RUSSELL GULLEY
From JACKSON HIGHWAY to HOWARD FINSTER and Beyond
by Michael Buffalo Smith Down around Ft. Payne , Alabama, you will
find all sorts of remnants from a band that once ruled the world and the Hot Country charts. A band called Alabama. But if you look closer, you will also discover a musician, songwriter and arts advocate whose claim to fame rolled around sev- eral years before Randy Owen and the boys busted out of the Myrtle Beach Bowery, Russell Gulley
Russell, tell us about where you were born and raised, and also about your first ex- posure to music and earliest influ- ences. I was born Nov. 16th, 1947 in Rome, Ga., grew up in a Pentecostal family and raised in Fort Payne, Alabama, so the church choir was my first exposure to music. Mom sang in church. My father, called “Red,” a furniture de-
signer and wood shop foreman for a local manufacturer, introduced me (via records) to such musicians as Jimmie Rodgers, The Chuck Wagon Gang, Les Paul and Mary Ford and others. It was Mom’s first husband, a man named Vince “Little Joe” Stanley, the first electric Steel Guitar Player in our county, and his son, my half-brother, Bobby, that taught me my first lessons on guitar…very brief ones. They were Honky-Tonkers and
Mom would only let me and my brother Den- nis play in church, so Gospel Music was the first music I played. Early on, I of course saw Elvis on the Ed Sulli- van Showon TV, Jerry Lee Lewis on Ameri- can Bandstand, and I became fascinated with anything that came out on Sun Records, espe- cially Jerry Lee. Later in my teens, of course the Beatles came on the Sullivan show and I moved into the rock era.
How and when was Jackson Highway formed? In my teens, I started traveling regionally and recording with a Gospel group, The Howell Family, for Lonzo and Oscar’s record label in Nashville. That gave me a desire to be a pro- fessional, so after a tour in Vietnam as a draftee I came home and started traveling with a rock band. We backed several artists, such as Ronnie Dove and Ray Petterson, and while touring with a soul singer named Ruby Winters, I began to write songs. In fact I’d been writing for a while, but while working with Ruby, my brother, Dennis, who was working with a band that was auditioning for Jimmy Johnson at Muscle Shoals Sound, de- moed some of my songs. None of his band was writing at the time. Johnson wanted the songwriter, so I was called to audition myself. That audition led to my being signed to
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