DAVE'S DIARY - 3 JANUARY 2005 - GRETCHEN WILSON
GRETCHEN
WILSON
WELL READ IN THE SADDLE
"Well I ain't never been the barbie doll type/ no I can't swig that sweet champagne/ I'm a redneck woman/ I'm just a product of my raisin'." - Redneck Woman, Gretchen Wilson-John Rich.
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Chart
topper Gretchen Wilson's bodyguard was already packing in late spring
for her Australian tour with singing Texan actor Shotgun Willie
Nelson. |
Gretchen won't need such protection from bird watchers at the Myer Music Bowl or fans she won on her quickie Australian debut gig at the Sydney Basement last year.
Wilson, Nelson
and ARIA award winning Aussie country folk group The Waifs have been added
to the Melbourne International Music Festival to broaden its appeal.
The festival suffered in its first two years for being top heavy with
faded, jaded blues and rock artists long past their use by date.
Ironically, it was country blues guitarist Bonnie Raitt and veteran rock
group Chicago who broke the mould last year with scintillating performances.
BIG
& RICH
Wilson broke internationally when she burst onto the scene with fellow
roots rebels Big & Rich.
The two huge selling artists - members of the Nashville MusikMafia - stunned
fans and industry by using TV as their launch pad to invade radio and
sales charts. Wilson's debut disc Here for the Party had sold 2,658,000
copies by December 19 and Big & Rich's Horse of a Different Color
sold 1,632,000 copies during the same period.
Big & Rich's Super Galactic Fan Pak, which contains a CD of
five songs and a DVD, sold 80,000 units.
Wilson and Big & Rich enjoyed a huge sales surge over Christmas and
Gretchen is fast reaching the three million sales mark.
The Illinois born single mother won the CMA Horizon award on the strength
of her dynamic debut that blew peers out of the water.
She is also in demand on TV, radio and commercials.
Gretchen performed Hoyt Axton-penned song, Joy to the World, for
the U.S Target commercials in the U.S.
It's a long way down the lost highway from her humble roots in a tiny
town in rural southern Illinois.
POCAHONTAS PROUD
| Wilson
was born on June 26, 1973, in Granite City, Illinois, which had the
closest hospital when her 16-year-old mother Christine went into labour
while driving. Gretchen's father left before she turned two as she grew up in Pocahontas, 36 miles east of St Louis, with a population of 727. She was raised in trailer parks in the tiny town. Her first job at 14 was tending bar alongside her mother at Big O's, a rough-and-tumble establishment five miles outside of Pocahontas. ''It's not the suburbs,'' Wilson says of all the little towns of her childhood. ''I hadn't been anywhere else, so I figured that's what everywhere looked like. There's not much to do, and all of us kids there got into a lot of trouble. |
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You stay out too late, get in fights, play hooky from school. I call that the normal stuff that kids do, but I guess it's not normal.''
She left
home at 15 to sing in taverns and honky-tonks - her first paid gig was
at the Hickory Daiquiri Dock Bar & Grill in Collinsville.
"I went out and bought an amplifier and a cassette player and microphone
and I started booking gigs under the name of 'Country Cutie,' " she
says.
"I was playing to Happy Hour crowds, an older generation of people.
They thought I was adorable and they liked hearing me, a 15-year-old,
sitting there singing, 'You ain't woman enough to take my man.' "
She lived on her own, often working behind the bar with a double-barrel
shotgun for protection. She began playing other nightspots, always conscious
of the fact that she was underage.
"I behaved myself," she says. "I knew my limits and boundaries."
At 16, she joined her first band, and eventually was in two or three,
playing almost every night and earning a good living.
MIDNIGHT FLYER
She soared
with a band that played classic rock as Baywolfe and country as Midnight
Flyer, becoming one of the biggest draws in the St. Louis area.
"We had a great thing going," she says.
"I mean really good money, home every night, never really went too
far away from home. It became almost like a regular job."
Although she was growing musically, she says, "I had kind of topped
out there and I guess I just decided that Nashville was not going to come
to me."
So she moved to Music City in 1996.
Her first break was when former Lonestar singer-bassist John Rich and
Kenny Alphin (aka Big Kenny) heard her sing with the house band at a bar
where she worked.
For weeks, Wilson didn't return calls from Rich.
"I figured he was hitting on me," she recalled.
Eventually, though, she started hanging with the MusikMafia, a weekly
songwriters gathering hosted by Big Kenny and Rich.
This led to a job singing demos, where she tried to make a name for herself.
''I got here and spent a week walking up and down Music Row, trying to
deliver homemade demos, and everybody was like, 'Oh, we can't take that,'
'' Wilson said.
''I thought, 'How does anybody do anything here? How can I get a record
deal if nobody listens to my stuff?' ''
She sang the original demos for Martina McBride's In My Daughter's
Eyes and Reba
McEntire's I'm Gonna Take That Mountain, among others.
