Today the most outlaw thing you can possibly do in Nashville, Tennessee, is play country music.
There are two kinds of people, there's those who like Johnny Cash, and those that will.
The truth of country music, the real stuff, will prevail ..... generation after generation.
Nothing will prepare you for singing the truth like about 35 years in the music business, financial troubles and a couple trips to jail, ... It will get you really humble and really truthful, and gets you ready to sing out about who and what saved you.
There's the chart -- and there's the heart. And it's great when they both line up. But you better follow your heart, 'cause that's where it's at.
From watching Lester (Flatt), I learned that it's important to be loyal to the people who made you and bought your music. He called me up to the front of the (tour) bus on the very first trip I went on with him. Lester pointed out two elderly people who were walking towards the but. He said, 'Those two people have been coming to see me since the mid 40's. That's what a country fan is all about.'
Doing a thing call the Hillbilly Rock, some say it came from Elvis down in Tennessee.
Where better than the church for people like me, George Jones and Johnny Cash to go to get ourselves in shape enough to sing a gospel song?
I call this my church house trilogy. Souls' Chapel really was music from the Mississippi Delta, which to me is a church within itself. The Delta is the church of American Roots music. The Badlands is a cathedral without a top on it. And the Ryman has been called the Mother Church of Country Music, but to me it's the Mother Church of American Music. If you can think it up, it's been done there. In my mind, this is kind of a spiritual odyssey as much as anything else, and I had the settings of three churches to make it in.
It's the hillbilly rock, beat it with a drum. Playin' them guitars like shootin from a gun. Keepin' up the rhythm, steady as a clock. Doin' a little thing called the hillbilly rock.
