A COAT OF MANY COLORS
As my mom's band developed into a proper bar band, the music became a little more serious. She had notebooks filled with lyrics and the song structures of the late-'80s country divas. It was around this time that Mom took me to my first concert. We saw the Judds at the Puyallup Fair in Washington State. We absolutely loved the Judds; they would become our second and third concerts as well. I believe the Judds were one of the first important influences on my connection with my mother. I knew subconsciously that I wasn't feminine or lighthearted enough for her¡­but I could sing, and I loved music as much as she did. That was our language.
We heard about a small theater holding auditions for The Northwest Grand Ole Opry Show. We were very familiar with the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and often fantasized about traveling south to see it. My mother had decided that she wanted to try out, so my siblings and I went to Mom's audition. Right before Mom took the stage, a little girl about nine years old strutted out in a yellow frilly dress and sang the shit out of Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors." My mind was blown. This was the first time I realized that kids didn't have to wait until they were grown-ups to follow their dreams and start their lives. I didn't want to be a kid anymore anyway. I always said I did, but I was lying.
I wanted to be a singer.
My mother read my mind. She knew I had made the connection and that I no longer saw singing as something I wanted to do "when I grew up." We started talking about songs and singers all the time, correcting each other's misheard lyrics and complimenting each other's vocal choices. When she had band rehearsals, she was careful not to leave me out. The band would learn one of "my songs," and I'd get to sing at least once a practice.
Very shortly after all that I had my first audition at the Opry. It was just me singing, with my mom's friend Bill Stevenson playing guitar. No one got paid, these were just good people who wanted to play music for anyone in any way possible. It was a very powerful lesson for a young person to learn about what a privilege it is to get to play music even for free.
To my delight, I got a spot in the show and was instructed to practice my song, put together an outfit, and be at a Wednesday-night practice for the performances Friday and Saturday night.
I chose "Tennessee Flat Top Box," a song by Rosanne Cash and written by her father. It was a song about a poor but very talented little dark-haired boy in a south Texas border town (I always imagined him as Mexican) who believed that he could be a country star. He would play his guitar week after week in a tiny Texas cabaret for a crowd of adoring young girls until he disappeared, only to reemerge on the Hit Parade as a big star.
My first real moment onstage came that weekend. I was around eight or nine years old. It was right after Grandpa died. My outfit was mostly homemade, and funnily enough, it was very similar to the kind of thing I'd wear onstage now. Tight black jeans tucked into cowboy boots, a light-blue shirt tucked in with a homemade vest and bolo tie. My great-grandfather on Dad's side loved to find and polish turquoise in Arizona whenever he and my great-grandmother weren't wandering between bluegrass festivals in their motor home playing Dobro. He'd make us bolo ties and vests, hatbands and belt buckles. He made quite a few special things for us to wear onstage as a quiet way of showing his pride in our music. I topped off the whole outfit with a powder-blue cowboy hat that had been bedazzled the night before by my mother.
I still can't bring myself to go out onstage in ordinary clothes¡­I see it as a sign of disrespect to the audience and to the art of entertainment. It's not about having fancy clothes and being rich; it's about communicating to the crowd that you understand the evening is special for them.
The stage door was painted to look like the entrance to a castle, and the backstage had real vanity lights on the "ladies' side." The separation between the crowd and the backstage was bizarrely intoxicating. "Backstage" still has an allure to me. I think that's true for most people. Not everyone gets to be back there. It holds the secrets and it knows what the audience is about to experience when they don't. It's like the anticipation you feel when someone is about to open a really spectacular Christmas present that you put a lot of thought into.
The Opry had an announcer. I'll never forget the sound of my name as I was being called out onstage for the first time. You don't hear your full name for too many reasons when you're a kid. Attendance in school, maybe a stern warning from your parents, but it's not too often that your name is called out like an adult's to do something extraordinary. I still think about it sometimes when I'm introduced to the stage or if I accept an award. It's an honor to hear your name spoken in such a way.
"And now for her Northwest Grand Ole Opry debut, please put your hands together for Brrrandi Carlile!"
