Hillbilly Heart (2 page)

I have asked why a kid from Kentucky who wanted to be a pro baseball player started to hear voices telling him to buy a guitar, and then started to hear songs, and then ended up with the life I have today. On the one hand, I followed my dream and worked hard and never gave up. On the other hand, I don’t claim to understand a thing.

I’m not the best songwriter. I’m certainly not the best singer, either. What I do is bring honesty to my music. I also bring a conviction that sharing my music is my purpose. I honestly can’t think of any other way to explain what’s happened to me thus far in my fifty-one years. In this book, you will see what I mean. I will share stories from the whole extraordinary ride—the good, the bad, the off-key, and the stuff that still doesn’t make sense. You’ll learn about my family and our crazy life. You’ll see that I’m a guy who occasionally
needs to disappear into the woods till my head clears. And you’ll read a few stories that might make you believe, as I do, in a power greater than any of us.

I’m constantly asked how I write songs, and I never have a satisfying answer. I don’t know that any songwriters do. Telling you about “Trail of Tears” is about as close as I can get. As I said earlier, I don’t know how this stuff works. All I know is, I have lived the majority of the songs I’ve written. They are my truth. This book is a lot like those songs. The stories ain’t always pretty, but they’re real.

PART I

Country as Country Can Be

CHAPTER 1

“Life Ain’t Fair”

L
IKE ANYONE ELSE
, I can think of a hundred different things in my childhood that shaped me in one way or another. But one moment stands out as decisive and defining not just for who I became but also for the ways it caused me to look at the world, the way people behaved, and what I was going to understand about myself.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s car. I was about ten years old, a stocky boy with long, dark, floppy hair and a smile I was reluctant to break out. I was still a kid, but growing up fast.

I was clearly all boy, a good athlete and given to finding trouble if it didn’t find me first. Still, my dad, Ronald Ray Cyrus, recognized I was a little sensitive on the inside—more thoughtful than soft—and I had been going through a bunch of stuff that had me thinking. It was beyond my control, and what I would call a worst-case scenario for me and my brother, Kevin Lynn.

(By the way, everyone called him Kebo, and I was known as Bo. For some reason, my dad always called us by those nicknames, and they just kind of stuck.)

Anyway, my feelings were no secret to my dad. A few years earlier,
he and my mom had split, and even more recently my dad, who had remarried, had filed to get custody of me and my brother.

It had been a mess, and now my dad was taking me for a drive so we could talk. I have a hard enough time expressing myself at age fifty-one, and back then it was even harder. My dad noticed I was on the verge of tears, and struggling emotionally.

“What is it, son?” he asked.

I took a deep breath to summon my courage.

“Why can’t we just be a normal family?” I asked. “Why’s everything always messed up?”

My dad pulled over to the side of the road and put his truck into neutral. He looked into my eyes. To his credit, he told me the truth.

“Son, life ain’t fair,” he said. “It ain’t fair. Once you understand that and accept it, the better off you’re going to be, and the sooner you can move forward.”

Acceptance of life’s hard knocks was a way of life for my kinfolk. They came out of the mountains of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia and settled along the banks of the Big Sandy, the Little Sandy, and the Ohio Rivers. I would get to know the region well when I played the bars and honky-tonks there. It was known for railroads, steel mills, coal mines, and farms, cornerstones of the industries that built and fed America—and the Cyrus men labored in all these fields.

My dad was a rigger for Armco Steel in Russell and Ashland, Kentucky, when I was born on August 25, 1961, the second of Ronald and Ruthie Cyrus’s boys. My mom was a big-hearted woman from the Appalachian hills, a little spitfire barely past five foot who played piano by ear and had been such a talented performer in high school that her senior class had named her “Most Likely to Succeed and Run a Hollywood Studio.”

On the day I was born, my papaw Eldon Lindsey Cyrus, who stood several inches over six feet and weighed well over 200 pounds, perfect for a fiery Pentecostal preacher, looked through the glass partition of the hospital nursery and tried to read the name
on my ID bracelet. It said
BABY BOY CYRUS
. But he thought it said
BILLY RAY CYRUS
.

“What a perfect name!” he declared.

Since my mom’s father was William and my dad’s middle name was Ray, it made sense to him.

“But it actually says ‘Baby Boy Cyrus,’” my mom corrected.

He didn’t listen. He had already made up his mind.

All of my earliest memories from our home at 2317 Long Street in Flatwoods, Kentucky, are related to sports, church, girls, being rebellious, and music—most of all music. On Saturday nights my papaw Casto, my mom’s father, and my uncle Clayton came over and played bluegrass and folk classics such as “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey,” “Rolling in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” and Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” My mom was on piano, her father played fiddle, and her brother played guitar. Sometimes my dad hit on a little drum while my brother and I listened and sang and jumped around.

When they took a break, we switched on the radio and listened to the Grand Ole Opry, though I remember one night at my papaw Casto’s home when everybody laid down their instruments, turned up the radio, and listened to a heavyweight boxing match between the champion, Sonny Liston, and a very confident Olympic gold medalist named Cassius Clay. One other thing I remember about that night—my papaw had a gas fireplace where the heat came out of the floor. I stood on it too long and burned a hole in my sock.

