the house. He sang Hank Williams, Sr. songs and played an acoustic guitar that my dad bought from him later that day for $5 and gave to me. Not long after that, another of my Dad’s employees, a black barrel house piano player named Henry, played in our living room. I was totally fascinated and bitten by the blues at a young age.
Tell me about your early experience as a musician, your influences, bands you played in? At around age 10, The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, and that put me over the edge. I re- member hooking up with some friends around my little town and us all playing and singing through one Fender Twin amp. I wrote simple songs on my open tuned acoustic and cut a single at age 13 in Wilm- ington, NC which got airplay on the local AM radio station. As a teenager in the summer I worked
the graveyard shift at a gas station and would listen to an AM Nashville blues station. That station exposed me to Muddy Waters, BB King and Ray Charles – which expanded my natural influences of country and bluegrass. In high school, I met my friend Richard Bell from a nearby town; he re-strung his right handed bass and taught me my first notes. We formed a band named Heather (after a girl he knew) in 1969 and we are still per- forming together in Eastern NC to this day.
Tell the story of your meeting up and joining the Outlaws in 1976. At that time I was with a band from Mel- bourne, FL called Fresh Squeezed and we were performing our last gigs in Tampa at a little club called The Depot. My friend Wally Dentz, a fantastic bassist and harp player who went on to play with the Bellamy Brothers, called me. He said this band called The Out- laws was needing a bass player and he couldn’t do it because his band named Tight Shoes was on the cusp of a record deal. He
told me he had given them my name. I had not heard of The Outlaws, but at our Friday gig at The Depot, Henry Paul and Monte Yoho showed up and introduced themselves. They spent the evening listening to the band and at the end of the night they asked me if I would come and audition the next afternoon. I said sure, then frantically called Wally and told him. He invited me over to his house and gave me the first two Outlaws albums and highlighted four songs he knew were in their live set. I spent most of that same night learn- ing these four tunes, and went to the audition on Saturday afternoon.
The audition went well and I think the
chemistry was good from the start. They were very welcoming and nice, and on Sunday Henry called and asked if I would be inter- ested in joining the band. Fresh Squeeze had ended the night before, and since I had just intended on returning to NC, the timing was perfect. On Monday afternoon, we started three days of intense rehearsal. Thursday we traveled to Birmingham, AL for my first Out- laws gig at a local minor league baseball sta- dium. Suddenly I was on a stage before 12k people opening for my heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd and Johnny Winter. That was my first realization that The Outlaws were as big a band as they were. It was both frightening and terribly exciting for a 22-year-old country boy.
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