A few years ago, rising Nashville singer Billy Dean spent a short, unhappy but ultimately pivotal stint on a basketball scholarship at East Central Junior College in Decatur, Miss.
It was a commuter institution, Dean recalls, and its weekend population consisted mostly of imported scholarship athletes with neither the money nor the transportation to escape.
Dean amused himself by writing songs that later provided his entry into Nashville, but finally, in frustration, he took a page from the autobiography of Merle Haggard.
”I was a Haggard fanatic and had read his book, and it talked about him hoboing around on trains,” remembers Dean, who is scheduled to perform Dec. 5 at the Cubby Bear, 1059 W. Addison St.
”I was sick of college, tired of being trapped in this place, so I decided I was going to hop a train and go to Bakersfield, Calif., to meet Haggard. I went down to this little train yard on a Sunday afternoon or something, and as a train took off, I jumped on it. I was scared to death.
”The train went a mile or so to the other side of Decatur, dumped its load, then turned around and came a mile back. That`s as far as it ran. I guess they don`t go more than two or three miles anymore.”
With two big country hits in a row in ”Only Here for a Little While”
and ”Somewhere in My Broken Heart”-and with a third, ”You Don`t Count the Cost,” just entering the charts` loftiest reaches-Dean no longer is looking for a way out.
Having leapt into show-opening slots with such high-profile names as the Judds, the Oak Ridge Boys, Clint Black and even Haggard, the 29-year-old says audiences have gotten so enthusiastic that he now walks onto stages reluctant ”to open my mouth.
”I`m afraid I might spoil it,” he adds.
Dean`s caution is understandable. He is a performer who has worked his way up through Nashville`s songwriting ranks. He`s also no clone of the scene`s current stereotypical Neo-traditional Hat Act.
His music embodies country ideas-love, family, kids, etc.-through sensitive lyrics and Adult Contemporary instrumentation.
The most pleasant thing about this kind of music is that it came out of Dean himself.
”I`m a country person, grew up in the country with country roots, and my whole way of looking at things is from an average person`s point of view,” he says.
”But I don`t like simple music. I never have been comfortable writing a song and having to do it in three chords so the radio will play it. I always thought that was crazy. I`ve spent all my life learning how to play, so why can`t my music use what I`ve learned?”
Born and reared in Quincy, Fla., a town in the Sunshine State`s northwestern agricultural section, Dean cut his musical teeth on his father`s collection of country records by Marty Robbins and Jim Reeves. He also first performed with his father`s country band.
His two albums, ”Young Man” and ”Billy Dean,” contain a lot of nostalgic songs about a happy childhood, but the reality of his own was less idyllic. His father, who had forsaken dreams of a big-time music career, became crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and was unable to hold the heavy construction jobs he had had. Dean`s mother ended up working seven days a week to pay the bills.
Their son played all sports until his junior year of high school, then focused on basketball as a way of getting to college. He soon regretted going to college: ”I already knew what I wanted to do,” Dean says. After six months, he quit his academic education to continue his musical one, playing in bands around the Gulf Coast.
Then he headed for Nashville.
”We had a songwriter from my hometown, Michael Foster, who wrote `Heart of Mine` for the Oak Ridge Boys,” he says. ”He had a record deal and everything, and I guess I figured if he could make it in Nashville, I could probably give it a shot.
”I entered the Wrangler Country Starsearch in south Georgia and won the local and then the state. The finals were held in Nashville, and some of the judges-Frances Preston of BMI, Martha Sharp of Warner Bros. and Jim Reeves`
widow, Mary Reeves-gave me a lot of encouragement to move up here. So I did.” That was 1983. Thanks to his lonely college weekends, he had a tape of original songs he could play for Nashville publishers, and he quickly found a booking agent.
As can happen in Nashville, his new contract was not made in heaven. Dean soon found himself with seven other musicians in a station wagon pulling a U- Haul trailer; they were booked to play a three-week gig in North Dakota.
”The trip was so gruesome that I took every bit of the money I made for the three weeks and bought me a plane ticket home,” he recalls. ”I wasn`t about to ride back in that station wagon.
”On the last night, the club owner gave us two or three cases of beer and two or three gallons of wine, and about 50 miles outside of North Dakota the station wagon ran hot, and there was no water, and they ended up having to pour beer and wine into the radiator.
”I, meanwhile, was sitting with my cocktail and my peanuts on my plane. I was broke, but at least I wasn`t going through that.”
Bankrolling his Nashville activities with periodic forays home to capitalize on a Florida following, he soon was signed as a writer by SBK Songs.
In the mid-`80s, he cowrote a song that Shelly West recorded. As he went along he got a few other cuts, including one on a big-selling album by Randy Travis.
For the most part, however, he found that although most of his best work produced favorable reactions, nobody could think of any established performer to pitch it to.
”That`s when I really started pursuing the artist career,” he says. ”I said to myself, `All these songs here that nobody`s cutting are what I sing the best. They`re what I`m about as an artist.`
”I had gone the whole spectrum trying to find what I did best. Making part of my living doing demos, I sang like everybody from George Jones to James Ingram, but when I narrowed it down to what I did best, it was sort of right in the middle of those two. I couldn`t sing a traditional song as good as a Joe Diffie or a Mark Chesnutt, and I had to come to terms with that.”
Despite his bucking of Nashville`s dominant current trend, his talents have gotten him through some impressive doors. SBK Songs placed him with its corporate sister, Capitol Records, and the Judds` management firm took over the direction of his career.
In the four months since he began touring with the Judds, the Oak Ridge Boys, Clint Black and Merle Haggard, he says, his record sales have jumped from 70,000 into the hundreds of thousands.
”Somewhere in My Broken Heart,” which hit the top of the country charts and then the Top 10 of the Adult Contemporary ones, was the song Randy Travis had recorded. His recording was also his first hit as a songwriter.
”I had struggled so long trying to make it as a writer that that was as exciting to me as being the artist singing it; kind of a double-whammy.”
