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  There was a little Holiness Church not far from where we lived, just a few miles down an old back road, and they had electric guitars in their services. They got down with it. It was real foot-stomping, wall-shaking music, and I think God loves that as much as any other gospel music. When I was a little older, I’d go by there and hear the worship music coming from inside, and I’d be thinking, “Oh, man, playing electric guitar in church! That must be somethin’!”

  Our church wasn’t quite as raucous, but it was a sweet, holy place. Some hymns were mournful, but most were joyous. There were a lot of songs about the wonder of God and the gloriousness of God and the love of Jesus. And we sang hymns about the price He paid on the Cross for the forgiveness of sin.

  After the congregation sang a few hymns and got things warmed up, the preacher would usually call me and Mom and Dad out of the pews up by the altar to sing a few songs. One of my earliest memories is my mom holding me up in her arms in front of the congregation. I wasn’t more than three years old. She’d carry me down the aisle and set me on the pulpit with my little ol’ legs dangling down, and I’d sing harmony with her and my dad, who’d play guitar. We’d do our gospel numbers and lead the service for a while, just the three of us.

  I remember a hymn we loved to sing called “Prince of Peace.” It dated back to the 1870s, and the words were printed in one of the old Baptist hymnbooks they had at our church. It was a favorite of Mom and Dad. Some of the verses were so pretty, and they stay with me even after all these years: “I stand all bewildered in wonder and gazed on God’s ocean of love, and over its waves to my spirit came peace like a heavenly dove.” These were what they called praise hymns, and there was an awe-struck quality in the music and it really touched my heart.

  Singing with my parents in church was great. But there were some things I didn’t much like. I was sort of shy at that age, and I didn’t want to be the center of attention. That was one thing. Another was that I didn’t like having to give up my chewing gum. Just before we’d go up to sing at the pulpit, my mom would make me spit out my gum, and I hated that. It was always right about the time the flavor got real good and tasted the best. My brother and sister, they got to keep theirs. I had to go up front and sing, while they got to sit back in the pews enjoying their bubble gum.

  We were Free Will Baptist, also known as foot-washing Baptists, named after the foot washing Jesus and his disciples did at the Last Supper. Certain Baptist denominations follow that very ritual at Easter time, usually after the service. The men wash the men’s feet and the women wash the women’s feet. If you’ve never had an eighty-year-old man kneel down and wash your feet, well, I can tell you, it’s a very humbling experience. Especially when you’re much younger. Foot washing is a church tradition going back generations, but now it’s mostly a thing of the past. You hardly ever hear about it anymore. It’s a shame, because it’s something very precious that binds the old and the young. It’s humbling for the washer and for the washed; it’s a breaking of the hardened heart. Like the verse in Malachi 4:6 says, “He shall turn the hearts of the Fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their Fathers.”

  After the services, these old preachers—the same ones preaching with fire all morning long—would come up to me outside the church house and they’d prophesy and speak the word of God over me. They’d lay hands on me and pray: “God’s going to use you someday, young man. He’s going to use your gift and your talent to bring people to the Kingdom. Always give the glory to the Lord!” Being just a little kid, my mind couldn’t comprehend what it all meant. It kind of rattled me to hear how serious they were. Deep down inside, though, my spirit was saying “yeah and amen” to every one of those preachers’ words. It took years for the seeds to bear fruit, but it’s amazing to see how the prophecies came true.

  Church was where I got my first taste of the old-time hymns, and where I heard about heaven and hell. But the place I learned the most about living the Christian faith was at home. That was on account of my parents, but especially my mother. We went to church on Sundays, but that was only part of our life. It was how my parents lived the rest of the week that taught me most.

  My mom prayed a lot. She wasn’t a very educated person. About all the education she had in the way of formal schooling was through the fourth grade, while Dad went through the eighth grade. But they both had so much know-how, common sense, and faith. Mom knew the Scriptures. The word of God was so important to her, and she used it in prayer.

