The Kids Are Alright
Two decades after Tanya Tucker, Texas teens are tearing up the music scene.
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It was at a Cowboys game that Bill Mack first heard her sing. Mack has had his share of hits—George Strait went to number four in 1990 with a revival of his “Drinking Champagne,” which was originally written for Dean Martin and recorded by Cal Smith in the late sixties—but “Blue” took a more circuitous route. He penned the song while deejaying in Wichita Falls in the late fifties. Then, in 1960, he borrowed Roger Miller’s guitar backstage at a package show in San Antonio and sang the ballad to Patsy Cline. “Get that damn thing to me,” she commanded, for it was indeed right in her groove. After a local singer recorded the tune, Mack sent the tape to Cline in Nashville, but she died in a plane crash before she could record it. And that would have been that, had it not been for Fort Worth singer Polly Stephens, who cut a torchy version in the late eighties to sell at her gigs. Mack gave that record to Wilbur Rimes, who thought it was too old for LeAnn and put it aside. LeAnn disagreed, however, and worked up her own arrangement, including a distinctive little semi-yodel she and Mack call a “soul break.”
Wilbur changed his mind, and in 1993 LeAnn cut “Blue” for All That, an independent album produced by Wilbur and bankrolled by Dallas attorney Lyle Walker, a part owner of Norman Petty’s Clovis, New Mexico, studio, where Buddy Holly cut most of his hits. That studio is now a tourist attraction, but LeAnn recorded All That at Petty’s second studio, a converted movie theater in Clovis. Walker, meanwhile, suggested to the Blockbuster chain that it carry the CD, a coup that gave LeAnn wide exposure. When All That sold more than 15,000 copies, Nashville came calling. LeAnn had auditioned a year earlier for Jimmy Bowen of EMI, who had told her to come back when she was eighteen. “I know I was kinda ready then, but I wasn’t really,” she says now. “He was right to tell me to wait, but I wanted it.” This time, she got it. As All That and “Blue” made more noise locally, LeAnn performed in a Dallas theater for executives of the Decca label. Wilbur and Walker were negotiating with them when Mike Curb, who heads the Nashville-based Curb label, made an offer of his own. Pushed by his own two teenage daughters, Curb offered to keep things in the family by letting Wilbur continue to produce and manage. That was all it took; LeAnn cut new vocals on “Blue” using “her thirteen-year-old voice instead of her eleven-year-old voice,” as Wilbur puts it, and it’s been star time ever since.
IT CERTAINLY IS ON THIS NIGHT IN WYOMING. Not long after our interview begins, LeAnn leaves for her motel room to get ready for the gig. When she returns with her band ninety minutes before the show, she is on, a different person. Her hair and makeup in place, dressed in an outfit just given to her by her godparents for her birthday—black heeled boots, tight black slacks, a black and white horizontally striped blouse revealing an inch or two of midriff, a red vinyl jacket—she radiates authority as she bounds into her dressing-room trailer. It’s rather remarkable to witness the ease with which she gives directions to people three times her age.
“All my friends are, like, between twenty and eighty,” she tells me. “Those are the people I’m most comfortable with, because those are the people I’ve grown up around. I didn’t have close friends in school, I had about one, and I really haven’t kept in touch with her because it’s been so hard. That’s just how I am—I relate to those people better than I do to people my age. Last night, at the bowling alley, we had a birthday cake fight. Everybody was, like, smearing it all over each other’s face. It was really funny; we had a great time. But I’ve never had a food fight before in my life. My forty-year-old friends were starting a food fight, and it was, like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’
“I don’t want people to think of me as a thirteen-year-old singing sensation,” she continues. “I want them to think of me only as an artist and for my music, so that I will have the freedom to do the songs I like. If I sing little kid songs about getting out of high school and stuff like that, I’m not gonna make it. I’m trying to appeal to everybody from four to eighty.”
That’s also why she doesn’t identify as strongly with Texas as some country stars do. “Country music is not just Texas—it’s the whole United States, the whole world,” she notes. “I think there’s a lot of great artists who have come out of Texas, but I’m going for broader appeal. I was very skeptical when ‘Blue’ was released as a single because it was very traditional, and I knew radio was gonna be hesitant to play it. They call it retro, but it’s true country music and it’s totally different from contemporary country, which has the pop feel. What I wanna keep doing is keep my albums so there is traditional and contemporary country through everything, so there’s a wide spectrum of music for everybody and for all age groups.” Still, even LeAnn, who gives the impression she had everything worked out all along, claims to be surprised at how fast things have happened. “I’m skeptical about how my career’s gonna go, but I’m very excited. Being nominated for two CMA awards, that’s like the biggest highlight of my life, ’cause that’s what I’ve dreamed about since I was a little girl sitting in front of the TV watching Reba get an award.”
By the time she hits the stage, of course, she’s the picture of confidence. She begins by singing the first verses of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” a capella—nobody else in country music is gutsy enough to open a show a capella these days—and proceeds through nearly her entire album, plus a few pop anthems (“Stand by Me”) and country standards (“I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart”) before concluding with her version of “Crazy.”
Afterward, there’s a meet-and-greet, an industry practice whereby the star is introduced briefly but individually to a carefully chosen group of fans, local deejays, and winners of radio station contests. As Wilbur stands next to his daughter, handing her a glossy photo and saying, “This one’s to so-and-so,” LeAnn grabs and signs, shakes a hand and says hi, and smiles for the obligatory snapshot.
Forty-five minutes later—roughly twenty hours after she woke for the flight from Dallas—she hands her father her glossies and says, “I’ve got to go to the trailer now.” But as she turns around to leave, two teenage boys come up on either side of her. As she spots them, she stops and, without saying a word, puts an arm around the shoulder of each, breaking into one last split-second smile—star time all the way.
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