they should be there, just like I try to include them in every family get-together. That may seem a little country, but they are always in our hearts and the urns remind us of that at every turn.

So I walk into the trailer to say something to Hank Jr. and can’t really think of a thing to say. I mean, what do you say to a legend like Bocephus? He was close to the TV, so what I finally said was, “Hey, be careful there. Don’t bump that TV. That’s my grandma and grandpa sitting up there.”

He kind of looked at me, pulled his glasses down to the edge of his nose, then looked at the urns and then the pictures of Grandma and Grandpa I had placed beside the urns, then looked back at me and said, “By God, you are a redneck, ain’t ya?”

And then we started talking. I guess the fact that I had brought my dead grandparents to the video shoot was enough for him. He knew at that moment that I was a real person.

If you know that video, you’ll also know some of the other stars who dropped by that day. When I sing “I know all the words to every Tanya Tucker song,” I wave to Tanya herself, sitting in the audience. Big & Rich are there, too, of course. To me it was like a marriage of the past and the present.

The idea was to release “Redneck Woman” as a single to radio stations, then follow that a few months later with the album Here for the Party. It is not uncommon in the country music business to have a single come out eight to ten weeks before the CD that includes that single. If the single hits, it builds demand for the album. That’s a lot better marketing strategy than just putting out an album that no one’s ever heard of.

So we released the single in December of 2003 in what is called a soft release. This means that a lot of radio stations got to hear it and hopefully begin playing and promoting it right after the holidays. The strategy seemed to work. According to Marc Oswald, we had so many radio stations putting that song out so fast that it was like a call to action. The phones started ringing off the walls at the stations, mostly from women, I’d guess, who instantly identified with the song. Then the video came out right on top of the airplay and only added to the buzz.

The whole thing was like a musical tidal wave. It came out of nowhere and just hit everywhere at once.

A lot of people have speculated on why this song got the huge, almost instantaneous reaction that it did. The song is unique, but it follows a country music tradition of sorts—a male tradition—that announces that it is just fine to be an unapologetic redneck, from Merle Haggard’s classic anthem, “Okie from Muskogee” to David Allan Coe’s “Longhaired Redneck.” The difference is, I think, this is a redneck woman putting out this “Hell yeah!” point of view and singing directly from her own life and experience. Marc Oswald’s theory is that through that song, I gave a new face, and a new attitude, to the lives of millions of silent, largely unknown women just like me. Women who also didn’t feel like “the Barbie Doll type” and enjoyed buying things “on the Wal-Mart shelf half-price” were happy to hear someone sing about their lives. All I know is that when I say in concert, “Can I get a big ‘hell yeah’ from the redneck girls like me?” I hear a sea of female voices—and even a few male ones—yelling back at me.

To me, the song is an expression of pride. It takes the word “redneck,” a slur word, and turns it on its head. Anybody who works hard, raises a family, lives modestly, or sends a son or daughter off to the military can find something to relate to in that song. The original “red neck” came from spending all day in a hot field behind a horse and plow. I never pushed a plow, but I know what spending twelve hours a day working behind a bar and pushing beer bottles feels like. And I could have been in New York working that bar as easily as in Pierron, Illinois. Or I could have been raising six kids in a trailer in Greenville. On one level, all people in these circumstances, man and woman, feel the same pride in our lives. Let me get a big “hell yeah!”

In the four months between the release of the single, “Redneck Woman,” and the release of the album, everything changed. The single was number one on the country charts for six weeks. It had reached that top spot faster than any song in the history of country music. It was a rocket going straight up. A couple of months before nobody outside of Pocahontas, Illinois, and a few friends in Nashville knew who I was. They had never heard my name. Now, suddenly, on the basis of one song and a pending album release, everyone in the universe of country music knew my name. I don’t think anybody is prepared for their life to be whipped around like that and begin to move at such lightning speed. I know I wasn’t.