My papaw Casto was a character. He worked for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, riding in the caboose. He enjoyed a beer or two, or three, and inevitably called me over to ask if I wanted to hear something funny, which usually meant an off-color joke.

“Did you hear the one about a little bee?” he once asked.

“No, sir,” I said.

He pulled me close and dropped his voice to a whisper.

“A little bee flew across the sea and landed on a martin pole, stretched his neck, shit a peck, and closed up his farting hole.”

Another time, he asked, “Did you hear about the guy who gave a speech to ten thousand people?”

I shook my head.

“Ten thousand people!” he continued. “Ten thousand people…
ten thousand people.
Can you imagine? Then some old wino in the back hollered, ‘Hey, buddy, what about ten thousand people?’ And that ol’ boy looked up and said, ‘Ten thousand people… and that damn bird had to shit all over me.’”

That one still makes me laugh.

On Sundays we went to the tiny white Pentecostal church where my papaw Cyrus preached. Eldon Lindsey Cyrus filled that church with the spirit of the Holy Ghost and gospel hymns. As I said earlier, he was an imposing man, with a commanding presence, and when he pointed to the little sign in front of his pulpit,
EXPECT A MIRACLE
, you believed him. I did.

He was a rebel in his youth. He probably would have ended up in the steel mills or coal mines if fate hadn’t steered him in another direction. He drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and chewed tobacco, all considered sins back in those days. Then one day when he was out riding his horse with a huge chaw tucked inside the cheek of his mouth, he felt the calling of the Lord. He heard a voice from beyond or high above tell him to become a preacher.

He immediately spit out his chaw, rode home, and took steps to become an ordained preacher. He spent the rest of his life spreading the good word. And the words he preached were taken straight out of the Bible. I looked up to him, as did many people. He found a lesson in everything, as did my dad, but as a kid, I especially liked listening to my papaw, thinking it was cool that he had talked to God, and I took every opportunity to ask, “Papaw, tell me about that time you heard the voice of God.”

Sunday was also the day we listened to my dad’s gospel group, the Crownsmen Quartet. My dad had many talents. He was strong, smart, wise, tenderhearted, and charismatic. He was also one heck of a gospel singer, a very passionate and respected entertainer. His
quartet was renowned throughout the tristate area for their southern gospel harmonies. Whereas most gospel groups sang one emotional, inspirational ballad after another, the Crownsmen Quartet were known for their high-energy performances.

Starting when I was four years old, my dad would bring me onstage and have me join them on “Swing Down, Sweet Chariot.” I know you are probably thinking isn’t that “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”? But my dad’s group sang, “Why don’t you swing down, sweet chariot / Stop and let me ride / Swing down, sweet chariot, stop and let me ride / Rock me Lord, rock me Lord / Come Ezekiel / I gotta home on the other side…”

It was my first taste of harmony, and I loved it. My dad got a kick out of having me sing with him, hearing my tiny but expressive oom-pah-pas. I would experience the same feeling of pride years later when I brought my daughters, Miley and Brandi, onstage to sing with me.

My favorite song in their set was “I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me.” It was the group’s slowest and saddest song. Written by papaw Cyrus, the tune told the story of a man growing up and learning to appreciate what was really important in life. Toward the end, my dad would stop singing and speak the words as a slow recitation. In a plaintive tone that had people hanging on every syllable, he said, “And now I have my own sweet family, a wife and little children dear, and only God knows how I love them, and how I love to have them near.”

That song moved me inside. It moved my spirit. And as I got older, I would ask, “You got Papaw’s song on the list?” I wanted to make sure they were going to perform my favorite.

My dad would smile.

“Yeah, bud, it’s in there. Are you going to sing ‘Swing Down, Sweet Chariot’ with us?”

It’s my impression that the harmony extended to our home. My mom was the hands-on field general. Ruthie wasn’t all that big, but she was tough. She was an expert skeet shooter as well as a seasoned
musician. You know that old saying dynamite comes in small packages? That describes Ruthie, who was both feisty and loving. She never failed to take in a stray animal, feed one of my friends, or nurse a dead plant back to life just by loving it. That said, she never took any shit, either.

My dad was the more laid-back of my two parents and a very wise man. He saw a lesson in just about everything and concluded most of his thoughts by saying, “And the moral of the story is…” I know I inherited a sense of that. Dad was both a friend and a father, the same way I try to be with my kids. He worked hard, often pulling double shifts at the steel mill so that we could make ends meet. Sometimes I would wait up for him, and even though he must have been exhausted, he would get out the Oreos, pour us some cold milk, and watch some cartoons. As I got older, he never failed to ask how I was doing and if I needed something or if there was anything on my mind I wanted to talk about.

To this day, it’s one of the things I miss most. I mean you can have all the conveniences and luxuries money can buy, but you can’t bring back having your dad there when your back is against the wall and you want to talk with someone who knows you better than you know yourself, and knows about life, too. That was my dad.

My brother, Kebo, was side by side with me through the majority of my childhood. Although older than me, he was slight in stature and smaller than most kids his age. He used to get picked on now and then, and I instinctively stuck up for him, even if it was his fault. Conversely, he could talk me into anything. One night, he convinced me that it would be fun to hide in the ditch in the woods, holding a fishing line connected to a plastic baby doll. When a car came around the curve, he told me to pull it across the road.