Pocahontas Proud : Part 1

Redneck Woman: Stories from My Life
by Gretchen Wilson, Allen Rucker

Gretchen Wilson may be one of country music's hottest stars, but unlike most people living a rags-to-riches fairy tale, she doesn't play down her humble beginnings. Born to a teenage mother in southern Illinois and raised on stock car races and bar brawls, Gretchen grew up surrounded by women who knew that if something was worth having, it was worth fighting for. And if that meant an actual knock-down, drag-out, then a real woman took her earrings out and got down to it.

One thing Gretchen never had to fight for, though, was her voice. From impromptu performances in the aisles of Kmart as a small girl to her teenage years as a bar singer, Gretchen belted out the tunes whenever opportunity arose, and never pretended not to know she had pipes. In her early twenties, those pipes carried her to Nashville, where she joined the throng of dreamers looking to hit the big time in Music City. There she continued singing in bars, where she was discovered by a group of talented misfits who called themselves the MuzikMafia.

Finding friends was just the first step on a rocky path to superstardom. Gretchen continued to work on her craft and pursue her dream until one day, to no one's surprise more than her own, she found herself shaking hands on a record deal with the president of Sony Music Nashville. Now, two smash hit albums and multiple awards later, Gretchen tells her tale in a no-nonsense style that shows the world what a redneck woman really is.

Chapter 1

I'm the biggest thing that ever came from my hometown And I'll be damned if I'm gonna let'em down If it's the last thing I do before they lay me in the ground You know I'm gonna make Pocahontas proud.

I grew up in the southern part of Illinois, a kind of no-man's-land between St. Louis on the west and the Indiana border on the east. The land is flat, as flat as Iowa or western Kansas. The horizon is broken by an occasional silo or water tower but otherwise is endless. There are plenty of cornfields and dairy farms, interrupted by small town after small town with names like Pierron, Dudleyville, Greenville, Edwardsville, Millersburg, and Pocahontas. Some of these towns are so small that their inhabitants just say they're from a particular county, like Bond County or Madison County. Pocahontas doesn't even have a grocery store. Pierron doesn't have a gas station or stoplight. I guess the four hundred people or so who live there don't need to stop that much.

Travelers whiz by on Interstate 70 from St. Louis to Indianapolis and rarely stop and investigate the places or the people who live within a stone's throw of that highway. A common saying is, no one comes to Pocahontas who doesn't already live there. It's part of a rural society that looks inward to the lives of its neighbors and not outward to the life of the world.

Although Illinois fought for the North in the Civil War, the area of Illinois that I'm from feels a lot more like the South. The region is very close in distance to Southern strongholds like Kentucky and Tennessee, much closer than it is to Chicago and the upper Midwest. The speech is Southern-people say "carn" for corn, "fark" for fork, and "arwl" for oil. The name of the Interstate is Highway "Farty," not Forty. More importantly, the outlook is more Southern than Northern. The people there feel a part of the great traditional Southern culture that has now made huge inroads into every part of America-country music, stock car racing, pickup trucks, and Jack Daniel's whiskey. If you think about it, the South really did rise again, and is still rising, in ways no one could have predicted.

My mom, Christine, gave birth to her only daughter, Gretchen Frances Wilson, when she was sixteen. My father, who I didn't really meet until I was twelve years old, was a local boy she had married at fifteen. Her main reason for marriage, she says, was to get out of her childhood household and escape from a tyrannical father. She dropped out of school in the beginning of the tenth grade and now claims she didn't have much time for school even when she went because of the demands her father put on her-everything from babysitting her younger brother, Vern, to moving rock piles for one of her dad's many landscaping projects. She soon tired of her new husband (my father) because, even as a teenager, she was forced to work two jobs-waitressing and housecleaning- while he was struggling to find one.

She left my biological father after two years and soon met up with her second husband, my stepfather, who to this day she rightly refers to as "the dark one." At the time of their marriage, my mom was eighteen and he was twenty-eight. He was a smooth operator, the kind of charmer who could talk anyone into anything. He talked my beautiful, blond, adventurous teenage mom into marriage and made her life-and much of my life-a living hell for the next sixteen years.

My mom married my stepfather for stability and he was anything but stable. He made his living as an itinerant, selfemployed contractor and builder-anything from bricklaying to deck-building-and he knew a hundred ways to often talk people out of their money. He would bid a job, for instance, take half the money up front for materials, buy half the materials, do half the work, and then just take off with the rest of the money. And he'd often do this to people who didn't have the wherewithal to find him. There were always a lot of angry people looking for him.

In my mom's words, he was a master at "playing the role." One way or another, he was always making money but he could waste it on pursuing the next job as fast as he made it. At the end of the day, he never had anything to show for it.

Soon after her second marriage, my mom had another child, my stepbrother, half-brother, Josh, who I now just call my brother since we've been so close for so long. Because of my stepfather's methods of doing business, we were always moving. My stepfather would be ready to walk away from a job half-done or maybe the rent became due on the trailer or apartment we were living in at the moment, and it would be pack-up-and-get-out time. My mom would pack Josh and me, along with the dog and cat and a few meager belongings, into her beat-up Ford Escort and away we would go. Sometimes we'd only go ten miles, from one little town to another, rent another trailer with nothing more than my stepfather's solemn promise to pay the rent after he got his first paycheck from a job he only claimed to have.

So we were always moving on, always running from debt, never having enough money to stop, plant roots, and live a normal life. I spent a large part of my childhood on the move, never really sure which unfurnished rental unit to call home. Moving was our principal family activity. We moved an average of every three or four months from the time my mom met the dark one until the time I took off on my own at age fifteen. I'm from Pocahontas, but I have lived in some form of temporary residence in Collinsville, Edwardsville, Belleville, Troy, St. Jacob, Greenville, Millersburg, Pierron, and Glen Carbon, all towns in the same general area. Consequently I kept switching school districts every time we moved. Even within one school year, I might find myself as the new kid in class in three or four different elementary or junior high schools. I probably attended twenty different schools from the time I began kindergarten until I finally quit in the beginning of the ninth grade. For both Josh and me, it was an endlessly crazy existence.

Life in rural Illinois is tough even if you're not moving every five minutes and running scams to stay alive. Everybody there struggles. Outside of farming, which is one of the hardest lives imaginable, there isn't much around there that could pass for a local economy. The best you can hope for, if you don't feel tied to the place and the people, is to latch on to some kind of skill or career that can take you out of there.

Copyright © 2006 by Gretchen Wilson

About the Author

Gretchen Wilson's first album, Here for the Party, debuted at #1 on the Billboard country chart, and she received a Grammy in 2004 for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. She lives in Nashville with her daughter, Grace.

Allen Rucker was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and has an MA in Communication from Stanford University, an MA in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a BA in English from Washington University, St. Louis.