It was all mind-boggling. It was a shock to both my life and my lifestyle. And everyone else’s around me. It took me at least a year to stop spinning. And it was full of irony. First of all, at the point when “Redneck Woman” was becoming a smash hit, I was broke. In fact, I was more broke, I think, than I’d ever been in my life. I was retired from both of my Nashville money-making enterprises, bartending and demo-singing. I mean, hell, I was now the artist other songwriters were making demos for! Unfortunately, royalties on records don’t just come in a couple of days after people start buying the records. It takes a while, anywhere from nine months to a year or more, before they slip a royalty check under your door. With funds from a small signing bonus from the record company and an advance from my management company, I had been living and supporting Grace while I wrote and recorded the first CD. But at the time my career was taking off like a moon shot, I was cash-poor.

Plus, I was on the road promoting the record, constantly. I did, among other things, a nationwide radio tour. For four grueling weeks I had to go from radio station to radio station, playing a song or two right there in the studio and talking about myself. Sometimes the radio stop would be a redneck barbecue on the roof of the station with fifteen or twenty call-in winners and some overcooked ribs. Then you wipe your mouth and head to the next town and the next station.

This was not only physically hard but mentally hard as well. I was ripped away from my family, on a bus with a bunch of people I didn’t know all that well, and I was being asked to do things I was in no way prepared for. They don’t teach you how to be a public figure down at Big O’s. The truth is, I was scared to death. Scared and exhausted. I was overworked and wasn’t getting enough sleep. At the same time I was trying to adapt to a lifestyle that was new, unpredictable, and foreign to the way I had lived for the previous twenty-nine years.

I was prepared to get up on a stage or even in a radio station and sing, but I wasn’t prepared for much else involved in being a “rising star.” I wasn’t prepared to be a friggin’ model. I wasn’t prepared for glossy photo shoots. I wasn’t prepared for hair stylists and makeup artists hovering around and fooling with my look. For all I knew, by the time they were through, I’d look like a person I didn’t really know. I might turn into a prettied-up fake version of myself.

But most of all, I think, I wasn’t prepared for the media. I wasn’t prepared to sit in that radio station or in front of a TV camera and answer any and all questions thrown at me. I was deathly afraid of sounding stupid or silly or to have nothing come out of my mouth. I wasn’t a talker. I didn’t have anything earth-shattering to say to the world. I was a singer, sure, but really I was just an ordinary person—a single mom with a three-year-old daughter and hopefully a good job I could continue. I didn’t realize how much I’d have to share my personal life with curious reporters everywhere. I still had a bit of the hard shell that Big Kenny pointed out, and it made me very uptight and self-conscious to talk about myself like that.

I remember my very first “phoner,” i.e., an on-the-air telephone interview with a radio station somewhere out there in America. I was sitting in my house and I called a Seattle radio station and talked to a DJ with a show called Ichabod Crane in the Morning. I was so scared that I could hardly breathe when I called in. I knew the show was live and any goofy thing I said would be instantly broadcast to all of Seattle.

Today people like Marc Oswald will tell you I handled it all like a pro—that I had a witty or punchy answer to every question thrown at me. But I can tell you, in all honesty, I didn’t feel like a pro. I felt like a girl from Pocahontas, Illinois, who had suddenly been thrown into this fast-paced, think-on-your-feet-and-always-smile media circus. I guess, in my own mind, I was somewhere in that circus between the trained bear and the lady on the high wire.

Nowadays, all these media encounters no longer faze me. It’s taken quite a while, but I’m really comfortable with them now. I just speak my mind. I may not say what you want me to say, but I’ll answer your question in my own peculiar way. My nerves no longer get shaky when they turn that camera on and start peppering me with questions. The irony is, I do get a little nervous now before going out on stage to do my regular ninety-minute show, a show I’ve done hundreds of times. What if I forget a lyric? (It’s happened.) What if I trip and fall? (It’s happened.) I’m surrounded by a band of great musicians and a group of never-fail technicians, but I still get butterflies waiting backstage for my name to be called.

Starting out, I was relaxed on stage and nervous in media situations. Now it’s just the reverse. Somewhere along the line, I made a complete one-eighty.

