Episodes

  • Charles McNair: South Alabama Writer Lives High in the Andes

    Charles McNair: South Alabama Writer Lives High in the Andes
    Jul 25 2024
    Writer Charles McNair Lives High in the Andes, but His Roots are in South AlabamaMy conversation with Charles McNair felt a little like a family reunion as we connected many dots in our common roots. It was fascinating to learn how a boy from South Alabama wrote his way to being a Pulitzer-prize nominee, continues to write, and now resides a bit south of the Wiregrass in Bogota, Colombia.Of course he found a very imaginative way to explain that his home state is always with him. Ask him if he’s from Alabama, and the proof is on his knee.“At this very moment, if I weren’t modest, I’d pull up my left pant leg and show you my knee,” McNair said. “I might be the only person in the world with a banjo on my knee — because I come from Alabama. The day I turned 40, I walked down to the tattoo parlor near my home and got a little banjo tattoo.” We had a great time talking about all the things we have in common, but when you’re interviewing a talented storyteller with an interesting past, it’s best to let them do the talking.“Frasier-Ellis Hospital was a two-story house they called a hospital, and my mama delivered me in a room being observed by a team of medical students,” McNair said. “I’m told that when I was presented to the world, they all stood up and applauded. That may have been the defining moment that shaped my personality, I don’t know.”That was 1954 in Dothan, and McNair would spend the next several years absorbing everything the natural world had to offer in the Wiregrass region of Alabama. “I was a large red woodland animal for my first, I’d say 16, 17 years,” he said. “I lived in those woods. We built forts. We had wars. We waded the creeks and watched out for snakes, ran from yellow jackets, and hid by the railroad track when the hobos came down the line. These were mythically terrifying figures. They were like Stephen King characters to us.“And every night when I went to sleep all those years, I heard a train passing by on those tracks behind the house — that mournful whistle, the midnight train whining low,” he continued. “All that infused me with memories and things to write about. All my novels have been nature focused. The presence of the woods and nature played a tremendous role in all the books I've written.”McNair has published three acclaimed novels: “Land O’ Goshen” (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), “Pickett’s Charge” (Livingston Press, 2013), and “The Epicureans” (Tune & Fairweather, 2024). He is also the author of “Play It Again, Sam: The Notable Life of Sam Massell, Atlanta’s First Minority Mayor” (Mercer University Press, 2017).Growing up during the struggles and tensions of the Civil Rights era left a particular wound that McNair carried until a couple of years ago at a reunion of the Dothan High School class of 1972, the first integrated class at the school to graduate together.“A dear friend, a Black man named Shaq Thompson, and I resolved to solve a problem that had existed since we’d graduated,” McNair explained. “In the 10th grade, they closed Carver, the Black school, and all of those students came over to Dothan. There had been a lingering resentment — the hurt feelings of having your culture and your history sort of ignored. Shaq and I brought back together the Black classmates and the white classmates for a 50th reunion. And I felt a healing.“I also made peace with Dothan,” McNair added. “When I left at age 18, I could not wait to shake the dust off. It was too conservative. It was too constraining. And I went off to college and came back many years later and started to make my peace with Dothan and who I’d been and how it had been. My mother went into a decline around 2016, and I flew from Colombia every six weeks to stay a week with her. During that two-year period, I really started making peace with 50 years of anxiety and of disappointment in Dothan. I now am looking at a piece of property to buy there. I have come back. I’ve made new friends. The city’s different … I’m different.”I’ve heard it said that no matter how far you go, you have to write about where you came from. McNair attests to that. The growing-up years are inescapable.“I couldn’t agree more. It’s always about Alabama and family and those friends and that life for me,” he said. “That’s the core. That’s where everything else comes from.McNair attended the University of Alabama for seven years and “when I left, I was still a sophomore,” he said. “I was in and out because of work and when I was in, I only took writing classes. I didn’t get credit for the writing classes that I repeated, but I still took them because that’s all I wanted to be, ever.”The arc of McNair’s career is rich with experiences. He’s taught English to Saudi Arabian students. He’s worked in the newspaper business. He’s worked in corporate America, writing for BellSouth Corp. But he continued his personal ...
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    35 mins
  • Grace Pettis: Living Her Life Down To The Letter

    Grace Pettis: Living Her Life Down To The Letter
    Jul 17 2024

    Singer/songwriter Grace Pettis talks about her new album "Down To The Letter" with Fred Hunter.
    ---
    Grace's music is described as a little bit of folk, a little bit of country/Americana, and a whole lot of soul.

