American Thunder: The Garth Brooks Story - Brossura

Sgammato, Jo

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0345439503 ISBN 13: 9780345439505

Casa editrice: Ballantine Books, 2000

Riassunto

Traces the life and career of the country singer who has become America's most successful solo musical artist, recounts the stories behind some of his most popular songs, and reveals how he has coped with success

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Jo Sgammato is the author of Dream Come True: The LeAnn Rimes Story, Keepin' It Country: The George Strait Story, Country's Greatest Duo: The Brooks & Dunn Story, and For the Music: The Vince Gill Story. She divides her time between New York and Nashville.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

The Boy In February of 1962, according to the Census Bureau, 318,090 people were born in the United States. These babies entered the world with the potential to be or do anything. In America, a land of limitless opportunity where citizens were encouraged to reach for the sky, no dream was too big, no ambition unattainable.

Troyal Garth Brooks was born on the seventh day of February 1962, at St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In America's heartland, wheat grew tall, cowboys stood taller, and proud Native Americans kept the country's true history alive. Giant oil rigs gushed black gold, fueling the prosperity and peace that made dreaming possible.

Two weeks after Garth's birth, John Glenn safely orbited the earth three times and President John F. Kennedy traveled to NASA headquarters in Florida to personally welcome him home. Meanwhile, back in Washington, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was conducting the first nationally televised tour of the White House. From suburban New Jersey to rural Arkansas, the talk was of desegregation, as Martin Luther King, Jr., was spreading his dream. Overseas, the United States was expanding its military role in a country called Vietnam. And a "crisis of abundance," a surplus of agricultural products, including milk, led the government to pay farmers to produce less.

The proud parents on that seventh day of February 1962, Colleen Carroll Brooks and Troyal Raymond Brooks, had begun their lives together with a family that consisted of three of Colleen's children and one of Troyal's. Together they had been blessed with one son, Kelly, and now, eighteen months later, they completed their family with the birth of their last child. Two loving parents and six lucky children formed a household where the words stepchildren, half brother, and half sister were never used.

Tulsa was a town that loved music. Cain's Ballroom, over on Fourth and Main, was known as Western Swing's own Alamo. Cain's had been christened by the sounds of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the swingin'est band in the West, which played there almost every Thursday and Saturday night from 1935 to 1943.

Bob Wills's unique style--a mix of everything from the blues to cowboy music, from Mexican mariachi to German polka, and from Dixieland jazz to pure bluegrass--did more than transform American music forever. It drew everyone at Cain's Ballroom to the curly maplewood dance floor mounted on sets of Dodge truck springs. Another attraction at Cain's in the 1930s and '40s was the availability of bootleg whiskey--Prohibition wasn't repealed in Oklahoma until 1957. Dancing and booze made for some wild times. When things got too rowdy, Bob Wills tapped the microphone with his fiddle bow and played a church hymn.

Colleen Brooks, Garth's mother, loved music herself. As Colleen Carroll, she'd been a featured singer on "Red Foley's Ozark Jubilee," the pioneering radio and television show. Her black curly hair draping down to her shoulders, a ribbon tied sweetly at the neckline of her fringed shirt, Colleen sang her heart out. Her strong, sweet, clear voice captured the attention of the folks at Capitol Records, where she recorded four singles in the mid-1950s. Her talent might have led to fame and fortune, but it was hard to be a female singer back then, and even harder if you were married and had children. Colleen loved music, but she loved family life even more.

Troyal Brooks, called Raymond by everyone who knew him, was a former U.S. marine. He worked as an engineer and draftsman for one of Tulsa's many oil companies, Union of California (Union 76).

The big city of Tulsa was exciting, but Colleen and Raymond wanted a quieter life for their family. In 1966 they moved to Yukon, a town of 10,000 residents about fifteen miles southeast of Oklahoma City. The ride from Tulsa to Oklahoma City was along America's most famous highway, a road of legend, music, and dreams--Route 66. Woody Guthrie's folk music, John Steinbeck's classic novels, and Jack Kerouac's amazing book On the Road all memorialized the lives that were spent, enjoyed, endured, and sometimes lost on Route 66. What a fitting backdrop for a future American hero.

Yukon sits squarely on the famous Chisholm Trail. Less than a mile from the Brookses' new home was a remnant of the trail where, in the late 1800s, more than a million longhorn cattle traveled from San Marcos, Texas, to railroad loading yards at Abilene, Kansas. This was cowboy country, pure and simple. It is also flat country with sweltering summers, frequent tornadoes, and winters that see fierce blizzards.

Over on Main Street in a town where kids could roam freely as long as they came home in time for supper, two-story brick and cinder-block buildings housed the town's businesses and stores. The MFC Farmers Co-op and Yukon's Best Flour Mill across the street were the tallest structures in town. Several blocks south of Main Street, at 408 Yukon Avenue, was the white split-level house where Garth Brooks grew up. From the street, the Brooks home looked like any other pleasant, quiet suburban home in 1960s America.

Inside was a different story. How quiet could it be with six kids running around, feeling free to play, laugh, enjoy life, and listen to music? As Garth would later say about the home he grew up in, it was "just totally cool. You could live in the house. You could try things, stretch your imagination." Like other households where the kids were encouraged to dream and allowed the freedom to falter, it was, he said, "a house you could make mistakes in."

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Ballantine Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0345439503
• ISBN 13: 9780345439505
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 243