I was eighteen years old when I first picked up a guitar - my dad’s beloved 25 year old Guild, as it were. Practice an hour a day for two weeks and you’ll be playing songs - so he told me. I was determined to get through that first two weeks and graduate a master guitarist but the repetition of practicing chord transitions was just too boring for me. I’ve never been a quitter, so to make it more interesting I started making up my own songs to go with the chords. Just like that, I became a song writer. Not saying I'd ever willingly let anyone hear anything I wrote back then, but good or bad I was still a songwriter.

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Less than two years later my dad took me to a music store to buy my twenty-first birthday present a full year early. (He told my mom he wanted his guitar back.) I returned home the proud owner of a brand new HD35 Martin. I named it Apollos. I’d never had anything so posh before. By then times for my family weren’t quite as hard, but from my childhood life with a family of seven in a one bedroom trailer out in the sticks of the Ozark Mountains, a brand new Martin guitar really felt almost bougie. No one could have known how precious a gift my parents had given me when they gave me music.

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Some of my favorite memories are of sitting around a bonfire with a bunch of friends strumming guitars, pounding on hand drums, singing melody and harmony to every praise and worship song we knew from dusk into the wee hours of the morning. Those were the rare times. The rest of the time I was on my own, wandering in a cadence of words and chords and notes, weaving them into songs like thread following the shuttle through the loom.

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Ever since we first met, my best friend, Buck, who had worked for awhile in the music industry in Nashville, encouraged me to take my music onto a public stage. I just shook my head. I didn’t think I was good enough — as a singer, a musician, or a songwriter. Who would want to hear what I was writing about, anyway? Who cared about my life, my pain, my faith, my love?