    Grace is the winner of many of the nation’s most prestigious songwriting contests, grants, and residencies, including NPR’s Mountain Stage NewSong Contest, the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Grace’s songs have been recorded by other esteemed artists, including Sara Hickman and Ruthie Foster, with 3 co-writes on Foster's latest, Grammy-nominated album, Healing Time (2024).

    Grace was an official showcasing artist at SXSW and Folk Alliance International this year (2024). She has independently released three acclaimed records and signed with MPress Records in 2020. Her debut album on MPress, Working Woman (2021), was produced by lauded singer-songwriter Mary Bragg, mixed by 2x Grammy® award winner Shani Gandhi (Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical), and featured an all-female/non-binary band and creative credits. Guest contributions came from Indigo Girls, Ruthie Foster, Dar Williams, and other luminaries.

    Grace Pettis' much-anticipated sophomore MPress Records release, Down To The Letter, captures the Nashville-based (formerly Austin-based) singer-songwriter at the peak of her songwriting powers. Chronicling the end of a marriage and the reclamation of self after betrayal, codependency, and loss with heartbreaking detail, the lyrics deftly toe the line between personal pain and universal catharsis.

    ​

    Produced by Mary Bragg (Natalie Price), mixed by Jon Estes (Robyn Hitchcock, Dolly Parton), and mastered by John McLaggan (Parachute Mastering), the album showcases Pettis' rich voice, perhaps one of the most dynamic and agile of her generation.

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    34 mins
  • Pierce Pettis: This Traveling Troubadour Is Right Where He Wants to Be

