crowd. I can’t take it anymore. I’m too old. I’m liable to get a little claustrophobic, too. (Both Laugh)
So were you born and raised in Atlanta? No, I was born in Lynette, Alabama, which is just about 12 miles North of Auburn. Chambers County. It’s 82 miles orsomething like that… south of Atlanta. Down I-85. Growing up, when I got into my teen years, I
was playing in bars and VFW’s and stuff like that around Lynette and you had to play covers, you know? And when I got out of high school I thought, “Well I wanna go where you can form a band and write your own stuff.” And Atlanta was the closest place. And I had a bunch of other friends who were taking off before I did, maybe a couple of years older. So that was like a dream. I thought, “Yeah, I’m gonna graduate from high school and get out of here. Move to Atlanta.”
Well, yeah. I’m interested in guitar too because I play myself. At what age did you start playing guitar and who would you say were your earliest musical influ- ences. I mean, not just guitar, but over- all? Well my first influence on guitar was my dad. He was a bluegrass guitar player. And he bought me my first little cheap guitar when I was six, because I think he got tired of me banging his around, you know? I’ve always wanted to play - as soon as I was big enough to grab one, I wanted to play it. He would play it for me all the time. He would sit and play and sing old traditional songs, you know? He was a very religious man too so he sang a lot of gospel, and he taught me a lot of those songs on the guitar. He was my first influence, you know. He taught me the “cowboy chords” the three chords, “G, C and D” that you need to play a song. The chords that you need to play a song successfully. And then I was always surrounded
by that. My grandmother’s brothers were in a gospel quartet called The Suwannee River Boys. They formed in I think, in like 1939.
I remember them. I used to be a gospel DJ. I remember hearing them. Ok, yeah. That’s Buford and Merle Abner, my great uncles. So music was always around, you know. And, that’s what we did - we gathered around the piano and played and sang, and then when I got to be a little older, like 11 or 12, my mother and father were divorced so I split time between my mom and dad. Here’s my dad and my grandmother with gospel music and bluegrass traditional-type songs, you know. The standards that I was learning. And then my mom liked the Stones and the Beatles and Bob Dylan. It’s funny, when I got a little older and I bought an electric guitar and I had friends, they didn’t like bluegrass or country music, they liked Led Zeppelin. So I started, especially with the Stones, specifically with the Stones, with “Honky Tonk Women.” I remember thinking,
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