11.10.08 - Word Count 12777

The more I thought of the beginnings of Emmey’s story, the more I felt connected to her. I had grown up in a family that was as different from me as night was to day. My parents were Baptist missionaries in Africa up until the time I was six years old, when we moved back to Alabama for my father to pastor a church in one of the poorest counties in the country. I started singing at the knee of my mother – the great hymns of the Baptist tradition, she called them – as she pounded them out on the old upright piano, one clunky chord after another. She was not a natural pianist – she had learned laboriously, and only in order to serve as my father’s helper.

I still remember when they realized I could sing, and sing well. I was in the kitchen of our little parsonage, making cornbread for our supper. My brother and sister were setting the table and singing some of the songs my mother had taught them to help them memorize the books of The Bible. When they finished the Old Testament, I broke in with The Gospels, in a high, clear soprano and sang clear through to Revelation. I could still feel the silence that followed. I looked up from the oven to see my brother and sister staring at me with their mouths open. My mother walked into the kitchen and asked who that was singing, and I was afraid to answer her. Afraid I had done something wrong.

My sister pointed at me and said, “It was Carrie!”

For the next hour, my mother made me sing everything she could think of, just to test and see if it was real, or some sort of fluke that had caused the melody to flow out of my mouth.

That Sunday, I was standing on the wooden platform in front of the little church, knees knocking, voice quivering, singing, “I Shall Not Be Moved,” while my mother clunked out the chords on the piano behind me. The congregation sat perfectly still during the entire song. I’d never seen anything like it –even when Daddy preached people coughed and sneezed, and fidgeted on the hard wooden pews. When I was done, a chorus of deacons’ voices rang out in “Amens” and “Hallelujahs,” but I was speechless.

Back then, no one applauded in churches. An amen or two was high praise.

Every Sunday after that, I stood on that same wooden stage, behind that same dark walnut stained podium, lined up with the center of the cross in the baptistery, and sang my heart out. I never told Mama and Daddy that I sang to hear the Amens and Hallelujahs, not for the Lord’s approval like they told me I should. I didn’t think they’d understand.

We were raised, my brother and sister and I, to serve the Lord. Every aspect of our lives was supposed to honor God and lift up the name of Jesus. I just wasn’t very good at it. I tried – God knows I tried – at least I hope He does. But it wasn’t in me to serve in the way my family did. I was very young when I realized how very selfish I was, and how little I cared about how selfish I was. It just didn’t bother me. At least not the way it bothered them – my family.

In school, I was an okay student. I excelled in choir and theater, though and found that to be a very powerful tool in the avoidance of the consequences of underachievement. I was always cast in the lead role of every musical production, and so I couldn’t ever be expected to do quite as well on tests and term papers, because I needed to prepare for the big show. My teachers were quite enamored of me and my voice, and I learned how to use it to my advantage. I wasn’t an honor student, but I received grades that far surpassed my effort.

One of my high school boyfriends, Chris Beatty, taught me to play his guitar and how to work through chord progressions. I saved up my babysitting money for months before I had enough to buy the old Yamaha guitar that was in the window of the pawnshop in downtown Eutaw. I had been writing lyrics and melodies since I had learned to write my letters, and soon I was writing songs more often than I was writing term papers. The songs were better than the term papers, anyway. I performed one of them at a school concert my junior year. It was a typical teenage song about unrequited love and unfulfilled dreams. And kissing.

Lots and lots of kissing.

After the concert, my parents locked me in my room and took away my guitar, thinking that I had forsaken my faith by writing this “piece of filth,” as my father called it. I do think they were somewhat relieved that that song had only involved kissing, but it was still too much for them to accept.

Mama and Daddy meant well, of course. I promised to write only songs that uplifted people’s faith in Jesus, and they gave me my guitar back. I was careful to not sing any of my real songs in front of any member of my family. Ever.

My sister and brother both went into full-time ministry when they grew up. Sarah married a preacher from just over the state line in Mississippi and went on to have babies and host women’s luncheons and spearhead food drives and baby showers. David went to seminary in New Orleans and became a youth pastor at a church in Brookwood. After a few years, he married a sweet girl and then was called to a church in Tuscaloosa as pastor. Mama and Daddy couldn’t be prouder.

Of them.

I tried. I really did. I thought maybe I could go into music ministry, so that I could be on the stage every week, but then I found out that most Baptist churches don’t let women be music ministers, so that kind of killed that. My parents suggested that I get a degree in music education so I could work with children and teach them how to sing for the Lord. I applied to a small college near home that had a music education program and was accepted. I wanted so much for them to approve of me, too.

I had worked at the Dairy Queen in town every summer during high school so I could have enough money to go to college, but the day after I turned 18 years old, I wrote my parents a long letter, took my money, my old Yamaha acoustic guitar and the 15 songs I had written that I really liked and went up to Nashville to see if I could get them recorded instead of going to school. I didn’t tell Mama and Daddy about that. None of the songs had anything about Jesus in them. I didn’t think they’d approve.

I called them when I got there and told them I had a job at a diner, waiting tables, which was mostly true. It was a job. And I was waiting tables. But I was serving cocktails instead of coffee, and my skirt was as high and tight as the collars on my daddy’s Sunday shirts. I worked nights at the “diner” and during the day I beat on the doors of studios and agencies and anyone I could get to listen to me. On my off nights at the club, if they didn’t have anyone else booked, they’d let me play and sing for the customers and for tips.

It took two years, and one of those fortunate misunderstandings to finally break into the business. One Monday night at the club, I was scheduled to work until 11 pm, then play until closing at 1 am. When I got to work, the manager pulled me aside and told me he had messed up the schedule and booked five waitresses on a night when he usually booked 3. He couldn’t afford to pay all of us, and since I was the youngest of the bunch, I would have to give up my shift. I told him that would be fine if he’d let me play for tips starting at 9 instead of 11 and he agreed.

That night, Mitch Ryland walked into the club and changed my life.

After my first set, he walked up to the stage and handed me his card. When I looked at it and saw “CFA Records” under his name, I thought it was a pick up and handed it back to him. I may have only been 20, but I had been waiting cocktail hour for 2 years. I wasn’t stupid.

After my second set, he came back up and handed me his card again. He was very insistent that I take it, and said he understood my hesitation, and that he would prove to me that he was who he said he was. I took the card and told him I hoped so – I could use a break – and put it in my front pocket.

He stayed for all four sets – all 15 of those original songs I'd walked out of Greene County, Alabama with, and 5 that I had added since arriving in Nashville. As the bar closed, I packed up my guitar and headed out to my little beaten up Chevy Chevette hatchback, escorted by the club's bouncer, Hector Smith. Hector put my guitar case in the back of the car and told me goodnight.

When I got into the car, I looked out the front windshield and saw something flapping from my windshield wiper. I rolled down the window and reached out to get it, waving goodnight at Hector at the same time. As I rolled up the window, I turned on the dome light to see what it was.

It was a newspaper article from the Nashville paper, The Tennessean, about the impact Mitch Ryland, CEO of CFA Records, had made on the country music scene in Nashville over the past 5 years. The accompanying photograph didn’t do him justice, but certainly did make it clear that he was who he said he was. I reached into the pocket of my blue jeans and pulled out the card.

“Mitch Ryland,
CFA Records,
Country Music’s Rising Stars.”