    Pierce Pettis: This Traveling Troubadour Is Right Where He Wants to Be
    Jul 2 2024
    Throughout his career as a performer, songwriter, and recording artist, Fort Payne native Pierce Pettis has been inside the hurricane they call the music business. But he is also an outsider, never achieving the often sought-after goal of world fame — and for that, he is grateful.Through his work with Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, PolyGram Publishing, High Street Records, and Compass Records, his songs have been recorded by music legends such as Garth Brooks, Joan Baez, and Art Garfunkel. Pierce has also released numerous albums, both as a solo artist and as part of groups. His work can’t be pigeonholed in one genre. He dreamed of making it big as a young musician, but after working in the industry and seeing firsthand the tribulations stars can face, he feels blessed to have worked as a craftsman behind the curtain, doing what he loves.“This is going to sound crazy,” Pierce says. “I count my blessings that I didn’t reach what I thought were my dreams when I was young: fame and fortune. Well, I wouldn’t mind fortune. But I have friends who are very famous, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It takes a toll on you. And so I’ve had the great privilege of seeing it through friends’ eyes without having to go through what they went through.”Before Pierce was born, his father moved from Evergreen, Alabama, to Guntersville, where he finished high school. Eventually, the elder Pettis opened a store in Fort Payne, but as Pierce tells it, the family didn’t know anyone in town and, unfortunately, his father’s business didn’t thrive. But they liked the town and, even though they were “outsiders,” everyone was welcoming and kind. There is that “insider-outsider” theme that would echo throughout the songwriter’s professional life.Pierce comes from a musical family, and he was in childhood bands from an early age. He left the Fort Payne area, attending school in Florida and later traveling to and living in a multitude of places, including London and Paris, North Carolina, Ohio and New York, and Nashville. After his first marriage ended in divorce and his children were living with his ex-wife in Atlanta, he came home to Fort Payne and has been there ever since. No matter where he traveled, the songs that emanated from his soul tended to touch on his home and were rooted in small-town Southern culture.“I realized looking back at all the songs I wrote during all that time, there were so many songs about where I grew up,” Pierce says. “I have a theory that one of the reasons is the South in particular has a very powerful oral tradition. And we’re agrarian. When you live in the country, you tell stories. We’re like the Irish. Most of Ireland is still very rural. That creates a nation of storytellers, and we’ve created a lot of writers and a lot of singers and songwriters. It’s just in the air.”So how did Pierce get from his early days of college in Florida to a career in music? That path, too, winds through Fort Payne. “I was down at Florida State, about to be kicked out of music school, because I was an idiot,” Pierce laughs. “I was forging my advisor’s signature to get into classes I wasn’t supposed to be in. And I didn’t bother to pick up a principal instrument, which you’re really supposed to do. I could have been a voice major. I didn’t have the sense to think that through. Meanwhile, my friends from Fort Payne, Dennis and Russell Gulley, called me up one day and said, ‘Man, you need to come over to Muscle Shoals.’ So I dropped out of college and headed to the Shoals. I met [producer] Jimmy Johnson and I had reels of all these songs I’d written. Jimmy was kind enough to sit and listen and he saw some potential.” While he was working in Muscle Shoals, a big break came Pierce’s way when Joan Baez covered his song “Song at the End of the Movie” for her 1979 album “Honest Lullaby.” “Joan Baez’s album, before the one I was on, was called ‘Diamonds and Rust,’ and it was a huge album,” he recalls. “So everybody wanted to be on the next album. I got to be on this album, and that was really something because of the other writers — like Jackson Browne and Randy Newman. Everybody thought this album was going to be gigantic. And it wasn’t.”Meanwhile, Pierce signed with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in Nashville, partly because they believed the upcoming Baez album with his song was going to be a huge hit. “But signing wasn’t the greatest thing that ever could have happened to me,” he says, “because it forced me to go back into the trenches. My deal ran out in Muscle Shoals in 1980 and I ended up going back and finishing school at Florida State in mass communications and psychology. Pretty good background for a writer, right?”As a singer/songwriter, he played the college circuit, along with basically anywhere else he could take the stage. This included rough and rowdy ...
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Damon Johnson is Grateful for his Rock and Roll Life