  Prayer is such a powerful thing. I saw my folks and other neighbors praying for a man who lived on our creek. He was an alcoholic and he beat his wife and he was just full of meanness. But his friends and neighbors didn’t give up on him. They kept on earnestly and prayed for him. Then one day the man walked down the aisle of our church and gave his heart to Jesus. I knew God was real when I saw how his life changed.

  Mom was a real prayer warrior, and she was always doing battle for us. I’ll never forget one day when I came inside the house after playing, went looking for my mom, and couldn’t find her. I was calling her name and there was no answer. I finally walked down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom. The door was cracked open and I peeked in and I saw my mom down on her knees, praying.

  She was praying for my dad and my brother and my sister. And then I heard her call out my name, too. She was asking the Lord to watch out for me and to keep His hand on me. And she was praying that someday I would accept the Lord Jesus for myself.

  Her face had a beautiful, radiant glory. It was lit up with the prettiest light, like sunshine on her cheeks, only it was shining from the inside. And she had tears running down her sweet face. The sight of her stunned me. It was powerful to see my mother doing business with God for her family. She was our intercessor before the Lord. That moment stayed with me and is forever etched in my memory. It’s like a precious leaf frozen in the ice, always there to draw on for strength when I need to.

  Of course, Mama showed her faith in other ways, too. She was kind and gentle, and she had a warm heart. But she was firm and unbending in her discipline. She was a strong mountain woman to the core. She had to be strong to raise us kids and do all the cooking, washing, and cleaning, as well as farm work. In those early years, Dad was away from home on welding jobs most of the time. It was usually my mom who had to lay down the law, and I’ll tell you what, my mom meant business. If you done wrong, she made sure you knew it. She’d knock you through a door and make you fix it!

  There was one time I got in big trouble and ended up getting my hide tanned. I was about five years old, way too young to shoot a real gun like the rifles and shotguns my dad had for hunting and target practice. I had gotten a toy squirt gun and was just realizing how I could hit things from a pretty fair distance. So I was always on the lookout for fresh targets. It was just a piddly lil’ ol’ plastic water pistol, but it sure made me feel like a hotshot.

  One morning I slipped down to the barn around milking time. I wasn’t looking for trouble. I just wanted to have some fun with my new squirt gun. My mom was in the stall sitting on a stool milking the cow. She’d put some corn in the feed trough for the cow to munch on. I snuck down on the side of the barn where the stall was, and it so happened that there were cracks, little spaces between the sideboards, to let some fresh air inside the barn.

  I was outside the stall and looked through a crack at where the cow was feeding. Mom didn’t know I was there, and I didn’t want her knowing. But the cow heard me and was curious to see what was out there. So now here was this great big ol’ eyeball staring from that crack in the wall, and I thought, Man, what a good target! I got up close and personal with my squirt gun and shot that cow right smack in the eye. Well, the cow went ballistic. She wheeled around and kicked over the milk bucket and my mother, too. It was chaos, with my mom’s foot hung up in the bucket. Then the cow stepped on my mom’s leg. I heard my mother groan and the cow having a fit trying to get out of that stall.

  I took off
running as hard as I could, scared to death and knowing I had really messed up bad.

  Well, Mom came stomping back up to the house, and she was drenched—not just in cow’s milk, either. She had mud and everything that a cow excretes splattered all over her. She wasn’t a bit happy about it, and she wore my butt out over what I’d done. I’m telling you what, she really spanked me good, and I deserved it, too. It wasn’t just that she was mad; she had to teach me a lesson about consequences. As much as she prayed for me and as much as she loved me, she was never easy on me. She always taught me right from wrong, good from bad. She’d make sure to correct me whenever I strayed from the path, even when I got older and was a husband and a father with kids of my own.

