Prelude to Nashville

I've blogged the story of the White Water Band. When I left the group in the summer between my junior and senior years, I decided that the next year I would go to college and major in music, even though I would have been playing flute only two years at that point. Sometime in spring of 1977, the spring of my senior year, I traveled to Greenville, North Carolina, to audition for the music program there. I didn't get in. So, sometime later that spring I auditioned to get into the music program at Mars Hill College, just a few miles from home, and I made it. I spent the next two-and-a-half years as a flute major at MHC. I had a darn good time, and I learned a lot about music.

All the time I was writing songs.

After my trip to Europe in the summer of 1979--have I blogged that?--I entered fall semester of my junior year at Mars Hill. The previous spring, I'd played what was called my "jury," I believe, to determine what path my two remaining years of music study would take. I desperately wanted to be a performance major instead of moving into the high school band director path. Believe it or not, after only four years of playing, the last two with a wonderful MHC flute teacher named Dr. Joyce Bryant, I made performance major! In my greater dreams I would be a world famous solo flutist, recording and touring for the rest of my life. In my lesser dreams, I would be a first-chair flutist in the symphony orchestra of some large city.

All the time I was writing songs.

I guess something happened to me that summer in Europe. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I began to see myself and my life differently as I encountered people and places so different and removed from my own experience. Maybe it was that night when I borrowed a guitar from the house band and "Stairway to Heaven" in an outdoor restaurant in the hills above Rome. Again, I'm not sure what it was.

What I am sure of was that when I returned to Mars Hill College in Fall 1979, I began to think differently. I faced up to the realization that I simply didn't have the dexterity in my fingers even to be last-chair flutist in the symphony orchestra of a medium-sized city. I could play slow stuff beautifully, but that was the best I had to offer. Not being able to face the idea of being a band director, I began to look around. The Europe trip seemed to have opened me up to the possibility of living somewhere besides Madison County, North Carolina, so I was ready when I saw a newspaper article about the Music Business Program at Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee.

I looked closely at the article, maybe sent off to the school for some information and an application. These came, and I applied. Sometime in early December, I think, I broke the news to my family and friends, to Dr. Bryant and others that I was leaving Mars Hill and beginning studies as a Music Business major at Belmont come January 1980. I don't remember getting anything but support in this decision. Although I might have forgotten some arguments or heated discussions, all I remember from my parents was the total love and commitment they always showed me.

I remember spending a rainy New Year's Eve on the telephone with a bunch of my friends from the previous summer's Europe trip. (I was in North Carolina, and several of them had gathered in southern California.) Then only a day or two after New Year's Day 1980, I packed up my Ford Pinto stationwagon and headed out for Nashville.