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Tambourine Man” and “Louie Louie” for Fall Festival at Archibald D. In the fifth grade I formed a band with two buddies. I taught myself to play this road-worn Stella, first copying the folks songs of Peter, Paul and Mary before falling hard for the music of George Harrison and jazz greats like Chet Atkins and Wes Montgomery. The guitar was a gift from a former bluesman who worked for my dad at his weekly newspaper down in Mississippi. I told him about growing up in North Carolina, singing in the church choir and teaching myself to play a second-hand Stella Concertmaster beginning around age 10. We turned out to have much more in common than I realized. It’s from one of MacAnally’s most successful songs, “Down the Road,” a moving anthem about a father and his daughter that was nominated for a Grammy in 2010. “Funny how life works out down the road,” he agreed. A dozen solo albums, seven CMA Musician of the Year awards and one Grammy nomination later, he remains one the most respected songwriters and studio musicians of modern times. Mac grew up in rural Alabama, studied classical piano and played for his Baptist church before going on to a stellar career performing on his own and eventually writing Billboard toppers for the likes of Jimmy Buffet, Alabama, Kenny Chesney and Sawyer Brown. He told me about his own musical journey. With two small kids and a busy journalism career that literally took me to a lot of interesting places in the world, I confessed, my beloved guitar rarely left its case these days. “But that’s another life,” I said with a laugh. I admitted that, once upon a time, I came dangerously close to heading for Nashville the year I graduated from college in 1975.
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I thanked him for saying this but felt sure he was just being kind to his appointed limo driver – in my case a well-traveled, mud-freckled Chevy Blazer in which he seemed right at home. On the way there, he complimented my playing and wondered if I’d ever thought about making music a career.
We even jammed a bit with a couple local musicians before he packed up to be driven back to the airport by his host. One of his earliest albums, No Problem Here, is a anthem to the small town Southern life and still my favorite album of all time.Īfter his appearance in the main performance tent at the Maine Music Festival two decades later, we shared a cold beverage and talked about how our careers had gone since that night we met in that Athens bar. I first heard Mac perform at a bar in Athens, Georgia during the years I was the senior writer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday Magazine and Mac was already a star in country music. Some years back, I told this story to a musical hero of mine, the Grammy winning Alabama singer-songwriter Mac McAnally, whom I helped bring to the Maine Music Festival in the late 1990s. Instead, I settled for playing a few coffee house gigs around town and becoming an English major and columnist for the school paper.
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She went off with me to college along with a window fan for my dorm room, a portable record player and a wooden crate full of record albums.Īt that time, I was seriously thinking of postponing college and heading to Nashville to try my luck as a songwriter. Today she’s a symbol of the life I never had. Ruby Jane is a beautiful Alvarez guitar I purchased the summer after I graduated from high school in 1971 with money I earned giving guitar lessons for Maurice Weinstein at Lawndale Music company for the princely sum of five bucks an hour.
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And if you know how to touch her the right way, she still makes the sweetest music. She’s old and nicked up from years of travel, but has a body that’s spectacularly curved in all the right places. Sometimes before dawn on the late summer mornings, I let in the cat from his nighttime rambles and put on the coffee, then spend a few quiet moments with Ruby Jane.
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