From Shelly Fabian,
Your Guide to Country Music.
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The moment Gretchen Wilson set foot on the stage she felt as though she was having an out-of-body experience, but it was when she stepped into the infamous circle where Patsy Cline had stood years before that she really felt like she “was floating around the room,” watching the unforgettable experience unfold. “It wasn’t even real,” she remembers. “It was like I wasn’t even in my own skin. It was so completely dead silent in there that you could almost hear yourself breathing.” Though it was barely more than a whisper, Gretchen inherently found herself singing “If You’ve Got Leaving On Your Mind.” She couldn’t help herself and singing that particular song seemed like the natural thing to do. “I felt like I had an audience in there,” she recalls. “It was really weird. It was totally empty and nothing but wood pews. It was like I was singing to a room full of ghosts.”

It goes without saying that Gretchen won’t ever forget the chilly November night last year when she stood on the stage of the historic Ryman Auditorium – if only for a matter of minutes – but at that moment she was living out a fantasy. “We were flying,” she explains. “It was one of those things where you wake up the next day and it’s just like, ‘did I dream that? Did that really happen?’” Much like Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, it was as if the Illinois native had clicked her heels together. Rather than not being in Kansas anymore, she was the furthest she’d ever been from her own childhood back in Bond County.

Born and raised in rural Pocahontas – located 36 miles due east of St. Louis along Interstate 70, where numerous trailer parks are clustered among corn fields and pig farms – life in the ’70s and ‘80s resembled anything but a dream for Gretchen.

Well, I ain’t never been the Barbie doll type/ no, I can’t swig that sweet Champagne, I’d rather drink beer all night/ in a tavern or in a honky tonk or on a four-wheel drive tailgate/ I’ve got posters on my wall of Skynyrd, Kid and Strait

Her mother was merely 16 years old when she had Gretchen, and her father, unfortunately, had moved on with his life by the time she was two. In a town, population 727, where a woman is lucky to work as a waitress in a greasy spoon diner like the Powhatan Restaurant, the common gathering point where Pokey Road intersects I-70. Across the parking lot from the restaurant sits the 12-room single-story Powhatan Motel. Its only competitors – Tahoe Motel and Lighthouse Lodge – sit across the way, as does Denny’s Auto Service, T/G Antique Mall and Jackie’s Country Store Gifts. Other than that, exit 36 doesn’t offer much to the casual passersby – “It’s basic, but it’s real. It’s me” – and even the locals, at times, are hard to come by, but it’s a place where everyone seems to know one another. More importantly, they not only know you by name, but they also know your kinfolk as well as all your business.

“I wish I could say I’ve traveled more than I have,” says Gretchen, “but I pretty much stayed in one region and I’m sure there are a lot of places like it. To me it just seems so normal around there. It’s my home. It’s where I grew up. The faces around there look like my kind of people. I look at faces in other parts of the country and I don’t get it right off the bat, but I look at anybody up there and it just looks like home.”

Some people look down on me, but I don’t give a rip/ I’ll stand barefooted in my own front yard with a baby on my hip/ ‘cause I’m a redneck woman/ I ain’t no high class broad/ I’m just a product of my raising/ I say, ‘hey ya’ll’ and ‘yee-haw’/ and I keep my Christmas lights on/ on my front porch all year long/ and I know all the words to every Charlie Daniels song/ so here’s to all my sisters out there keeping it country/ let me get a big ‘hell yeah’ from the redneck girls like me, hell yeah

As one could only imagine, being the daughter of a teenage mother – “my mom made a lot of mistakes, but she was young” – life was stressful, to say the least. Whenever they couldn’t “make rent,” which was every few months, they packed up what little belongings they owned – “there were times we only had a little bit and times we didn’t have anything, but she always made sure that we had love” – and moved on down the road only to find yet another trailer. The steady course for Gretchen and her younger brother Josh, however, were their grandparents, the late Vernon and Frances Heuer. Vernon, an Army veteran, was a crotchety old man who lost a leg in World War II. A product of the Depression Era, he obviously “didn’t trust banks much” and so he sacked away his earnings in a “mason jar that he kept buried in the backyard.” Frances, on the other hand, was a peaceful woman. She loved her kids; she loved her grandchildren and, in spite of Vernon’s mean spirit, she loved her husband. And, truth be told, he loved her.