    Damon Johnson is Grateful for his Rock and Roll Life
    Jun 20 2024
    Let me tell you, I would not have imagined when I left Fyffe High School in 1971 that five decades later I’d be sitting on my sofa watching a guy from Geraldine playing guitar with Lynyrd Skynyrd on the network’s New Year’s Eve special. Damon Johnson finds it equally unbelievable that he is THAT guy. “I’ve had a lot of memorable gigs in my life, Damons says. “I’ve played giant festivals around the world — Europe, South America, Japan. I’ve played Red Rocks, Madison Square Garden. But let me tell you something: Ringing in the New Year on CBS at the stroke of midnight, playing ‘Free Bird’ live on television… that was not in the playbook ever, you know? What a thrill.”Damon’s down-to-earth gratitude for all his incredible experiences shines like a spotlight when you speak with him. Born in Macon and having grown up in Monroeville, Alabama, he moved to Geraldine in the 10th grade in 1979. Coming from a musical family, he gravitated toward the guitar as a teen, though he’d taken piano lessons and played trombone in the marching band. “About the time my high school friends and I all started discovering Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, all that stuff, I got pretty serious about it. I fell in love with it.”He and his friends started a garage band, and his social life revolved around music. “Once people heard me play the electric guitar, you would have thought Eric Clapton had landed in DeKalb County,” he laughs. “And I can’t overstate what that did for my confidence. So many nice people saying nice things, encouraging things. I quickly put a band together. So that was kind of how things got started for me in Geraldine.” At the local convenience store, Damon read music magazines and was consumed with everything about the bands of the time, never dreaming he would make a living the same way. Today Damon lives in Nashville — a long, rich journey between now and his Geraldine days. He not only plays with the legendary Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, but he also has resurrected a band he started in the early 90s called Brother Cane, whose albums led to three Number 1 singles, and who toured with names such as Aerosmith, Van Halen and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And he is a solo artist who writes, records and performs his original work.“Lynyrd Skynyrd tours about 50 or 60 shows a year, and that gives me plenty of time to scratch my artistic itch and write new songs,” Damon says. ‘I love writing, I love making recordings. I’ve made a lot of records over the past 30 years and been in a few other projects I could have never, ever imagined. I’m really grateful.”The impressive acts Damon has written for, recorded with, or performed with include Ted Nugent, Sammy Hagar, Stevie Nicks, Faith Hill and…Alice Cooper? “It makes me smile when you even mention Alice Cooper,” says Damon. “It was 2004 when I started playing with Alice. And that next year, both my parents had a chance to come and see me play and meet Alice. They couldn’t have been more thrilled to meet him and talk about those early days when they were alarmed to see his album covers in my room. Alice loves it when anybody comes up and says, ‘We thought you were crazy.’ But Alice is a role model in terms of the footprint he is leaving as a true artist, committed to writing and recording and making records. That guy’s never put on a bad show. And he’s a great husband, great father. It’s family first.”Most folks don’t know that Alice Cooper is an extremely good golfer. In fact, Damon took his clubs on tour with Cooper’s band because the group hit the links most days when on the road.Though known as a rock artist, Damon made a foray into the world of country music as well. After all, living in Nashville and not dipping his toe into country music would be like living in The Bronx and not going to a Yankees game.“Country music was always a part of my listening experience as a kid,” Damon says. “Every bit as much as rock music was, because my parents were very much steeped in country. I’m so grateful that my dad always played records by the all-time greats. You know, the Mount Rushmore of great male country artists: Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. So that was always kind of bubbling beneath my burgeoning love of rock and hard rock. I’ve always been able to add a little of that to whatever band I’m playing in. I’m not a great country player, because I have a different measuring stick of what that means. A lot of that has to do with the equipment you have, the amplifiers you use, the guitars you have. But I’m never afraid to grab a guitar and get in there and see what I can come up with.”That musical heritage was on full display in 2007 when Damon helped form the country music band Whiskey Falls. “We played a good bit around Alabama and the Southeast,” he says. “We gave it a fully ...
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Jerry Ellis is a Writer and Spiritual Traveler