  One time in the 1980s, when I was past thirty years old and had made my name in Nashville, I was visiting at her house near Brushy Creek, and I had my little kids with me, Andrew and Mandy. Mom and I were alone in the kitchen just like old times, fixing up something good to eat, when I said a word I shouldn’t have said. I wasn’t saying it to her, and the kids weren’t even around to hear it. I just blurted it out without thinking. I’ll tell you this much: It starts with an s and ends with a t! Not too strong for some people, but for Mama it was a bad word.

  As soon as the t came off my tongue, her hand came at me, quick as a cat. She popped me good, and my lip swelled out. Boy, did I feel small. I said, “Mom!” I was more surprised than I was hurt. I thought maybe she’d realized she’d overreacted. But she wasn’t sorry one bit for what she’d done. “Don’t you talk like that in my kitchen!” she said. “You know better than to say that!” She scolded me something fierce. My ears were burning. Here I was a grown man with kids, and I felt like I was four years old again.

  I thank God for the consistency of her love and her firm hands that brought correction. (Those same firm hands could wring the necks of two chickens at once, too. I saw her do it out in the yard early one morning from my bedroom window!)

  We’re always our parent’s children, don’t matter how old we get. I was lucky to have a good Christian mother up until the day she died. I know a lot of people who never had that. It’s a hard life when you haven’t had a good family and a strong Christian upbringing. If you raise your kids up with a solid Christian foundation, they won’t ever forget it no matter what happens. It will always be in the back of their minds. I know it was that way for me.

  My mother’s gone, but what she taught me I put to use every day. That includes using some of her recipes for fried chicken with fried cornbread and pinto beans, and pork and sauerkraut. They weren’t real recipes like you see in a cookbook, ’cause she never wrote none of it down. She’d prepare all this stuff from scratch, off the top of her head. She was a great down-home-style cook—she saw cooking as a joy, not a drudgery—and most of what I know in the kitchen comes from my mama. I learned to cook the same way I learned to play music, just by watching and doing, trial and error.

  When I was growing up, we mostly lived off of what we raised ourselves. Everything was so fresh and tasted so good, like milk and butter and all kind of garden vegetables. My dad raised a vegetable garden every year. He raised potatoes and watermelons and cucumbers and beans and tomatoes and corn and cabbage, all sort of things. Sometimes, he’d raise sweet potatoes, too, in an area down by the creek where the sandy soil was. We grew just about everything we needed, and we always had plenty and then some. Dad gave away a lot to neighbors who didn’t have fresh produce of their own, especially older couples and widows who weren’t able to work their own gardens anymore. It sort of spoils you in a way, being able to go out in the garden and pick tomatoes off the vine, instead of having to go to the supermarket. I didn’t even know you could buy tomatoes at a store until I was seven and we moved to Tennessee, and I didn’t like store-bought compared to the ones we raised.

  Ours had a rich, earthy taste. I used to go out in the tomato patch early in the morning with a saltshaker in my back pocket and get a big ol’ ripe one and bite into it. Oh, man! It was the best. Like the old saying goes, you can’t buy true love or homegrown tomatoes. That’s the truth. And with what was left over, Mama would can the lot and those tomatoes would last us through the winter, along with kraut and pickled beans and sweet corn.

  It was a great way to grow up, helping out in the garden or down at the barn. I didn’t have to hoe very much since I cut too many plants and vines with the hoe blade. I would mostly help out by gathering vegetables from the garden and picking fruit from our orchard. I learned that having chores, learning responsibility, was a big part of life. Nothing tastes better or sweeter than corn you’ve hoed and brought in yourself from the field to the table. That was real satisfaction, and it made you feel part of the land and the earth. You felt like you belonged.

  Dad always got the Stark Brothers catalog, and he knew a lot about grafting apple trees from his Uncle Calvin. They were men who just loved making things grow. Dad would take a Red Delicious apple tree and graft it with a Rome Beauty. He carried a real sharp pocketknife, and he’d make a slit in the sapling and tie the graft together with string, and then he’d put on sticky resin to keep the sap from running out and the bugs from getting in. He was very meticulous.

