Published May 10, 2021 at 11:26 AM EDT Listen • 36:30
Photo by Stephania Orru
Like the prophets of biblical times, music artists have often found it hard to gain acceptance in the places they came from. There is a heartbreaking scene in the documentary Every Night’s A Saturday Night: The Bobby Keys Story where the sax player famous for his time in The Rolling Stones sits outside his former high school, unable to bring himself to go to his old classmates’ reunion decades after leaving his small town of Slaton, Texas. Another example is my home town’s native son, Don Gibson, who left Shelby, North Carolina being thought of as pretty much a nobody that dropped out of school in the second grade before he went on to become a successful artist and one of the most celebrated song writers in country music history.