    Jerry Ellis is a Writer and Spiritual Traveler
    Jun 12 2024
    When I called Jerry Ellis a man of letters, he liked that so much he asked me to repeat it. But I really wasn’t kidding. The Fort Payne native and graduate of The University of Alabama has written nine books. His inaugural book, about walking the Trail of Tears, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. I will call this interview the tip of the iceberg because Jerry’s story is so rich that we couldn’t cover it all here. So, I asked for the “Reader’s Digest” version.“I was born in 1947 in Fort Payne,” he says. “My ancestors, who were mixed-blood Indians, settled in Sulphur Springs in 1837. I had a great childhood, but by age 17, wanderlust kicked in and I started feeling strangled by a small town.”Needing to stretch his wings, Jerry took off to New York to stay with his sister, actress Sandra Ellis Lafferty (you may know her from “Walk the Line,” “Hunger Games,” “A Walk in the Woods,” and other films). During the trip, he realized he loved everything about hitchhiking. “I had hitchhiking fever,” Ellis says. “By the age of 26, even going to The University of Alabama and later a year of graduate school in Oklahoma, I’d hitchhiked enough miles to circle the planet Earth five times.” You can imagine the tales that result from miles and miles of hitchhiking and how that fuels the mind of a writer. Ellis was picked up by a wide range of individuals and families, including the Hells Angels, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Teenage America. Fitting, as he’d been a weightlifter who’d set a regional bench press record. Weightlifting and travel had become his fire, as he put it.Over the course of his life, Ellis has traveled to six continents. He lives part-time in Rome. The road called him, steered his life in new directions, and taught him about humankind.“Listening to all the stories … people began to open up to me a lot, and I realized, circumstantially, I was a kind of confessor,” Ellis says. “In a way, I was a very secular priest in the sense of people telling me their deepest, darkest secrets. I’m cheap therapy. They can talk to me. I’m polite, I’m kind, I’m compassionate. I ask the right questions sometimes, and all these stories began to accumulate in me. I realized I was being introduced to the human condition. And I wanted to try and make sense of it.“I realized I had a talent for writing,” he adds. “I had not known that. I knew I had a great imagination; I knew I was very sensitive and all that good stuff that artists have.”His talent was quickly discovered, as he sold short stories in New York, and the first play he wrote was produced in an Oklahoma City theater. Lots of creative folks would have stopped there. But Ellis hadn’t yet found his destiny.“I ultimately wanted to do something more daring, more meaningful, with more substance than just writing short stories,” he says. “In the 80s, the idea of walking the Trail of Tears to honor the Cherokee came to me. It took some failures and confrontations with myself and the world to take the leap of faith and actually walk it, which was my breakthrough spiritually and personally and commercially into New York publishing. I did not walk the Trail of Tears for recognition; I did it to honor the Cherokee and to up awareness about what had happened. You know, Fort Payne was one of the forts or stockades or roundup areas for most of the Cherokee of this area. It always had a strong influence on me.” Ellis actually wrote a fictionalized story about a modern-day walk, only to discover the story was really about him.He gave me a little backstory that led to that linchpin moment in his life. He was waiting tables in New Orleans back in his 30s when he met a director/producer from New York. They made a connection, and the director agreed to option a screenplay Ellis had written.“So, I decided to go for broke and go out to L.A. to sell that screenplay,” Ellis says. “As soon as I got there, I called him because my option money was due. He said, ‘Jerry, I’m going to have to drop the option. I just discovered I have cancer and I’m not going to live much longer.’ I had another script about a man who walked the Trail of Tears in reverse after his Indian grandfather appeared to him at the foot of his bed one night and said, ‘To redeem your soul, you’ve got to go walk the Trail of Tears and offer the spirits of those who died on the trail, the 4,000, to come back home with you.’”Those in the publishing business told Ellis the writing wasn’t bad, and was, in fact, interesting history, “but people aren’t going to buy tickets to anything about Native Americans,” Ellis recalls. “I don’t usually get depressed, but I got very depressed.”Ellis was so broke that at one point he scoured the sidewalks for coins. Ironically, his apartment building overlooked Paramount Pictures, to which he could not gain access. One night, while on the roof of his building ...
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • Cynthia Stinson: The Innkeeper Found Unexpected Roots in Mentone