With regard to the media, I just realized one day that there was nothing to be uptight about. The only people who really care what I say or do are the people who are listening to me, and those are by and large people I know, understand, and feel comfortable around. Those are the people who like my music and come to my concerts. Whether they are sitting in a seat in Row 14 or sitting at home watching me on the tube, they are the same people. Why should I feel self-conscious around them? They are just like me, and vice versa. Nobody else really cares.

In the midst of all of the early craziness surrounding the release of “Redneck Woman,” we decided to return to Pocahontas to do a photo shoot for the first album and also take documentary footage of the Big O world I had sprung from. We all piled in a bus—Marc Oswald, John Rich, songwriter Vicky McGehee, my makeup pal, Candy Burton, a still guy, a documentary crew, and a few other stragglers, and took off for Pokey. We did everything we set out to do in three days working seventeen- and eighteen-hour days. It was one of those trips that made me stop and wonder just what the hell I had gotten into.

I was not in the press much at that point, but everyone in that area knew who I was and had heard that I was coming back to town with some fancy-dan Nashville types. One of the things on the agenda was to shoot me performing in a local bar like Big O’s. The real Big O’s was gone by then but Hoosier Daddy’s, Mark Obermark’s other bar over in Carlisle, was the perfect setting for this honky-tonk performance. The place was a tight fit—you could almost touch the ceiling by stretching out your arm. The crowd was rowdy and the drinks were good, but the ventilation sucked. Although it was January outside, inside Hoosier Daddy’s it was a hundred degrees and the smoke was so thick that you sometimes had trouble seeing the person you were talking to two feet away.

Marc loves to tell the story of John’s particular entrance into the Hoosier Daddy’s world. John, still in Nashville-land, had decided to wear one of his prize possessions—a full-length raccoon fur coat, the kind of coat you might see P. Diddy wearing to the Grammy Awards. John had probably picked it up at a yard sale or the Salvation Army for fifty bucks, but he loved that coat. I was nowhere around when John, in his fur coat and red cowboy hat, decided to make an entrance into Hoosier Daddy’s. According to Marc, who was right behind him, the whole crowd just stopped and stared at him, like a Martian had just landed in their tavern. It was like one of those scenes from a movie where the music stops and everyone starts to get up, ready to attack. John and Marc were smart enough to get the hell out of there, high-tail it back to the bus, and lose the John Shaft apparel.

I remember what I wore that night—tight blue jeans and a pair of black leather boots that came up over my knees. Marc said the boots looked like something Wonder Woman would wear, but they felt right at home at Hoosier Daddy’s and I had a great time performing in front of the people I had known all my life. Maybe some of their parents were there at the Hickory Daiquiri Dock when I thrilled them with my killer karaoke routine.

That trip was important for another reason. It reinforced in my mind what I knew best and what I should be writing songs about. I had already written a few songs like “Redneck Woman” that identified exactly who I was, but there were more to come. Back from that trip to Pokey, John and Vicky kind of looked and me and said, “Here’s what you need to say. Hell, you’re missing it because it’s your life and it’s boring to you, but this is what you are. This is who you are.”

Vicky McGehee is the greatest writer on earth when it comes to titles. One of my all-time favorites—“When It Rains”—is on that first album. Well, as we talked about that visit to Illinois, it was Vicky who came up with the title “Pocahontas Proud,” and we got right to it. After a kind of Waylon Jennings opening groove, the first line said it all: “I was raised in Pocahontas, Illinois.” Following were straight-out autobiographical lines like . . . “At fifteen I was tending Big O’s Bar, I’d sing till two A.M. for a half full tip jar . . .” It was a piece of the life portrait I was beginning to include in a lot of early songs. As John had said, I was singing about my rough spots and the audience that soon came to my concerts knew just exactly what I was talking about.

