Campbell, was our first drummer and that was the first Winters Brothers Band. That was about 1974 then we got to the point where we got decent guitars and amps and we picked up our first gig with that band in Greenville, North Carolina in 1975. We didn’t even have a contract, but it was fun. We ended up making some friends and meeting some bands. After that we got a little more serious. We played a school’s out party at Fair Park in Nashville. But since we weren’t making any money, the band members changed from time to time. We first met Charlie Daniels when Dad was
doing some recording with Marty and Charlie was one of the guitar players on the session. Charlie already had a couple of records out by then. And dad started talking to him and told him that we were looking to get into this new thing called Southern Rock and asked if Char- lie would give us an audience, so to speak, and tell us where we needed to go for man- agement, booking, recording and stuff. Char- lie and his wife Hazel invited us into their home one evening and Dennis and I sat down and played him a couple of songs on acoustic guitars and he liked what he heard. We asked him if he’d be interested in producing us since he’d produced some stuff. He said he was getting real busy working on this new album he was working on called Fire On The Mountain but that his keyboard player, Taz DiGregorio, might be interested. We had seen Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker Band, The Outlaws, and Grinderswitch live a few times and we liked their music and thought that was the direction we’d like to go. So we thought working with Taz would be good. Taz worked with us, getting us ready to be
on stage and work with any kind of situation that might come up. He made us learn our songs backwards and forwards so that even if the lights went out we could keep on playing. That’s something I credit Taz with is getting us to the point where we were a professional
band. We were never signed with Capricorn but
we did record two records there. Dick Woo- ley, who had a record company called Rabbit Records was a former vice president with Capricorn, introduced us to Phil Walden and all his staff.
I have always been obsessed with the history of the Volunteer Jams. You played many. Tell us about what it was
like. Please include any anecdotes or happy memories. The first Volunteer Jam Dennis and I bought our tickets and went to the first one in 1974 at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville. That’s when we fell in love with the live as- pects of Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, All- man Brothers, The Outlaws and anybody that was doing our kind of music at that time. We had a great time and that’s when we really de- cided to pursue the Southern Rock thing. By the time the second one (at MTSU)
rolled around we had started working with Taz and had backstage passes and Charlie asked us if we wanted to come up and jam, but we didn’t have our guitars and we were
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