Swinging doors and cleaning floors is all I’d ever known
and out of nowhere somehow I found my yellow brick road
so when you’re broke and paying dues,
look at me I’m living proof
and if there’s hope for me
I know there’s hope for you
“Not Bad for a Bartender”
It was my ninth showcase, I think, my ninth time to go in front of a Nashville record company executive, sing a few songs, and try to walk away with a record deal. The first eight tryouts had been stone-cold rejections, for a hundred reasons. I didn’t have the right look. My hair was dated. I didn’t have the beauty-queen bone structure of many of the female stars currently topping the charts. I was a little too old, a little too heavy, a little too hard-edged, a little too rock and roll, a little too something. Rumor had it that I occasionally chewed tobacco and enjoyed a shot of Jack Daniel’s. My friend Big Kenny thinks that a lot of those deal-making executives, used to new talent that they could dress, mold, and manipulate, took one look at me and said to themselves, “There’s no way in hell I can control that woman.” Well, at least on one count, they were dead right.
So the night before this particular showcase—scheduled to take place in the office of the then president of Sony Music Nashville, John Grady—I found out that the appointment was for eight the next morning. I started freaking out. I called my new manager, Dale Morris, and said, “Dale, eight o’clock in the morning is way too early to sing. I can’t do that. I’m a bartender. I’m a club singer. I’ve been singing from nine P.M. to two A.M. my whole life!”
Dale said, “Well, then, get up at six.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “Get up at six and it won’t seem so darn early. Eight A.M. will seem like ten A.M. and you can sing your heart out.”
And that’s what I did. That morning, waiting to go into that office and sing to a man behind a desk, I was so scared. Doing an in-office musical showcase is always an unsettling experience. You feel so naked standing there, often staring at a lineup of businessmen, and then having to pick a guitar and sing without a microphone, lights, loud amps, or anything else to boost your performance. It’s so hard for someone who’s creative to stand and let someone who’s not creative judge them and tell them whether or not they are worthy of a commercial career. But, in this business, I’d come to realize, it’s just something you have to do, and I had pretty well made up my mind that I wasn’t going to turn tail and quit until they dragged me out of the last room of the last audition.
There was something about this moment that was oddly reminiscent of the very first time I had ever been paid to sing. I was all of fifteen and equally on edge. The venue, so to speak, was a little place called the Hickory Daiquiri Dock Bar and Grill in Collinsville, Illinois, a shotgun bar in a nondescript strip mall. My “act,” never before tested in public, was to sing some much beloved country standards to the unamplified backup of music-only tapes on a portable tape recorder, kind of a homemade, do-it-yourself karaoke machine. I sat on the top of the bar in a blue evening gown and curled-up hair and sang for the Happy Hour crowd at the Dock. I was so scared that first time that I threw up for an hour before going on “stage,” but I did it anyway. I knew I could sing.
I also knew I could sing when I walked into John Grady’s office at eight that morning twelve years later but that was no guarantee that he would agree with me. I felt a little better this time because I had Dale Morris, one of the most powerful managers in Nashville, at my side. I also had Big Kenny and John Rich, then virtual unknowns, playing backup for me. They were people I loved and trusted, two of the soon-to-be-legendary “Godfathers” of the Muzik Mafia, the loose collection of eccentric Nashville singer-songwriters I had hooked up with. Dale Morris said that my only job that morning was to go in, shake hands, sing like it was eleven o’clock at night, and leave. He would take care of any business afterward, should there be any interest from the star-makers across the room.
So I walked in, smiled, shook a few hands, stood there, and started singing. I sang three songs, none of which I had written myself. I was in the middle of a passionate ballad, “Holdin’ You,” which later appeared on my first record, when I glanced up at the only person I was really singing for, John Grady, sitting behind his big desk. He didn’t appear all that interested in my performance. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me. He seemed to be totally distracted, going through his desk drawers, looking for something to write with, like he needed to jot down a grocery list for the trip home that night. It was all very awkward, even more awkward than most in-office, let’s-see-what-you-can-do-kid type auditions. I was trying to keep my cool and not glare back into his eyes, as if to say, nonverbally, “why, you inconsiderate prick.” At the same time I was trying to sing a tender love song—“. . . I feel like I’m falling apart, holding you holds me together . . .”—with some emotion at eight o’clock in the damn morning.
