long, you know.
I know what you mean. Time is a funny thing. So we worked a lot. We worked pretty hard, you know, writing songs. We were doing a lit- tle radio show at WLOC in Mumfordville, Kentucky, called The Chitlin Show. We’d cut some demos and we did a showcase, I’m thinkin’ it was the end of ’88 at Douglas Cor- ner, and we had some interest. What hap- pened, we did a little cassette tape of Pickin’ on Nashville. Back then, you know, CDs were just coming in, so , the medium would be ei- ther vinyl or cassette tape so we decided on tape. This gentleman gave us enough money to go into the studio and cut eight songs, and we were selling this little cassette out on the road. Then we did a showcase at Douglas Cor- ner for CBS Records, who actually passed on us, but Harold Shed from Mercury Records was there and he took a real immediate inter- est in us. He took a cassette with him, and next thing you know… I heard the other day that he told somebody, he said three songs into our set he said ‘I’m gonna sign that band right there.’” And he didn’t know who we were. So by Spring of ’89 we had paperwork going and we signed our deal, around May or June of ’89, and the album came out in Octo- ber of 1989.
And that album, Pickin’ on Nashville, yielded the hit “Dumas Walker,” right? Yeah.
It went thru the roof, didn’t it? Yes, it did. I call my house the “Dumas Walker Estate.” “The House that Dumas Bought.” (Both laughing) Yeah, you know, initially it was about a gentleman. It was about two different places. It was about Dumas Walker, who had like a little package store on the Tennessee/Kentucky line in Moss, Tennessee. And it was also about a lit- tle place up in Greensburg, called The Greasy
Spoon that served slawburgers, fries, and a bottle of ‘skey. We just combined this song about two different places, you know, and Dumas Walker seemed to sing better and Harold. Initially we weren’t real keen on keeping it on the album because it was so re- gional and localized. But we reasoned that every community had a little place like this and it had such a sing-songy, hooky kind of chorus that people just gravitated to it, you know, and it was a hit. I mean it just took off and sold that album, you know.
Yeah, you know the music part of it too, I remember at the time, I was a DJ in some club somewhere for a while, and when I played that thing people would line dance, line dance, line dance, line dance! It’s like Dick Clark, “It’s got a great beat and I can dance to it!” Oh, absolutely! Got a great groove, just a nice little shuffle you know, and it worked.
And I guess you guys have never played a gig since then without playing that song? I mean, it’s like, they gotta hear it! Right. If we haven’t played that song it’s only because we’ve done a TV show where we were doing new songs or something like that, but if we did a show and we didn’t do “Dumas Walker,” we’d be in a lot of trouble. (Laughs)
It’s a lot like Skynyrd not playing “Free Bird,” you know?
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