Chapter 1 BIG FARMHOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE
Drama has been a part of my life since my birth. I was not just a breech baby, I was trying to come out butt first! I mean, it’s just so typical that I would do that! What an ass!
My mom says that she had to walk the hallways of the hospital for hours to get me to turn the right way so I could enter this world. It’s true, I’ve always wanted to be the center of attention. That is a great picture of how I have been my whole life and still am to this day. I love being the center of attention. It’s how I am wired. But it’s not like I’m a narcissist or anything. I just love to entertain people. I love to tell a good story and make people happy. It makes total sense that my mother put me on stage when I was four years old. I’ve been entertaining people ever since.
I’m a Midwestern girl. I grew up in New Franklin, Missouri—a Middle American town with mostly conservative family values. It’s one of those places where people work hard their entire lives, often with very little to show for it. My hometown sits in the center of the state and is a farming community of about a thousand people. That population has hardly changed in a hundred years, and that’s no exaggeration. The land is rolling countryside and wooded hills covered in oaks, elms, and dogwood trees. Rivers and streams are everywhere, and then, of course, we have the great Missouri, North America’s longest river, making its vast journey along seven states until finding its end at the Mississippi River near St. Louis. Simply put, New Franklin is in a gorgeous part of America.
Even today, it’s a town where everybody knows everybody. There were just thirty-five kids in my graduating class. I would say I was popular in high school for sure, but I was just a simple farm girl and I didn’t come into my own until after high school. I had no style. Everyone was basically the same. No one really had a lot of money, and we all wore boots and Levi’s and t-shirts to school. I did the best I could to be cute, but I didn’t think I was beautiful really until I reached my early twenties. And that meant learning what real beauty was. More on that later…
My childhood was spent riding horses, riding motorcycles, playing pretend, and just being a happy little girl. I loved growing up on a farm. And I always had a strong love of hard physical labor. I’ve never been afraid to work hard. I’m so much like my mom in that way.
When I was four years old, my parents, my two older brothers, and I moved to my mom’s dream home—a huge old yellow house built in the 1800s, on a four-hundred-acre farm. The house had not been lived in for years when we moved in, and it needed a ton of work. My mother works harder than anyone I’ve ever known, and even though she was pregnant with my sister Lesley and already had three young children, she dove into remodeling the place, at the same time trying to get the whole farm in working order and fighting an infestation of black snakes. This is a type of snake that is not poisonous but can grow to be eight to ten feet long. And they WILL BITE YOU!!!!! Every day that first summer, we killed at least five snakes with a garden hoe. We have so many snake stories from that house. First of all, when we moved in and started exploring the huge yards, we noticed that they were literally hanging from the trees! So we started shooting at them with BB guns. I actually got so good that I could shoot a hanging snake from a good ten feet away. One time my mom was sitting on the toilet and she looked up and a black snake was climbing down the wall right in front of her. She just calmly got up and got a broom and swept the snake outside.
Unlike most people, who scream and run when they see a snake, my mother is not afraid of them—or of anything, for that matter! The rest of us were terrified, like normal people, and I still am terrified of snakes today. But mom’s fearlessness, combined with her sense of humor, made life interesting. Mom once killed a black snake, wound it in a circle, wrapped it up, and hid it in the helmet my dad kept on the seat of his beloved motorcycle. So when he lifted the helmet up to put it on, a huge dead snake uncoiled and fell out onto the ground. We were all watching from inside the house through the big window in the front room. It scared the crap out of him and probably infuriated him. It would have made me so mad. But he was a pretty good sport about it. He knew that was just my mom’s sense of humor, and he eventually laughed about it too. Mom would do things like chase us around the living room with a dead spider that she had just killed, laid out on a paper towel. We would be screaming bloody murder and she would be dying laughing. I think it was her way of trying to toughen us up. I know this sounds so mean, but it really wasn’t. My mother is just like that. She is literally the smartest and funniest person I’ve ever known.
I was definitely a daddy’s girl. He and I bonded over a shared love of singing, and until I was four years old, I was the only girl and the youngest child. So naturally I received a lot of attention. And just because I was so stinking adorable! I was also the first granddaughter on my mom’s side, so Granny and Papa (pronounced “Pawpaw”) favored me too. I’m sure of it.
When I’d hear the sound of Dad’s motorcycle coming up the gravel driveway, I’d tear into the living room as the front door swung open. Dad would see me and start singing, “Weeeelllllll, heeeelllllllll-O, Dolly! Well, hello, Dolly, it’s so nice to be back home where I belong.”