THE BED
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Through
Rich she met Vicki McGehee, who co-wrote four songs on Here For
The Party including the wrenching ballad The Bed. Wilson began to look in earnest for a record deal, only to be rejected by every label in town. ''I had so many unsuccessful showcases, and I was never really being given a good reason why they didn't want me,'' she revealed. ''My opinion is that a lot of people were just scared of it. There are guys in very powerful positions in Nashville who know nothing about music. They're looking for age, or beauty, or hair. I know people who, after one song, were told they were 'too country.' "Too country? How could you be 'too country'? It's country music!" I wanted to make a record that sounded like the old stuff. |
I was always so drawn to Loretta and Tanya Tucker and Hank and Merle, because when you listened to their records, you knew that they were real."
THE EMBRYO
''Some people look down on me, but I don't give a rip/ I'll stand barefoot in my own front yard with a baby on my hip'" - Redneck Woman - Wilson-Rich.
Wilson began
writing songs with Rich and other free spirits and defied tastemakers
by penning six songs for her soulful country debut disc.
"She had been turned down eight times for record deals by people
who said that she wasn't pretty enough or that she was a "Harley
chick," Rich added.
"One day," about a year ago some of the glamorous female videos
came on TV.
Gretchen had a dip of Cherry Skoal chewing tobacco in her lip and was
smoking a cigarette.
She said: `John, I'm not the Barbie Doll type. I hope when I get a record
contract someone will make a big deal about the girls I grew up with,
working girls with three jobs who are raising the kids and who leave their
Christmas lights up all year. Let's write an anthem for them.' "
Forty-five minutes later, they had written Redneck Woman, and another
Nashville movement, the MuzikMafia, was about to go national.
Wilson made the video at Fontanel in Whites Creek - Barbara Mandrell's
old home.
"We actually didn't use the house at all in the video. We just used
the property out in front for the four-wheeling and stuff like that,"
says Wilson of the video featuring Kid Rock and Hank Williams Jr.
HERE FOR THE PARTY
"Well, I'm an eight ball shooting double fisted drinking son of a gun/ I wear my jeans a little tight/ just to watch the little boys come undone/ I'm here for the beer and ball busting band/ gonna get a little crazy just because I can." - Here For The Party - Gretchen Wilson-John Rich-Big Kenny
She topped
rock charts with Here For The Party (Sony) and country charts with
debut single Redneck Woman and When I Think About Cheatin'.
At 31 she has writing runs on the board with her songs cut by other artists
and sales approaching three million for here debut album.
Even her hot pants are in big demand - a pair autographed by Hank Jr.,
Kid Rock and herself - sold for $7,700 at an auction to fund Meningitis
research.
She traded her old pick-up for a 2004 black-on-black ¾ ton Chevy
turbo-diesel with four doors and a crew cab.
Her album is filled with biographical reality rooted tales from the title
track entrée to fitting finale Pocahontas Proud.
Wilson doesn't beat around the bush to land punches - her album entrée
is the explicit album track.
It segues into her anthemic Redneck Woman.
"I wrote that song about me, and my mom, and my mom's friends and
people from Pocahontas," Wilson revealed.
"It's amazing to me that people relate to it. It's not about rednecks.
It's about being proud of who you are," says Wilson who lives with
boyfriend Mike Henner and their four year old daughter Grace.
When she moved to Nashville she worked as a bartender and waitress in
a blues club co-owned by Henner.
HOMEWRECKER
"When I think about cheatin'/ I just think about you leavin.'"
- When I Think About Cheatin' - Gretchen Wilson-John Rich- Vicky McGehee.
Redneck
Woman is followed by When I Think About Cheatin' - one of five
co-writes with Rich.
Wilson delivers summary justice to female foes in Homewrecker -
a sequel to Loretta Lynn's Fist City.
And, of course, Wilson wrote the booze escape two stepper When It Rains
- foil to Wade Kirby-Thom McHugh sobriety soliloquy Holdin' You.
"When it rains I pour a couple more rounds/ till the hurting and
the heartaches start to drown/ I turn out the light when I turn up Dwight/
when it rains I pour."
The singer covers all bases from gospel laced Leslie Satcher-John Caldwell
tune Chariot to ruptured romance requiems What Happened
and The Bed featuring Rich as her harmony singer.
Rich, McGehee and Keith Anderson are the co-writers of the latter.
"He wakes up to say I love you but instead/ all he finds are pages
full of words she'd never said/ and that's all she left on her side of
the bed."
GRETCHEN SAVES MOMMA
As a teen
growing up in Pocahontas Gretchen had to get up in the middle of the night
to get her mom Christine out of the bar, she revealed on 60 Minutes.
''I remember having to go get her at the tavern. She wasn't capable of
driving herself home,'' Gretchen told Ed Bradley on the show that topped
ratings in the U.S.
''For a kid who's in school and a little brother at home and trying to
get to bed for school the next morning, that made me mad. I didn't want
to get out of bed at midnight or 1 o'clock in the morning and go up there
and get my mom.''
That was then and this is now.
Gretchen's mom is clean and sober and lives with Gretchen in Nashville.