About halfway through the song, I noticed Mr. Grady start to write something on a piece of paper. From my vantage point, I could clearly see him write the letter “n” followed by the letter “o”. As in . . . “NO.” That was it, I thought. He’s passing on me halfway through my three-song set and it looks like he had to write a note to remind himself. He folded the paper up and left it lying there on his desk while I went on to my third and last song. I couldn’t wait to get out of that room.
As we said our goodbyes and headed out the door, I turned to Big Kenny and John and indicated that I was sure the guy hated me and was passing on me; after all, I had seen him writing “NO” right in front of me. About that time, John Grady tapped me on the shoulder, handed me the folded piece of paper, and said, “Here, I want you to have this.” About halfway down the hall, hands shaking, I finally got up the courage to open that note.
It read, “NOW.”
With that one word, the dream I had had since the age of seven started to come true.
I am a redneck woman, and proud to say so. I grew up in rural Illinois, the first child of a single mom who struggled to keep her life, and my life, on track. I grew up living in rental housing of one sort or another: trailers, apartments, tacky little houses, even a camper or two. I dropped out of school at age fifteen and pretty much supported myself as a waitress, bartender, and club and dive singer until I moved to Nashville at age twenty-three. For my first five years in Nashville, until I finally got the break that changed my life, I continued to tend bar, sing for anyone who would listen, and had a baby out of wedlock along the way.
Except for the fact that I got this extraordinary opportunity to write songs and sing about the people I grew up with and feel a deep love and admiration for, I am no different from them. Like them, I’m “just a product of my raising” and I still say “hey y’all” and “yee-haw.”
In many parts of this country, “redneck” is an acceptable slur, along with equally acceptable put-downs like “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “hillbilly.” Low-income rural whites are about the last people in America who seem to be fair game for blatant stereotyping. Even media personalities who should know better regularly refer to Britney Spears as a white-trash queen or a NASCAR fan as a (dumb) redneck whose idea of entertainment is watching a bunch of stock cars going around in circles for hours. NASCAR, not to mention Britney Spears, are of course enormously popular and profitable, so the slurs are not as loud or frequent as they once were, but the attitude is still there. Say the word “redneck” or “trailer trash” in polite company outside of the South and everyone in the room will understand what you’re getting at.
Like I, or any self-respecting redneck, could give a good rat’s ass. We are way past the day where we automatically feel bad because we happen to live in the country, call a trailer our home, or get our hands dirty when we work a wage job. We have an ever-increasing sense of pride in who we are and where we come from, and some of this pride is starting to get noticed. Since I stopped doing work like waitressing and bartending and became known as a singer-songwriter, I have been asked the same question over and over again, whether I was in Stockholm, Sweden, Sydney, Australia, or Darlington, South Carolina. Everyone wants to know what I think it means, in a positive and truthful way, to be a Redneck Woman. I have always had to try and answer that question with one or two short sound bites and it’s always been frustrating. It’s too big a question to answer in a two-minute radio interview.
Since the redneck stereotype still exists in many places, and carries with it some pretty ugly associations of backwardness and racism, I thought this book might be the perfect opportunity to answer that often asked question—What does it mean to be a Redneck Woman?—and to describe in detail what the life of at least one such woman has been like.
As you will see, many of the most important—and powerful—people in my life are women: my incredible grandmother, my Aunt Vickie, my daughter, Grace, my mother, and the women of country music who inspired me from as far back as I can remember. This includes all the tough, resourceful, hardworking women I grew up around, the women I write about and sing about; none of them are “high-class broads.” In many ways, this book is for women, especially women who find themselves in difficult or unglamorous circumstances. Despite the hardships, many such women love their life, have a great time being who they are, and shouldn’t be told, by Hollywood or anyone else, that they should aspire to be something that they’re not. On the other hand, for those women who feel stuck with the wrong job, the wrong husband, or a life they don’t want, I can only repeat over and over again something I learned from my own life: If there is hope for me, there is hope for you.
Many of you already know what I’m talking about, of course, because you live it every day. To the rest of you, men and women, city or country, I say: Welcome to our world.
Now “let me get a big ‘hell yeah’ from the redneck girls like me . . .”
“Hell yeah!”
Again . . .
“Hell yeah!!!”