Thirty years after working there as a minimum-wage tour guide, Trisha Yearwood is now the main attraction in a brand-new exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Peer through the glass and you'll notice she shares her space with some of the hall's hallowed inductees.
There's a charming telegram from Kenny Rogers to congratulate her on winning an American Music Award. There's a handwritten letter from Johnny Cash, an appreciation of her kind words in an early interview. (A reporter in Branson, Mo., asked why visitors should go see her perform instead of Cash, who would be in town at the same time. Her reply was something like, "I don't know, I'd probably go see Johnny Cash.") There's Reba McEntire's autograph on a Rivergate Mall record shop flier from 1985, and the wedding gown Yearwood wore when she married Garth Brooks in 2005.
Like those artists, the pride of Monticello, Ga., is now one of country music's most recognizable legacy artists, as if there were any doubt.
"When I was a kid," Yearwood tells the Scene, "and in high school thinking about going to college, I believed that if I wanted to sing country music, I needed to be in the city where that music was being made. So moving to Nashville was something that I felt I had to do. I feel like it's still the place where dreams come true."
Yearwood and Brooks have recently relocated from Oklahoma to Goodlettsville, and she's moved the set of her Emmy Award-winning series, Trisha's Southern Kitchen, to a home in Brentwood. Calling from a recording studio on Music Row, she looks back at her good ol' days in Music City.
I have a lot of Nashville-focused questions for you.
That's cool. We moved back here last August after being gone for about 14 years. We lived in Oklahoma, and I was back and forth some, but I'm the one who needs to ask the questions. I'm telling you, it has changed so much since I lived here before. I'm learning my way again.
Have you wondered, "What happened to 12South?"
The first time I went by [12th Avenue in the Gulch], I almost didn't realize what street I was on. The only way I knew was because The Station Inn was there. And I thought, "Did they move The Station Inn?"
You first came here in 1985. Were you in college when you started working at the Hall of Fame?
Yes. I had transferred from Georgia and I was a junior in college [at Belmont]. I needed a summer job and I wanted to stay in Nashville, so I found this job. It was a minimum wage job as a tour guide, but I loved it because I loved country music. I wanted, of course, to be a singer. And so to spend my days in there, leading tours and getting to see all the stuff, it was really awesome.
That made the whole exhibit experience really full-circle and surreal. Although I was a tour guide and I didn't get to touch any of the stuff, I know the reverence and the pride and the work that goes into putting those exhibits together. I could never have imagined when I was working there that I would be talking about having an exhibit there. It's pretty overwhelming.
After college, you were a receptionist at MTM Records, which also had a publishing company. Was that when you started crossing paths with songwriters regularly?
Yeah. Actually, that was one of the situations where I didn't tell anybody that I was a singer, to get the job. Nobody in the building really knew, even publishing. But I got to hang out and talk to songwriters a lot, and I really liked them. I felt a kinship with them, but it was working that job as a receptionist, ordering Liquid Paper and answering the phones all day, that made me realize that if I didn't try to make something happen for myself, and I didn't tell people I sang, I wasn't going to get anywhere.
I credit that job with helping me call some of my songwriter friends that I had known in college to get some session work and to get started. Through that, I met a couple of guys I ended up singing with in a band in a bowling alley out in Hendersonville. That job, which didn't get done until 2 or 3 in the morning, made it hard for me to get to my other job at 9 in the morning. And still, once I left MTM, most of those people didn't know that I sang. I think that job was the catalyst to get me off my butt to go, "Hey, if you don't get out there and try to make something happen, you're going to get to answer phones for the rest of your life."
In 1991, you had a hit right away with "She's in Love With the Boy," and suddenly you were on awards shows and talk shows. Now you're on TV with your own cooking show. At what point did you start to get comfortable on camera? Did it take a while to get to that point?
Yeah, my biggest weakness in wanting to be a performer was my performance (laughs). I mean, I was very comfortable singing a demo, where my audience was a microphone and maybe two guys in the control room. No makeup, ponytail, my Keds. I'm very comfortable in that environment. Performing in front of an audience, having to talk to the crowd ... those were things that were mortifying to me.
I think at one of the very first shows I did in '91, I got reviewed and I got called a "singing stick." And I was! It was totally dead-on because I was terrified. I had grown up watching Barbara Mandrell's show where she played every instrument and she ran around the stage and danced. I'm like, "I don't do any of that. I don't know what to do." At first I just sang. I was like, "I know I can do that." Then I got a little more comfortable and I realized what worked for me was just being me. I'm not one of those artists with a persona that I put on when I go on stage, then I come off and I'm different. It transfers to the cooking show, too. When people see the cooking show, or they come to see me in concert, I hope they leave there thinking, "Man, I feel like we could hang out. I feel like she and I could be friends." That's what ended up working for me. I had to get comfortable in that environment. But it really did take a long time. And it was the weakest thing about me. I'm lucky that I came along at a time when I was allowed to make my mistakes and learn those ropes in front of just a few drunks in a club, not on social media or American Idol. I'm really lucky that I was able to learn it behind closed doors.
I moved here in the 1990s and I remember how many benefit shows there used to be. I believe you played a benefit show at The Connection, the biggest gay bar in town back then.
Yes, I did!
Since then, several artists from that era have come out, and today we have songs like "Follow Your Arrow" and "Girl Crush" starting a dialogue. What is it like for you now to see that the gay community is part of the conversation in country music?
I think it's just a no-brainer. That particular show, I remember I got some backlash from people who knew me. It was a benefit for a friend of mine, a gay hairdresser who had cancer. I was like, "This is for my friend. This is what you do. I don't give a crap what his personal life is about. This is somebody that I care about." I guess as a person, I'm about relationships, and I'm about people. I don't really think about the bigger political picture. I wish more people felt that way. I think that's the only way we're going to get through all this is if we just let people be who they are and love one another. That's my job not to judge anybody. Good God, I wouldn't want anybody judging my life.
Do you remember the drag bar on Lower Broadway called Cowboys La Cage?
I do! I don't think I ever went there, but I do remember that place. There was another place on Eighth Avenue. Another friend of mine was having a birthday party there and I think I was probably one of two straight people in the room. They had a drag show and somebody did "She's in Love With the Boy" in drag and I was like, "I'm a star! I've totally made it."
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