She is grandmother and nanny for Gretchen's daughter, Grace.
REDNECK WOMEN - THE HISTORY
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In
recent centuries the term redneck has been associated with males and
females who worked collarless in searing sun on rural and urban farms
and building sites - often in the south of the U.S. But the blue-collar redneck terminology, like many recent facets of country music, had its roots in Europe. The term "Redneck" was applied specifically to Presbyterians, according to a U.S. scholar, because in early 1640s some members of that group signed their names in blood to documents declaring their separation from the Church of England. They signified their opposition to the Church by wearing red pieces of cloth around their necks. |
Many of their
descendants later immigrated to America and settled in the South.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known printed reference
to "rednecks" in America occurred in 1830.
It came in a three-volume travel narrative called Mrs. Royal's Southern
Tour.
In it, the author defined the term as "a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians
in Fayetteville" (presumably North Carolina).
The name eventually faded, however. In the 1954 edition of the massive
Webster's New International Dictionary Unabridged, it doesn't even show
up as a noun.
REDNECK TV SHOWS AND MOVIES
The wily
yokel who outwits the city slicker is a staple of Americana - from the
Li'l Abner comic strip to the Lum & Abner radio show to the Ma and
Pa Kettle movies to Beverly Hillbillies TV series.
The "Opry" in Grand Ole Opry was a hillbilly smack at grand
opera formality.
In the 1940s, Irving Berlin and other pop songwriters celebrated the triumph
of rural simplicity in such songs as Doin' What Comes Natur'lly
and Feudin', Fussin' and Fightin'.
Back then, this same virtue was also heralded in country music through
sentimental tunes like Bradley Kincaid's Just Plain Folks and Little
Jimmy Dickens' Country Boy.
It was also a derogatory term used by elitist city slickers in Australia
to denounce bush bred boys and girls.
Those of us, lucky enough to be both Presbyterian and rural reared, cop
the double whammy.
I feel proud to be qualified on both counts, dropping the knees into the
corporate rock radio chains and commercial TV monopolies.
Nashville writer Ed Morris expanded on the redneck culture in a column
on the CMT site.
"The conflict between the working class and the leisure class turned
vicious in the 1960s, when workers clashed - both literally and figuratively
- with college students protesting the Vietnam War, deriding them as "pot-smoking
hippies."
"Symbolising that division was the 1969 movie, Easy Rider, in which
pickup-driving Southerners blow away the drug-dealing, free-spirited "heroes."
REDNECK SONG FLOOD
"It's
interesting to note that Charlie Daniels, who would later become their
patron saint, poked fun at rednecks in his first chart hit, Uneasy
Rider, in 1973."
Daniels, who toured Australia with Little River Band and Australian Crawl
in 1980, later wrote a sequel that he recorded - it was also on a Daniels
album featuring both versions.
"Rednecks blossomed into full bloom in the 1970s," Morris wrote.
"America was still in a cultural war between "hippies"
and "straights," and rednecks were caught somewhere in the middle.
They were more politically conservative than the "longhairs,"
but more impulsive and pleasure-seeking than the "suits."
"Depending on who was doing the singing, rednecks were either a breath
of fresh air or a dark presence. But everyone agreed that they were basically
creatures of action, not contemplation.
"In August 1973, Johnny Russell made his biggest ever assault on
the country charts with Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer.
"The people he toasted didn't "fit in with the white-collar
crowd" because they were "a little too rowdy and a little too
loud."
"Still, they were portrayed as a generally amiable bunch. A month
later, Jackson Browne hit the pop charts with the equally easygoing Redneck
Friend. This was also the year that Ray Wylie Hubbard released his
first recording of the soon-to-be-classic, Up Against the Wall, Redneck
Mother.
"In 1974, Randy Newman unleashed the savagely sarcastic Rednecks
on his Good Old Boys album. David Allan Coe did a bit of cultural
bridging in 1975 via Longhaired Redneck (although his redneck side
wins in the end).
"Then came the deluge: Vernon Oxford's Redneck! (The Redneck National
Anthem)" and Bill Black's Combo's Redneck Rock (1976);
Bobby Bare's Red-Neck Hippie Romance and Jerry Reed's (I'm Just
a) Redneck in a Rock and Roll Bar (1977); Glen Sutton's Red Neck
Disco (1979); the Bellamy Brothers' Redneck Girl and Conway
Twitty's Red Neckin' Love Makin' Night (1982); Alan Jackson's Blue
Blooded Woman (And a Redneck Man) (1989); Charlie Daniels' (What
This World Needs Is) A Few More Rednecks (1990); George Jones' High-Tech
Redneck and Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If (1993);
Joe Diffie's Leroy the Redneck Reindeer (1995); David Lee Murphy's
Genuine Rednecks (1997); Cledus T. Judd's First Redneck on the
Internet (1998); and Alan Jackson's It's Alright to Be a Redneck
(2001)."
Morris reports on more than 200 songs whose titles begin with the word
"redneck," and there are plenty more that have "redneck"
elsewhere in the name.