Like I said, I started writing songs like mad after the record deal happened. But all of those hundred or so songs I came up with in those early days were someone else’s stories. They weren’t mine. They were either generic country songs with no specific reference to one person’s reality or they were songs that meant something to the writers I was working with. People can sit here all day and tell you that a hit song is one that rhymes correctly, or has an instant hook, or is radio-friendly, whatever that means. To me, a hit song is something complete different from that. It’s a song that the audience believes.

The album Here for the Party soon followed on the heels of the single and things got even crazier. The album was number one on the country charts the day it came out and was certified platinum by the end of the first week of its release. In a little office ceremony, John Grady handed me a gold record and a platinum record on the very same day. The publicity demands kept increasing and I was just trying to keep my balance and sanity on a day by day basis. Things got big fast. I was asked to perform at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas. I was getting ready to make my Grand Ole Opry debut, this time for real. I started meeting people like Charlie Daniels, whom I had admired for a lifetime. I got to play before a hometown crowd of twenty thousand in St. Louis—it was just like playing for the forty-five people who knew me down at Big O’s, only this time they brought all their in-laws and everyone from down at the welding factory. And I started showing up on programs like the Today show and The Tonight Show. I seemed to be everywhere at once.

The Today show, for instance, was the first national morning show I’d ever done and only the second time I had been to New York. My very first trip to New York, only a short time before, was to do a showcase as a new artist on the label for Sony executives. I remember talking to Jeff Foxworthy on his radio show the minute I got to town. He immediately asked, as he always does, “Where are you and what are you wearing?”

“Well, Jeff,” I said, “I’m in New York City laying on the bed in some fancy-schmancy hotel and I’m wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and tennis shoes and I can’t find a cup of coffee that doesn’t have cinnamon or something in it.” He got a big laugh out of that—wide-eyed country girl in the Big, bad Apple.

For the Today show appearance, it was a really, really early call, and for a late-night bartender/singer like myself, it was not exactly the perfect time of day to be on stage yelling “Hell yeah!” I will never forget setting up for that performance. We were outside Rockefeller Center and when we did the sound check and quick rehearsal, it was five A.M. and still dark outside. There were only a few people in that predawn crowd and half of them were probably wondering who the hell I was. (There are hard-core country fans in New York, but there is little or no country radio or other widespread exposure.)

So, at five o’clock in the morning in the middle of a plaza in the middle of New York City, it was time for us to rev it up and kick ass. And that’s just what we did. The response surprised the hell out of me. This growing crowd of people who looked nothing like my regular fans were starting to smile, whoop it up, and call out my name. For me, coming from a world light-years away from this ultra-urban backdrop, it was bizarre. It was one of the strangest stage experiences I’ve ever had.

On that same trip to New York, I did Live with Regis and Kelly. After my second album was released, I went back to Regis and Kelly. This time, backstage before my number, I happened to mention to Kelly that my Aunt Vickie always calls it The Kelly and Regis Show. Regis must have picked this up on Kelly’s microphone or something, because when he said goodbye to me on the air, he ended with, “Hey, Gretchen, say hello to Aunt Vickie!” He busted me then and there. Nothing gets past an old pro like Regis Philbin.

A lot of numbers were being thrown around in those early weeks after the album came out. Apparently Here for the Party sold 800,000 CDs in less than a month. Experts were proclaiming that it was on its way to being the biggest selling debut album in the history of country music. I broke all the records, they said, even some of those set by Garth Brooks. Of course Carrie Underwood from American Idol came along and broke my records. But I had all the bragging rights there for about fifteen minutes.

It was hard to grasp the significance of all of these statistics piling up. I was thrilled that so many people liked the music and just happy to be out there singing. Singing, I knew how to do. Everything else was exhausting. It was a dizzying life of bus-plane-bus-plane-bus-bus-car-plane.

And then the awards started coming. The first statue of any kind I’d ever won was the first award I won at the Country Music Awards (the CMAs). It was the Horizon Award for Best New Performer. The live show was the first time I ever had to say something to an audience like that. It was also the first time I had ever sung in front of the whole country music industry.

