Diary of a Player (25 page)

The son even told me that he used to push the strings to stop his father from playing, just like I did with my grandfather and my sons, Huck and Jasper, do now. Then Mr. Nichols tells me of his father's love for traditional music and how they laid him to rest to a recording of “Life's Railway to Heaven.” I just shook my head. Of course they did. That also happens to be the very
first
song I ever played for an audience, that very first performance at the Glen Dale United Methodist church, so many years ago.

W
hen I was starting out, I wanted to be a player, a real player. Nothing more. Then I realized that I wanted to be a songwriter and communicate with the world that way too.
Then you have a couple hits, and all of a sudden it's time to put on some kind of show. So in a sense, that part of the picture came last to me. Being a big showman was not what motivated me.

But being the front man of a band is a blast. There is nothing like bonding with a musical group that weathers the miles and the ups and downs right along beside you. Professionals who every night have your back. And I have the best band that I could ever imagine. Like most of the songs we play, these guys are road tested. Basically, we've kept the same group together since 1999 or 2000. My bandleader, Kendal Marcy, on keyboards, banjo, and mandolin; Ben Sesar on drums; Kenny Lewis on bass; Gary Hooker on guitar; Justin Williamson on fiddle and mandolin; and Randle Currie on steel guitar. They are called the Drama Kings. And they have definitely earned that name. You can imagine that in over a decade of highs and lows, there is a sense of family that is only barely eclipsed by DNA. And we have watched as our lives have changed together. From the status on our Facebook pages, to the houses we could afford, to the vehicles we drive, not much is the same.

These guys have been behind me in clubs where we outnumbered
the patrons, all the way to venues larger than some cities.

With the musical and emotional backing of these great musicians, I gradually stepped up and tried to become a real front man and a headlining act. In the beginning, I didn't really know who I was going to be as a performer and entertainer, because I came at all this first as a player and then as a songwriter. Eventually, I sang my songs because they were what I wanted to say. It was never part of my original goal to have ten tractor trailers hauling a bunch of video equipment and a PA down the road. Heck, I didn't even know that was a possibility. But it evolved pretty naturally because as more and more people come to see you, you want to blow them away in new and unexpected ways. Like a family, it just keeps growing and growing—if you're lucky.

Over the years, I eventually figured out how we could use the bigness of the event to add value for our fans—for example, by using the video to make it feel like Alison Krauss is there to sing “Whiskey Lullaby” with me some nights. I came to realize that putting on a big show was all about bringing our music to the people in ways they wouldn't expect to be possible.

O
n November 10, 2010, I had about as much fun as a man can legally have without negative repercussions. It was the night of the forty-fourth annual Country Music Association Awards, otherwise known as Country Music's Biggest Night. It's a show I've been watching since I was a little kid, because to us Nashville hillbillies, the CMA Awards are like the Grammys and the Oscars all wrapped up into one.

For the past three years, I've had the honor and pleasure of hosting the show along with my friend Carrie Underwood, and I think we've found a really good chemistry. The CMA Awards show is a lot of work—and even more fun—and thankfully it brings me together with a colorful and talented group of characters who've become pals, including the show's current executive producer, Robert Deaton; the longtime executive producer, Walter C. Miller; the director, Paul Miller; and the show's writer, David Wild, whose name you might have noticed on the cover of this book.

David is the sexiest writer alive.

David wrote that last line, actually.

At the forty-fourth annual CMA Awards, everything we all planned somehow worked, and the night felt like another
dream come true for me. A week or so before the CMA show, I had decided that I didn't want to play a track from
American Saturday Night
or my new
Hits Alive
collection, but instead would play a brand-new and yet-unrecorded song that I wrote with Chris DuBois called “This Is Country Music.” To me, this was a true love song written for the music that changed my life forever and to the millions of people out there who feel exactly the same way about it that I do.

As has become a CMA tradition, we ended the night with our biggest award of all, Entertainer of the Year. It's an honor that has long represented the very highest achievement in country music.

My friend Tim McGraw was set to present it, and he walked up to me backstage right before he went out, holding the envelope, and jokingly said, “Wanna peek?” I said, “No, thanks. I'll wait.” And there he went, out there to change a little bit of my history forever.

In accepting the award, I made sure to start with someone else's wise words. “My hero Little Jimmy Dickens has a saying, and that is, ‘If you see a turtle on a fence post, it had help getting up there.' And I feel just like a turtle on a fence post at this point.”

Next I thanked the people who gave me the greatest job in
the world: “First of all, I want to talk to the fans. It sounds like a cliché when you say thanks to the fans. But the great thing about country music fans is when you say ‘fans,' I don't even mean mine. You guys are loyal to everyone in this room. It's the most amazing, loyal fan base in the world.”

