Keith Whitley went to Nashville 3 1/2 years ago and recorded a song country music fans now know well: ”Does Ft. Worth Ever Cross Your Mind.” The problem was, he recorded it only on a tape he submitted to RCA Records.
After his RCA contract was signed and plans for his first album were proceeding, producer Norro Wilson decided against songs about Texas. So the writer of ”Ft. Worth” asked if he could use Whitley`s demonstration tape to pitch the song to George Strait. Whitley said sure.
A few months later, Whitley`s mother called him. She had a copy of the RCA demonstration tape, and she was calling to say she had heard his record of ”Ft. Worth” on the radio. Whitley laughs.
”No you didn`t, Mom,” he recalls replying. ”You heard George Strait`s.”
”That`s how close it was,” he goes on. ”It sounded as if they said going into the session, `Let`s cut it as close to this demo as we can.`
Because Strait had never sounded that way on any of his records before.”
The experience was particularly galling because by then Whitley had been chastised by record reviewers. They said his first RCA recording, a mini-LP titled ”Hard Act To Follow,” sounded too much like the late, great Lefty Frizzell. Then when Strait`s ”Ft. Worth” came out and became a huge hit, they waxed enthusiastic, saying it ”paid tribute” to Frizzell.
Whitley shakes his head with an amusement that is greater in retrospect.
”I thought, `Why couldn`t they say that about me?` ” he remembers. ”I mean, he learned to sing that way from me. He wasn`t paying tribute to Lefty; he was paying tribute to ME.”
This all happened a couple of years ago, and things since have changed dramatically. In the last 18 months, capitalizing on a pop-ish hit titled
”Miami, My Amy,” Whitley has made himself an eminently solid touring act, then gone on to take control of his recording destiny.
He recently initiated an unusual RCA move to let him scrap a so-so, previously recorded album and record a forthcoming, third LP that is not only his career`s finest but also one of country music`s best of the year.
”I felt the whole ballgame depended on this one,” he explains.
”We had sold a lot of copies of the `Miami` album without being racked by some of the big distributors. I figured we were going to get racked by them this time, and I knew if we didn`t put out the kind of album I needed, we might not get another shot.”
So he went to RCA-Nashville boss Joe Galante, told him he didn`t think the material he and producer Blake Mevis had recorded was good enough, and asked for release from Mevis, with whom he had been associated on the
”Miami” LP.
Who Whitley is, in a musical sense, has been an intriguing question for some time. A native of Sandy Hook, Ky., his first national reputation was made in bluegrass music where, in his teens and 20s, he stunned people as a vocalist with Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys and J.D. Crowe & the New South.
But he had always wanted to be a country rather than a bluegrass singer, he says. In fact, he got into bluegrass because there was a shortage of country bands in Sandy Hook. He ended up trapped in a bluegrass stardom while watching fellow young country traditionalists, such as John Anderson and his friend and onetime bluegrass colleague, Ricky Skaggs-grab the country limelight in the early `80s.
In Nashville, he first had to battle the bluegrass identification. Then, after the hard-country ”Hard Act To Follow” mini-LP failed to dent the hit charts, he suddenly scored a big hit with the unlikely pop ballad ”Miami”
and further confused observers. Fans could hardly be blamed for having no fix on his position; he had trouble finding it himself.
”I knew what I liked and what I wanted to do, but I didn`t know how to do it,” he recalls. ”It may have had something to do with the big circle I had had to make to get into country music.”
A persistent observation kept goading him. After ”Miami,” he remembers, fans continually approached him at shows and said, ”We`re so happy to see you have the success you`ve had, and we can`t wait for you to do some of those GOOD songs like we used to hear you sing.”
These ”GOOD songs,” he knew, were the really country ones, and he wanted to do more of them, too-with a fresh sound. This desire finally impelled him to request separation from Mevis, who never ”saw me the same way I see me.”
The ”me” who emerges on the new album is a vocalist of not only great range and power but also obvious maturity, infusing soul equally into heartfelt ballads and uptempo stompers, hard-country masterpieces (such as Lefty Frizzell`s great ”I Never Go Around Mirrors”) and more contemporary things.
He never could have achieved such a performance, though, without the courage to gamble and change his situation. It came from two changes he made in his private life soon after ”Miami” had begun to change his public one.
”When I came to Nashville, my personal life went to hell,” he recalls.
”I had 10 or 12 professional years on the road before I came to Nashville, and I had learned to do things the way the oldtimers did. Given that and the people who had most influenced me musically, I thought everybody had to drink to be in this business.
”That was all well and good for years, but in most cases it will catch up with you. Where it caught up with me was the two years that I had to just sit and wait by the phone for something to happen while I was trying to get my record deal. I got a little farther into it than I realized I was.”
His marriage disintegrated before he finally began trying to control his thirst. To go onstage without the customary shots of Old Courage, he had to learn to perform ”all over again.”
His determination to do so, though, was so strong that after he had stopped drinking, he sought rehabilitative treatment to try to make it stick
This change might never have stuck had he not made another one. He renewed an acquaintance with Lorrie Morgan, the Grand Ole Opry`s most impressive young female singer (as well as a new addition to RCA`s artist roster), and marriage swiftly followed.
”We met when I first came to town, over at Acuff-Rose studio where I was doing some vocal overdubs,” he remembers.
”Ron Gant of Acuff-Rose was producing Lorrie at the time, so she happened to be there. I was married, and we probably didn`t say more than two words to each other, but I had this real strong attraction to her.”
Time passed, and his private troubles mounted. Besides his divorce, his older brother, Randy, died in a motorcycle accident and, at the end of his rope, he finally began fighting the bottle.
After ”really boozing it up pretty bad,” he unexpectedly pulled himself together enough to be able to go to the 1986 Academy of Country Music Awards show in Hollywood, where he made an impressive appearance.
He then returned home to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where Morgan entered his life.
”She came up to me at the Opry and re-introduced herself-as if it was necessary for her to,” he recalls.
”I think I spilled my guts to her there in about 10 seconds, told her I was divorced and that we had to go to dinner and so on. It turned out she was a big fan of my singing; she had all the records I had done with J.D. Crowe.