The song I sang was the ballad “When I Think About Cheatin’.” I was so scared, looking out at all those famous faces. I caught the eye of Alan Jackson, who was sitting in the first row. He had a friendly look so I focused on him throughout the whole performance. Every time I opened my eyes, I found Alan. My thinking was, “He looks like he’s on my side.” I’m sure others were, too, but I was too frightened to notice.

Then I had to get back on stage to accept the award and I don’t remember anything I said except that I had been in the back of the same audience the year before and dreamed I could be up here, and here I was. The rest is a complete blank. It’s a good thing that I didn’t get into this business to talk, because I wouldn’t have gotten very far.

My first big performing tour was opening for Brooks & Dunn. I was the opening act, the very first performer on stage. I got to play twenty-five minutes and since it was summer and outside, it was still daylight when I went on. There are usually three acts in a country concert like this. The opening act, in this case, me, gets to play with the sun often glaring right into their eyes. The second act—on this tour it was Montgomery Gentry—gets to play in part daylight and part darkness. Finally the headliner, Brooks & Dunn, the act that everyone paid to see, comes on when everything is just right—the sky is dark, the air is cool, and the crowd is ready to whoop and holler.

Despite the afternoon sun and heat, this was great fun because I shared the stage with some of the best performers in the business and their audience was probably a lot closer to me than those people on the streets of New York. Even before that tour, I got to stand on home plate at Busch Stadium in St. Louis and sing, on national TV, the national anthem at game four of the World Series. Having grown up only fifty miles away, I’ve been a huge Cardinals fan since I knew what a baseball game was. This was like another Pocahontas homecoming, in front of the whole world.

It was in the middle of the Brooks & Dunn summer tour that we had a ten-day window, ten days with no concerts scheduled. I was ready to go home for a decent spell and play in the backyard with Grace, but my management gurus had a different idea—a quick, round-the-world media tour to promote the album.

And I mean, around the whole world. In that ten-day period, we traveled 27,000 miles. The redneck woman went global.

It made good sense, of course. The record was breaking worldwide and the timing was right to put a face to the music from Australia to Sweden. We took off and literally circumnavigated the globe in ten days in July. We started in Australia and then flew around the world to London, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and a few points in between. I did only four live gigs, I think, in London. Everything else was radio, print, and TV. We did morning shows, late-night shows, variety shows, you name it. In a place called Ulladulla, Australia, we did a long-running variety show called The AFL Footy Show. “Footy” refers to Australian football, which was the launching pad for the show. I shared a dressing room in the back of a semi with a muscleman and a nine-year-old kid who dressed up like Gene Simmons of Kiss and lip-synched Kiss tunes on stage. It was fun, but it was nuts.

Marc Oswald claims that the only time I lost it through all these interviews and appearances in places I had never, ever been before was on one occasion in Germany. I was trying to call Grace across four or five time zones and the connection was less than perfect. I missed Grace terribly—this trip was the longest time we had ever been apart in our life. Anyway, in the face of my frustration in trying to talk to her, I broke down and cried. I regained my composure pretty quickly but, frankly, I’m not sure how. I was operating on some source of energy I didn’t even know I had. This was it, I figured. This was the time to go all-out, and that’s what I tried to do.

The fans in every one of those places were great. In Australia they seemed to know who I was. In England, at least my first trip there, the media people knew about me but most music listeners had never heard of me. I did have a little trouble with the food in most of those places—even Australian beef tasted a little funny to me. I was happy to see that you could find a McDonald’s from Melbourne to Stockholm. We once made a fueling stop in Singapore that was just enough time for me to find a McDonald’s, fill up a to-go bag, and get back on the plane. I’m sorry, I was still a country girl—I couldn’t go to Sweden and eat something off the menu like salmon fetus. Marc claims I am capable of finding a McD anywhere in the world in under three minutes. A lot of the time, it was either that or starve.