The lights created a glare in my glasses, and I couldn't see the crowd of 250 people, but I could feelthem. I knew I had their affection and encouragement¡­The only way I can describe the way that I felt is "safe." I was making myself very vulnerable, but I trusted that part of human nature¡ªthe empathy and support that emerges when someone puts themselves out there. I knew I would always feel most at home in that tension and embrace. The song went too fast and the guitar player stumbled through every musical interlude (to be fair, "Tennessee Flat Top Box" is a tough song), but the applause at the end was the nail in the coffin of any other path I might have gone down in life. I never wanted to leave that stage. Or if I did, it would have been to step down into the audience and just sit with them for the rest of the evening. I wanted to be with the people who I suddenly believed understood me.
I was realizing early on in life that music, for me, was pure joy. For Mom, though, it was stressful and important. She was very proud of me and very supportive, but her own experience was tied up with grief for her father, stress from poverty, even body image. She wouldn't realize this fully until looking at her anxiety-ridden performance photographs years later. You can't hide much when you're onstage. People see you. They see your talent and your flaws, your clothes and your fear. Guilelessness is an imperative gift for any performer, and not everyone comes by it naturally.
My brother, Jay, may have made his debut that night too; I honestly don't remember. I was pretty preoccupied with myself¡­narcissism is such an embarrassing but necessary part of an artist's development. Jay was technically better than me. He regularly stunned our whole family with his superior voice and his ability to pick up and play any instrument. Even his comedic timing was extraordinary! He could play the spoons, guitar, and piano just from visits to family homes that had these things lying around. He could dance with old ladies at weddings and hold his own. He even introduced a new concept to the family called harmony. All this before he was even nine. I had to work much harder to keep up, but I wanted to work harder.
We all started thinking of him as "Little Vern." But Jay was different. Just like for Mom, live performance and music in general were incredibly stressful for him. He would frequently try to get out of participating in family performances to avoid the stress. This became a complicated part of our childhood relationship¡ªI felt like I needed him more than he needed me. I enjoyed the healthy competition and the give-and-take of exchanging new musical skills and influences. But I felt like I was always having to beg him to play with me or even talk with me about music as much as I wanted to. It was confusing and hard for me to accept.
The Carlile family spent several years entrenched in the eccentric Northwest Grand Ole Opry community, and it was transformative for us. The shows just kept coming! There were variety shows and Christmas shows, the Opry and the 'kids'" Opry, and so on.
One of my favorite performances happened unexpectedly when a celebrity came to the Opry one weekend: the legendary country singer Dottie West's daughter, who was a country star in her own right, Shelly West. She had a hit country song on the radio called "Jose Cuervo"¡ªI called it "The Fightin' Song." My mom was scheduled to open for her on the big stage. The three of us¡ªJay, Tiffany, and me¡ªwere gonna join in during Mom's set. Coordinated outfits had been made for our guest appearance onstage. The problem was that on the day Shelly was set to arrive, she allegedly told the folks at the Opry that she didn't want another woman opening the show. To be fair, they both had the exact same haircut. This was one of my earliest glimpses into institutionalized female competitiveness.
I don't want to put words into Mom's mouth, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume she was incredibly relieved and had probably made herself sick with nerves leading up to the show. She offered me up as her replacement, and I was going to get to sing multiple songs in a row! I basically got to sing every song I had ever learned that night, and we all got our picture taken with Shelly West.
Shelly sang her hit song about kissing cowboys and starting fights, and I watched with my mom from the back of the room near the soundboard. I was manic, explaining to my mom how incredibly possible it all was! The divide between the woman onstage who had a hit song on the radio and me wasn't really that great. We had just shared the same stage¡­and the audience wasn't clapping any louder for her than they did for me. Plus we were both in tiny Auburn, Washington, weren't we? My mom leaned down and whispered in my ear about something called a "composer." She told me that she had just met one and he had two "original" songs that he wanted her to sing.
This was an unsettling revelation. I had never thought about where songs come from. They came from the radio. You learn them, write them down in your notepad, ask a musician to learn the chords¡­and then you sing them. I thought they belonged to allof us. Now I was having to wrap my head around the concept that once someone records a song, it's only an "original" to them. Everyone else is just acting¡­I was dissatisfied with that. I knew I needed to find one of these composer people to write me an original, but I had no idea how.
My brother had a red acoustic guitar that someone had won for him at the fair¡ªthe kind of cheap toy you get by throwing darts at a balloon.