I stand by those words, and I always will. Then I remembered the man who changed everything for me: “My grand-father—tonight for me is about
him
. This is a man who loved Buck Owens, and he loved Johnny Cash and these people. And he said, ‘I want you to learn to play guitar because this is going to get you through lonely times, and you'll never be alone with this.' And I don't think he ever thought that it would draw twenty thousand people. But I think about him tonight.”

Standing there onstage in front of so many friends and heroes in my adopted home of Nashville, I thought back to watching this very same show a quarter century earlier in West Virginia sitting with my grandfather.

U
nless you know something that I don't, my story is far from over. So how on earth do you end a book that's about your life in the middle?

Maybe by talking about the end of another life. A life that made it all possible.

Unless you know something that I don't, my story is far from over.
So how on earth do you end a book that's about your life in the middle?

My great-grandmother Lottie Jarvis died in May of 1987. She was very old, of course, and because of that, her death wasn't the least bit shocking or tragic. She had Alzheimer's and had actually been gone for a while. So the whole family packed up and went to Milton, West Virginia, where most of our family is buried. There is a small funeral home there where my other great-grandma had her funeral, along with a few aunts and uncles and such. I know the place well, unfortunately.

My papaw had been having stomach pains for months, but all the tests he had been going through showed nothing. So he made the trip with us. At the viewing, he could tell I was uncomfortable. Of course I was. I was fourteen or so. So he came up to me at the casket and said, “Let's get out of here.” We went down the street and had a Coke at a bar that was open in the afternoon. I'll never forget it.

A week or two later they figured out what the pain in his stomach was. He had pancreatic cancer. Inoperable.

The doctors gave him three months.

At fourteen, I don't think it hit me what that meant. Three months was an eternity. Pretty much all summer. And summer seems like forever to a kid. So I would go down to his house for breakfast in the morning, then leave to play outside, and then go back to visit in the evenings. I would sit and play him songs on the guitar, while he sat in his rocking chair, too weak to hold his head up due to chemo. But his spirit was
never
weak. I remember that summer like it was last summer. He was constantly giving me advice and spouting wisdom. He always did that, but never to this degree. “Don't go to your grave owing anybody anything.” “Do unto others as . . .” “Profanity is the unintelligent man's way of expressing himself.” “Early to bed, early to rise . . .” And so on. It was like he was transferring his hard drive.

Until the morphine. Which stopped the transfer of information completely. In fact, he told my mom and dad not to bring me to the hospital once they started the drip, because he didn't want me to see him that way. So, unbeknownst to me, when the ambulance came to take him to the hospital for constant care, he thought he wouldn't ever see me again. He was on a stretcher. He had tears in his eyes. I rode down on
my bike to say good-bye, like it was just another doctor visit. But he knew otherwise.

I begged and begged over the next two weeks to go see him. So my parents gave in and took me to the hospital. When I went into his room I remember that he looked very small and frail. He weighed about 90 pounds. Before the cancer, he'd been a good 185. Now he looked like a prison camp refugee. Or worse. He was staring blankly at the ceiling. I walked in and said, “Hi, Papaw!” When he heard my voice, he turned away. He wouldn't make eye contact with me. Somewhere deep inside, his pride was running the show, and he did not want me to see him that way. He refused to look in my direction. I kept talking to him, telling him how I was doing, that I'd been practicing, and that Hank and the guys said hi. But it was no use. I went home devastated.

Summer was over.

He died about a week later, exactly three months to the day after his diagnosis. September 9, 1987.

So the whole family packed up and went to Milton, West Virginia. Again.

I was crying harder than I'd ever cried in my life as I stood in front of the casket. And there he lay. Or actually, no, he
wasn't there at all. I realized that and slipped out. I went down the street to the same bar where he and I got a Coke the last time. My dad figured out where I'd gone and came and sat with me. We didn't say much. Just sat there with our thoughts and emotions. Dad finally broke the silence.

“He's not really gone, you know. He'll be there every time you play.”

He meant that when I did shows or performed for people, Papaw would be looking down from heaven. A front-row seat. I see it differently.

He is there every time I play, yes. In front of thousands in concert, millions on TV, or three people in the living room. Or just me. I carry the legacy of the love of music that only a true aficionado like Warren L. Jarvis could bestow. I take his talent, his passion, with me. To the stage of the Opry, to the podium at the CMA Awards, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and to my own living room. To the same armchair where I muted his playing as a child and now let mine ring out so freely. Well, right up to the moment when his great-grandchildren reach up and mute those six strings once again.