    Cynthia Stinson: The Innkeeper Found Unexpected Roots in Mentone
    Jun 3 2024
    After winding up Alabama 117 from Valley Head in DeKalb County, you arrive at a four-way intersection in the town of Mentone. On your right is the most charming calling card you can imagine: the Mentone Inn, nestled against a backdrop of trees and lush landscaping, with an almost irresistible wrap-around porch. Stepping inside is like getting a big hug: the warmth, the relaxed atmosphere, and a host whose mission is your comfort. Few people are more qualified to share with visitors what makes this part of Northeast Alabama, and the inn, so special than innkeeper Cynthia Stinson. “The inn was built in 1927, by Hal Howe and his wife, Nelda,” Cynthia says. “They opened for business in 1928 and ran it until 1954, but they were only open May through September, so basically Memorial Day to Labor Day, as there was no insulation and no heating in the building. It’s always been an inn, built with 12 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms to begin with. Now all the rooms have private ensuite bathrooms.” Over the years, the inn has continued to be a cornerstone of the community high atop Lookout Mountain. “The inn has been the place for people to come and join together,” Cynthia says. “Families, weddings, church retreats. I say it’s a place for strangers to become friends. And that happens quite often.” Cynthia’s life intersected with the Mentone Inn quite by serendipity. “Well, I call it a God wink,” says Cynthia. “I’m from Greenville, Alabama, originally. I had an antique store there and a lot of inventory I wanted to get rid of. So I did the research for the World's Longest Yard Sale. I already knew about Mentone, because my mom’s family is from Pigeon Mountain. I called the lady at the inn, and she said I could have the entire square to set up my goods. I showed up on a hot August Tuesday and put a tent in the backyard, because at the time I couldn’t afford to stay there. I helped her with breakfast at the inn. Gloria was her name.” Gloria offered Cynthia a job at the inn, an act that would change the trajectory of Cynthia’s life. “I knew I needed a change, because a lot of tragic things had happened in my life that I was trying to overcome, she says. “And I was trying to overcome myself, because I was in a bad place. I went home and prayed about it. Two weeks later, I rented a U-Haul, and with my little dog, Bear Bryant, and $2,000, I struck out for Mentone.” In 2007, Cynthia joined the inn as a housekeeper, though she continued to live in her tent in the backyard until winter weather became untenable and she moved inside the inn. During that time, she also worked as the Sunday chef at the Wildflower Café.Mentone had become home.Then one day, after she’d been in Mentone almost three years, the inn’s owner, Mike Campbell from Birmingham, asked if she would like to take over operations. She did just that in 2009. “I basically put my head down and just started from scratch to build up some repeat business and get a good reputation and good reviews going,” Cynthia says. “And now we are a lodging destination and a hub for people to come and meet.” When guests walk in, ‘cozy’ and ‘homey’ are two of the most common words Cynthia hears. “People hang out and talk,” she says. “I have a little box on the table called a conversation starter. I pick a card out of that box and ask them a question, then walk away. Next thing you know, they’re laughing and talking and having a good time. And I have people who actually met here and plan to come back just to see each other. Sometimes two to three times a year, and a few of them four times a year.” The inn is a center of activity for tourists, but as Cynthia can attest, there’s a real sense of community in and around Mentone that is plain to see if you spend any time here at all. “We have a wonderful community that’s based on people who live there, and new folks are coming in and want to get involved,” she says. “That’s what it takes to have a good community — involvement. Our library [Moon Lake Library] is top-notch; we have a program that serves the elderly and school children, called the Mentone Educational Resource Foundation; we have the Rhododendron Garden Club; and other organizations. Behind the inn is a large pavilion, named the Linger Longer Pavilion, that serves the town in a variety of ways, and that service is important to Cynthia. “I knew I wanted to give back, because I felt like Mentone had given me so much” she says. “I allow nonprofits to use my pavilion for musical events. Little River Arts Council has a monthly series out there during the summer. St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church next door uses it for their outdoor activities. Scouts gather there. And I host a farmer’s market on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the property. It’s a pretty busy little corner.” Cynthia is in the process of getting the inn on the National Historical Register. “Aesthetically...
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    31 mins
  • Russell Gulley: Giving the Gift of Art in Many Forms