The accents occasionally threw me off a little, too. Most people everywhere spoke English, but sometimes it was a fractured English. In Oslo, I remember, we were doing a morning radio show and the interviewer was a very nice Norwegian man with only a partial grasp of American English. It was a live show broadcasting all over Norway; the whole country was listening in. The interviewer was asking me about how I wrote my songs, and in the middle of the discussion he blurted out the following question: “When you write these songs, do you feel like you’ve touched yourself?”

I knew what he was getting at, but my mouth dropped. My comeback, as I recall, was something like “I don’t think I’m gonna answer that question.” I had already been playing this media game for a while. With questions like that, you either think fast or sit there turning six shades of red.

Back from that trip, and at least partially recovered from the weird food and strange questions, I was asked to do a feature for 60 Minutes. Ed Bradley came out, spent some time getting to know me, and then together we took a trip back to Pocahontas. Ed began the profile by listing all the great things that had happened up to that point—a number one album, my first awards from the Country Music Awards and the American Music Awards, the four Grammy nominations that I had just received, all in a pretty short period. Then he went right into the meaning of the song “Redneck Woman.” My answer:

“I’ve never associated being a redneck with racism. . . . I think my grandpa was a little bit on that side, you know? I loved him just the same, but I had to tell people, he’s just—and I hate to say this about him—but he’s just ignorant.”

I didn’t pull any punches, either about Grandpa or a few other aspects of my life. I talked about drinking too much, but also noted that I never had any kind of drug problem. “I attribute that,” I said, “to being witness to some of my mom’s problems. There are times I remember having to go get her at the tavern. She wasn’t capable of driving herself home. You know, for a kid who’s . . . trying to get to bed for school the next morning, that made me mad. I mean, it really pissed me off.”

I guess I was glad to get that off my chest, in front of fifteen million of my closest TV-watching friends.

Finally, after endless months of traveling and talking and singing and posing and packing and unpacking, I got a break. For a few great weeks, I got to spend all day every day with Grace. By that point I had gotten my first royalty check and could at least pay a few people back, if not buy a few things for myself. I remember going down and picking out a new truck. It was a GMC Sierra three-quarter-ton pickup with an extended cab and four-wheel-drive Duramax Diesel. A hit record, a beautiful daughter, a new truck—what more could a country girl ask for?

But the roller-coaster ride soon started up again. Between the performance dates and the personal appearances and the video shootings, I had a new album to put together. Again, working with John Rich, Vicky, and other great writers, we turned out some songs that I felt expanded on the personal, almost autobiographical, tone of the first album. The more I wrote, the more confident I was that if I just said what was on my mind and in my heart, I’d keep connecting to my listeners.

“Not Bad for a Bartender,” for instance, came from a line John kept repeating every time we got an award or went to some fancy event. He’d look at me, smile, and say, “Hey, not bad for a bartender.” That grew into a song that truly expresses my amazement at what had happened to me. When I sing, in reference to my fans, that “I can’t believe how long they wait in the autograph line,” that’s the honest truth. I’m thrilled, of course, but also continually surprised. “Who are they waiting for? ME?”

Of course what was sometimes on my mind bothered a few other people, which we found out when that second CD came out.

Take the song “Skoal Ring,” a simple little tune about a woman who loves men who chew tobacco. Now, to me, that’s country to the bone. The song opens with:

Don’t need no diamond ring

Don’t want a bunch of bling bling

The only thing I really need

Is a man with a Skoal ring

What I’m talking about here—as I had to explain to a few Northerners like Matt Lauer on Today—is the ring mark that a can of Skoal tobacco leaves on the back pocket of your blue jeans. It’s not hard to spot if you come from my part of the country. As we were writing the song, I came up with a line about the singer (me) being a Bandit Girl—one kind of Skoal—and the guy being a Long Cut Man—another kind of Skoal. John Rich almost fell over laughing. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Gretchen,” John said, “only you could think that people are different because they chew different flavors of Skoal. That’s the most redneck thing I’ve ever heard in my life!”