He’d pick me up and swing me around as he continued the dramatic theme song to the Broadway show Hello, Dolly! For some reason, “Dolly” was one of my nicknames. And then it turned into Dobbish. We are strange.
Other times when our family was loading up to visit Grandpa and Grandma Evans’s farm down in the Missouri River bottom, Dad would call from across the yard.
“Hey, Sara, wanna ride with me?”
The truth is, I really wanted to ride with him, but I was also a bit terrified of riding with him, because he went really, really fast, and we lived on a winding, dangerous country highway with a lot of sharp turns. He would take those turns like a man on a motorcycle is supposed to—going all the way down to the right knee for a right turn and all the way to the left knee for a left turn. And you know how it is when you are NOT the one in control of the vehicle. It’s terrifying. So my instinct was to lean the opposite way from the way he was leaning. I knew those roads like the back of my hand, so I would prepare myself for the next sharp curve. It made him very angry, and one time he pulled the bike over and said, “What are you doing? Stop doing that! You’re going to cause us to wreck! Just sit still!” I don’t think he meant to be quite that harsh with me, but it hurt my feelings so badly because he’d never been that way with me before. I cried the rest of the way there, with my arms wrapped around his waist and my face cradled into his black leather jacket. But when we got to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, I pretended nothing was wrong.
I have always said that if I could trade places with anyone in the world, I would choose each of my children for a few days so that I could know what they think of me, of their lives, of themselves, and if they are truly happy. There were several things like the motorcycle story that happened when I was little that really hurt my feelings and have sort of stayed with me my whole life. And I had very loving parents. I just think that we need to be so careful that we don’t hurt our children’s feelings, and if we do, we need to apologize to them. Because let’s be honest, we all know when we’ve said or done something to hurt someone’s feelings, and we all can be prideful about it and not want to apologize. But when it’s your own child, you have to say you’re sorry.
One time on a hot and muggy Missouri summer day, I was outside playing in a little plastic pool that we got at Walmart, and I had been making up this song to surprise my mom when she came out. When I saw her and my brother in their rubber boots headed to the hog barn to feed, I said, “Mommy, come here, I want to show you something!” They walked over to me and I sang this little song for them, and at the very end I splashed them with the pool water. My mom got so annoyed that she took it out on me. I’m sure there were probably other things going on that were stressing her out that I didn’t have a clue about. I’m not sure why that has stuck with me all these years. I think it’s because my intention was to make her happy with my little song, and I wasn’t trying to be irritating. So when she walked away, I was left stunned and incredibly hurt. I don’t tell this story to try to make my parents sound mean. They weren’t. They were very loving and fun, and we were happy up until a certain point. No, I tell that story to remind you parents and myself that you have to be so careful with your kids’ hearts. And if you feel you’ve been too harsh, or hurt them because of something else that’s going on, make sure you tell them you’re sorry and that it’s not them, it’s you.
I’ve always been accident-prone. After moving to the farm, right off the bat I disobeyed my parents and did something really, really stupid, which earned me the nickname Crisco (another one of many). A lot of people today won’t understand that joke, but Crisco shortening is the essential ingredient in flaky biscuits and piecrusts. In other words, I was a total flake. I was FLAKY—that’s why they called me Crisco. Get it? Now I know that I was just creative and always daydreaming.
A Missouri farm kid
There was a large open hole in the front yard that needed to be filled and covered. It looked like a deep well, but it was actually a septic tank. I was riding around the yard on my tricycle while my parents were cutting branches down from the trees with a chain saw. Mom told me at least five hundred times to stay far away from that hole. So what did I do? I decided to ride backward on my tricycle around the yard because, well, just because. Why does any four-year-old do anything? And who lets their four-year-old ride a tricycle unattended near a deep and deadly open septic tank while running a chain saw! So of course, I backed right into the hole! I remember going under and trying to pull myself out by grabbing blades of grass while screaming at the top of my lungs for help. My parents couldn’t hear me because, like I said, they were running the chain saw!!!!!!!
Mercifully, they stopped cutting and heard my screams, ran to the hole, and pulled me out. I can only imagine how it must have felt for my mom and dad to race to their only daughter down a hole full of poop. I literally smelled like a Porta Potty for days, even after hours and hours of bathing!