  A year or two later, the hybrid would mature to give us a great harvest in the fall. We’d pick apples by the bushel. Mom would fry up some of the apples for breakfast, and she’d make fried apple pie. Oh, my God! If you’ve never eaten fried apple pie like my mom fixed it you’ve missed something wonderful. I can’t find any words to describe it.

  We used to butcher a hog every winter, too. We didn’t have a freezer. My dad would cut up the pig and lay out all the meat on a great big table in the smokehouse. He’d salt it down with real coarse salt. That hog fed our whole family for months. You know, it’s like Bill Monroe said, “You can’t hurt ham!” I will explain what he meant later on, if you stick with me.

  Nowadays some people think hog-killing was cruel. How could you raise an animal, go to the barnyard and feed it every day of its life, see it grow up, and then just kill it? But that hog or chicken was our food, and none of it got wasted. It was the way things were in the mountains, the way we lived, and we didn’t think anything about it.

  There wasn’t a lot of beef around in those days, but we didn’t miss it much. We had plenty of pork and chicken and caught our own fish, and my mom made it all taste good. One of my favorites was when mama would fix pork tenderloin, hot biscuits, and gravy. To this day, I can tell you, there ain’t nothing like the way she did it. She kept a bucket of lard under the sink, and she’d take a scoop and fry up some pork chops real crisp in an iron skillet. Then, right before they were done, she’d throw in a spoonful of water and cover it with a heavy lid and the scalding-hot steam would tenderize those pork chops just right.

  And the way she fixed her kraut and pork chops! She’d cook up the sauerkraut and pork together and layer it all with sliced potatoes and carrots and onions. Then of course, there were her fried potatoes and onions, and I can’t forget to mention her fried corn, where she’d scrape the cob clean and make this fried cream corn that was to die for. Frying was her specialty, and she even made her own fried potato chips from razor-thin potato slices sizzling in Crisco.

  But let’s not forget her fried chicken. Oh, my Lord, Mama’s fried chicken could bring peace to the Middle East. She fried her chicken three ways at once: in lard, with the skin on it, in a black iron skillet. Are there any questions? Her special ingredient, though, was in the refrigerator. When she got her lard good and hot and smoking just a little, she’d go for the secret weapon. She’d open the refrigerator door, grab a whole stick of butter, and lay it in that sizzling hot lard. That was when the Holy Ghost showed up! Then Mama would tell me, “Honey, the butter is what makes it so brown and crispy.” Eat your heart out, Paula Deen.

  I believe if the Arabs and the Jews could sit down at a table with a great big plate of Mama’s fried chicken, they could have some peace for a while. Well, at least unti
l the last piece of chicken was up for grabs, and then they’d probably get to fighting again.

  All this time my mom was cooking, she’d be singing, and her little kitchen was the best-sounding, best-smelling place you can imagine. It was heaven for a boy like me who loved to eat and sing both. I guess that’s how I got such a big, big appetite for food and music. Thanks, Mama! She knew as many great songs as she did great-tasting recipes. One of her favorites was “Cut Across Shorty.” I’d always be rooting for Shorty to outrun the city boy named Dan in the race so he could win Miss Lucy’s hand. Shorty was a country boy same as I was, and it made me happy that he beat out Dan.

  I loved singing around the house with my mom, it’s some of my best childhood memories, but when Dad came home from work on the weekends, that’s when the real fun began. We always had picking and singing at the house on weekends. My folks always made music fun, and that’s why I’m still having fun playing music fifty years later—because it never got too serious for me. You know, the music business is serious sometimes, but it never robs me of my joy for music. I’m grateful that I have that precious gift from Mom and Dad.

  I’ve been exposed to music all my life, and it all started by singing with my family and feeling the joy of music. For me, singing went along with whatever I was doing. Then along came something totally new, and it sure took my mind off singing for a while. My life was about to change forever.

  Chapter 3

  BOY MEETS MANDOLIN

  Singing families have been a part of American life since colonial times.

  —The Country Music Store, by Robert Shelton