You know, for most of its life bluegrass has had this stigma of being all straw hats and hay bales and not necessarily the most sophisticated form of music. Yet you can't help responding to its honesty. It's music that finds its way deep into your soul because it's strings vibrating against wood and nothing else.
I was never very interested in boys - and there were plenty of them - vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.
My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn't pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn... If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinquency would be cut in half in a year's time.
My grandmother raised me. She was a real no-nonsense but very funny lady. I drove tractors, made hay, milked cows, fed the chicken, fed the pigs.
I really do love being outdoors - I mean, you'd never think it in my high heels and pencil skirt! But I really do miss the smell of hay and farms, and I like milking a cow.
I've always considered myself a physical person. I don't call myself a farm girl, but I did spend a lot of years shoveling manure and throwing hay, because I worked to pay most of my riding expenses.
I wish that the circuses that were around now felt like they did then. They're not quite as elegant or as magical as they used to be. There was something about the old tent shows, the Big Top, the canvas, the lights, the sawdust, the hay and the animals that's just missing now. Now, it's all urbanized and maybe a little garish.
We seem to want one vehicle to carry people and soccer balls and hay bales.
My career progressed slowly. Real slow at a time. The irony of it was I had the best part of my career between when I was 45 and 49 years old. That's when most people are in their twilight, waiting to get to the Champions Tour. And that's when I made most of my hay.
I was 12 when I ordered my first guitar out of the worn and discolored pages of a Sears, Roebuck catalog. The story that I bought it on the installment plan is untrue, the invention of a Hollywood press agent. Local color. I paid cash, $8, money I had saved as a hired hand on my uncle Calvin's farm, baling and stacking hay.