    Russell Gulley: Giving the Gift of Art in Many Forms
    May 27 2024
    Sometimes you don’t realize how much your senses absorb when you’re growing up, but you find out later how those experiences shaped you.Russell Gulley grew up on Southern gospel and shape note music. His mother was very conscious of how much music and art can enrich lives. Russell sought a career in rock and roll, but later paid his mother’s gift forward by bringing the arts to communities and schools.Russell is the 2024 recipient of the Alabama Arts Impact Award, given at the Celebration of Alabama Arts, May 16 at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery.He spoke with me recently about the unlikely arc of his career, starting with his time growing up in Fort Payne.“Back when I was growing up,” Russell says, “musicians were kind of looked down on as being not very responsible people with bad habits. So that was the last thing that my mother wanted for me, to become a musician. “The only way I was able to get a guitar was if my brother and I promised to play in church,” Russell continues. “Ironically, the pastor banned me from playing, because he said I wasn’t playing to worship God. I was playing to have a good time, which is probably true. But right after that, I was hired by a gospel group and I worked with them for several years, recording two albums. That was my introduction to the recording business.”It was the opinion of Leon Rhodes, music producer and guitar player for Ernest Tubb, that motivated Russell further. “He told my boss and me that he thought I was a pretty good bass player, that I could make it in Nashville if I wanted to move up there,” Russell recalls. “That was the inspiration I needed. If Leon Rhodes says I’m good enough, I must be good enough.”Then, like many other young men of the time, Russell was drafted to fight in Vietnam. When he returned, he’d been divorced from his first wife. With nothing tying him to any certain place, he moved to Nashville and signed with an agent. There, he played bass for various artists of the era, such as Ronnie Dove and Ray Peterson (“Tell Laura I Love Her”).Meanwhile, his brother Dennis’ band, Cross, was playing and making demos in Muscle Shoals. Producer Jimmy Johnson asked the band, ‘Which one of you guys wrote these songs?’ They told him, “We didn’t. Russell Gulley wrote them.”“So the next thing I knew, I got a phone call and was invited to Muscle Shoals,” says Russell. “Apparently, I passed the audition and they signed me to the publishing company as a writer. “The kind of music that I was writing was not soul music,” he continues. “I didn’t write stuff like ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ I was writing stuff more like Frank Zappa and maybe some of the British acts. Lynyrd Skynyrd was just taking off, and Jimmy had worked with Skynyrd just before they changed companies. I think he was looking for another band to kind of follow in Skynyrd’s footsteps. In fact, during my interview, he played some of the original demos by Skynyrd. I’d never heard playback that loud. Jimmy looked at me and asked, ‘You think you’re as good as they are?’ Well, how could I say no if I wanted to pass the audition? So I looked at him and said, ‘You damn right I’m that good.’ Anyway, we got signed.”Russell, his brother Dennis, drummer Ronnie Vance, guitarist Britt Meacham, and keyboardist Tommy Patterson were dubbed Jackson Highway after the street address of the studio. In the mid to late 70s, Jackson Highway decided to market itself heavily in Chattanooga. Radio play was picking up, and listeners started to request their single. Muscle Shoals Studios called and said they had landed Jackson Highway a deal with Capitol Records. Capitol and Muscle Shoals Studios formed a joint venture to sign the band. Jackson Highway was building a fan base and touring with rockers such as Ted Nugent, UFO, and Triumph. They were set to play the Omni in Atlanta, what might have been “the big gig” to take them to the next level. But arrangements changed and they ended up playing a smaller venue.Jackson Highway returned to Muscle Shoals, and the day they were to perform a showcase for Capitol to renew their contract, Russell’s father passed away. “If there was anybody in this world that ever stood by me from the time I played gospel music to the time I went to Muscle Shoals and all of it, that was my dad. I could not stay in Muscle Shoals,” Russell says. He and Dennis went home to help with the funeral arrangements and be with family.Without an appearance at the showcase, Jackson Highway’s contract was discontinued. He apologized to his bandmates because he felt he caused the Capitol contract to lapse, but he did what he had to do.After losing his record deal, he returned to Nashville and began doing sideman gigs, playing with artists such as Gary Buck, who’d played on the Grand Ole Opry. The touring schedule left him with six months of the year where he didn’t play anywhere.In ...
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    1 hr and 33 mins
  • Greg Fowler: A Musical Meteor Brought Him to Alabama

    Greg Fowler: A Musical Meteor Brought Him to Alabama
    Apr 26 2024

    As a young DJ at his dream job in Myrtle Beach, Greg Fowler repeatedly read an ad encouraging people to visit The Bowery to hear a group who, at that time, was known as Wild Country. Little did he know that spark would change his life, eventually intertwining his path with that of the most successful band in country music history — ALABAMA.

    Read the accompanying story here, and watch the interview on YouTube!
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    1 hr and 1 min