And that little bit of redneck reality made it into the song:

I’ve always been a Bandit Girl and he’s a Long Cut Man

Somehow we still get along with different colored cans

When that boy comes home from work smellin’ like the farm

That berry blend on his lips still turns me on

When “Skoal Ring” hit the airwaves, there was some definite mumbling among the anti-smoking crowd. Some people thought I was promoting the use of smokeless tobacco among my fans, especially impressionable underage girls. The attorney general from the state of Tennessee wrote me a letter and asked me to stop showing a can of tobacco on stage while I was singing that song. The implication was that I was contributing to the delinquency—and ill health—of minors by singing the praises of an addictive drug, not to mention all the adults picking up a can on the way home from the concert.

I could see the point. Smokeless tobacco is far from harmless. Used in excess, it can damage teeth and gum lines and increase the risk of developing cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus. Just because you don’t smoke it doesn’t mean the same toxins don’t find a way into your body.

But I wasn’t trying to promote tobacco. I’d never dream of pushing alcohol or tobacco or anything like that onto a child. I have a child, you know, and I don’t plan to encourage her to chew, smoke, or drink Jack Daniel’s. This is a song that happens to feature a very common figure from real life—a good-looking, hardworking good ol’ boy with a big ring mark on his faded back jeans pocket. He is of age to chew, as is the singer of the song. I guess I could have identified the same guy by his hat or his truck or the beer can in his hand, but I choose the ring on his pocket. I in no way meant to offend or upset anybody, but the song rings true to me and says something about the people I know and like. Because of that, I’ll keep singing the song and hope that parents out there will teach their own kids about the dangers of smokeless tobacco.

Another song from that record that got people talking was the one I sang with Merle Haggard, “Politically Uncorrect.” It was a Merle-type song—say what’s on your mind. I liked it right away because if you listen closely, it’s a song about the pride and dignity of common people. It’s not about politics, as many people assume without hearing the lyrics. It’s about the underdog and maybe because Merle sings on the cut and the fact we say “God” a time or two, some people have seen it as a kind of conservative anthem. It’s not that at all. Politically, you can interpret the lyrics any way you please, but the only point I’m making when I sing it is, “Hey, see these people. Give them some respect. They’re as real and as worthy of praise as all those Hollywood stars and media types who pop up on TV every day.”

Singing alongside Merle Haggard is hard to put into words. Even today, when I listen to that recording and his voice comes on, I get goose bumps and the hair on my arm stands up. Merle is a legend—in some ways, the epitome of country music—but more importantly, Merle is a great, great singer and no less so today than thirty years ago. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, but if you listen to a lot of country radio, it’s like they’ve forgotten about people like Merle. And Charlie Daniels. And George Jones. George’s last record is one of the best he’s ever made. Same with Hag. People ask me all the time, “So, what’s in your CD player right now?” And the answer is, “It’s the old-timers, man, and they’re making music better than ever and no one in commercial music seems to be paying attention.”

I have become friends with and hope to write songs with a whole list of country legends, including Hag, Tom T. Hall, and Loretta Lynn. Loretta is as real as a member of my own family. She reminds me of both my grandma and my mom. She is like an instant mom to whoever she is talking to. And she’ll tell you exactly what’s on her mind.

At one CMT Awards ceremony, Martina McBride and I were set to give Loretta a special award called the Johnny Cash Visionary Award. We were standing offstage as they played clips of Loretta’s incredible career. Loretta, of course, is not paying any attention to this. She’s going, “Do I look fat in this dress? Martina, tell me the truth, does this look bad on me?” So the three of us started jabbering about anything and everything until someone said, “Loretta Lynn!” The curtain opened and Loretta the Star walked right out.

On another occasion, Kris Kristofferson gave me a ride in his limo one night in New York to the premiere of Walk the Line. A couple of months later he was putting together a charity album featuring various artists singing his songs and he asked me to record the song Johnny Cash made famous, “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” I of course said yes, but it was a very tough song to sing and I wasn’t sure I had done it justice. I don’t think I have ever sung a song that heavy.