It wasn’t long after we’d moved to the farm that my first sister, Lesley, was born. I was so excited to be a big sister! I loved helping Mom take care of her, spooning in her first bites of food, cheering as she rolled over, and crawling beside her once she could get around the room. Having younger siblings, especially having much younger siblings, no doubt helped me be a better mom once I started my own family. My two half sisters are fourteen and eighteen years younger than I am, so I felt like I had already raised two kids when my first child, Avery, was born. (That didn’t make it any less terrifying when I brought him home from the hospital, though.)
Farming is a family affair. On those four hundred acres, we raised cattle and hogs and grew a variety of crops. Our family grew as well. My younger sisters, Lesley and Ashley, born four and six years after me, made us a family of seven. We all learned to work hard from an early age. We never considered that we had a choice whether to work or not, because we didn’t. The boys were usually working outside with Mom and any hired help we could afford, while my sisters and I did both house and farm work.
Spring was planting time, and summers were spent in the fields tending the crops and caring for the animals. Sometimes the cows would break through a fence or one might wander off and I’d have to saddle my horse and help find it and get it safely back to the barn. Autumn was the harvest, and the boys and I helped as soon as we were home from school.
Even with the entire family participating, farming didn’t bring in enough to pay the bills. My dad started working the late shift at the Columbia Daily Tribune as a pressman in Columbia, Missouri, and Mom drove the school bus mornings and afternoons—a job she held for a little over forty years until retiring just recently.
My mother cared for all the practical details of our lives, making three home-cooked meals a day, taking on side jobs whenever she could, and generally making our home a comfortable haven. Because of my mother, I have strong family values, and I believe in the importance of cooking for your family, not eating out every night. I love to cook for my family, and I repeat many of those recipes passed down from Granny and my mom.
Even if it was brutally exhausting, and overwhelming at times, Mom’s dream came true when we moved to the farm. The earth called to something deep inside of her. It’s something I fully understand. If I hadn’t become a musician, I’d surely be living on and working my own farm today.
As it happens, though, I was born with a God-given gift for music. This became apparent when my two older brothers started taking guitar lessons. As they were learning, I would come in and start singing. And I was good. I was really good. I could literally sing anything, and I was only four years old. Funny that I couldn’t obey a simple order not to ride my tricycle near a dangerous and deadly open septic tank, but I could sing beautifully, and learn lyrics and harmonies, and I could understand music theory on a higher level than a four-year-old should be able to.
My mom’s strong entrepreneurial spirit gave her the idea to put a band together.
We started learning songs by people like Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gayle, Patsy Cline, Reba McEntire, Patty Loveless, the Eagles, Barbara Mandrell, Ronnie Milsap, and many more. I started playing the mandolin as well.
Both of my parents were musical themselves, but performing didn’t appeal to them. They were happy to listen to us perform instead. My mother even turned the formal living room into the “music room.” It was soon filled with guitars, microphones, amps, cords, and stereo equipment. And that’s where we became musicians. We didn’t always love it, because there were many times that we wanted to lie around and watch TV, but my mom would make us practice whenever we had free time on the farm. And thank God she did.
One of my best memories is of singing with my dad. We’d sing together on the faded couch in the living room, songs like “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away” from the Kendalls—a father-and-daughter duo. I would belt out the lead parts and my dad would sing harmony with me. I cry just thinking about those days. Everyone started to believe that I might be a prodigy, and that my brothers might be, too. My sisters would eventually show the same exact talent.
Before long, we were traveling all over Missouri playing at fairs, festivals, rodeos, wedding dances, senior citizen homes, Eagles Lodge dances, and eventually bars and dance halls (pretty much exactly what I do today, but strike senior citizen homes and add casinos and arenas).
I remember loving the reaction on people’s faces when they heard me sing. In the movie Sweet Dreams, Patsy Cline says something like, “When I’m on stage and I look in people’s faces, I can tell that I’ve reached right down into their souls with my voice.” That is exactly how I feel every time I’m on stage. It’s an indescribable feeling, and a high that lasts for hours after every concert.
Before long, my brothers and I were local celebrities. People would say, “Have you heard the Evans kids? They’re really good, and that little Sara can sing anything.” So at the age of five, my professional music career had begun. By age six, I was fronting the Evans Family Band. My brother Jay played guitar, my brother Matt played bass, and I sang lead and played the mandolin. I suppose the acclaim could’ve gone to our heads, but it just didn’t. Being poor and working hard on the farm kept us humble. Our music brought us attention, and that was great, but our band helped support the family as well.
Then when I was eight years old, something happened that would put everything on hold.