I may have been the only woman to try to master a Kris Kristofferson song since Janis Joplin recorded “Me and Bobby McGee,” and I guess I pulled it off, at least according to Kris’s wife. Soon after that session, she called me and said, “I’ve only seen those blue eyes cry a few times and he cried when he heard your recording of this.” That, of course, made me cry.

Someone asked me why I connect so strongly to the older generation of artists like Merle, Loretta, and Kris, and I guess my answer is that, like them, I’m an old soul. I feel like they are an important part of my career and can help me move forward as a singer and songwriter. In turn, I think I may be part of their careers, too, in some way that reconnects them to my audience.

A quick comment about another song, “California Girls,” on that second album. Now I have nothing against Hollywood celebrities, but boy, they seem to be taking over the world these days, and that doesn’t leave much time or space for the rest of us. We’re not all movie stars or even need to be. The song is a response to all of those prefect size-zero female images we’re all assaulted with every time we turn on the TV or pick up People. When John and I were kicking around this idea, he asked what Hollywood celebrity I wouldn’t want Grace to be like when she grows up, and out came Paris Hilton. I don’t even know Paris Hilton, but she seems like one of those people who are just well known because everyone knows her. No offense, Ms. Hilton, and I’m sure you’re not the airhead all those late-night comedians say you are, but most women could never come close to having your life. And that’s a good thing. As I say in the song, “Ain’t you glad we ain’t all California girls?” And California boys, too.

“California Girls” is a great example of how the people who come to my concerts affect my work. Most fans don’t know it, but performers rely on them heavily for honest feedback. It’s part of the back-and-forth relationship that helps people like me grow and change. Fans tell me by their reaction when I’m doing things right and when I’m not. I started playing “California Girls” in concert for a year before we decided to include it on an album. The reason it made it on that CD was because the fans put it there. Their response told me I was on to something.

One especially memorable song on All Jacked Up that I didn’t write is “I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today.” Grace helped me pick that one. We were riding together to the store one day and I popped in the demo to listen to it, and when it was over, Grace said, “Mommy, I really love that song.” Since I loved it, too, it was a no-brainer. It is a timeless, indescribably beautiful song, and I am so fortunate that it came my way.

There’s a “hidden” track on All Jacked Up that I’m especially proud of. It’s not really hidden, it’s just a final track that gets no mention in the album notes. It’s a Billie Holiday song called “Good Morning, Heartache.” What was I doing singing a Billie Holiday song, you might ask? It was something I wanted to do since I was a kid and first heard Billie Holiday sing in an old movie. There was so much passion and sorrow in her voice. Music, I realized very early in life, doesn’t discriminate. We all feel the same.

So we decided to record the song in one take, with no mixing or redubbing afterward, just like Billie Holiday might have recorded it. And we did just like I said when I introduce the song on the album: “Four players, one microphone, one voice, one take.” We all crowded around the one mike, the bow of the fiddle hit the opening note, and off we went. It was exhilarating. In fact, as I later told one reporter, it was one of the coolest experiences of my life.

That first rush of my career lasted a good eighteen months. A lot of the time, frankly, I didn’t know what I was doing. Other people—my managers, PR people, record executives, and the like—were telling me what to do. I just woke up after three hours of sleep and did it. By the time I attended and performed at my second Country Music Awards ceremony and received my second award—the first was the Horizon Award and the second was Female Vocalist of the Year—I felt like I had become a much different person in some ways than the girl who had walked into John Grady’s office with a slight chip on her shoulder. I was a touring pro, a media pro, and more confident than ever about my ability to write songs that were true to me.

I slowly began to see how the game was played and became more and more involved in the decisions that were determining my life. I became a better businesswoman and career strategist than I ever expected. If things go wrong from here on out, I can only blame myself.

That’s the career side. In a lot of other ways, I was unchanged. Despite all the exciting, mind-bending things that had happened in those eighteen whirlwind months, I was still a singer second and a mother and family girl first.

It was time to get back to the farm, or as we soon came to call it, “Camp GW.”