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| This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #99 (April / May 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription. |
"I'm from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which is actually much better known as the home of Rolling Rock beer," Kelley joked. "Growing up, there was always music in the house. My dad was a musician, and my oldest brother had a rock band. They practiced down in our basement so I'd sit and listen to them, and my dad had a repair shop and had country radio on there, so I'd listen to that.
"I always wanted to sing," she continued, "and by the time I was 15 I was singing in a rock 'n' roll band. We'd do Led Zeppelin covers and stuff like that." But then one day she saw Dolly Parton on television. "I was totally taken aback by her singing," said Kelley, who often includes covers of Parton's songs in her shows today. " I had never heard anything like it, so I went to the record store and found some of her records, and I was hooked. I brought one of her records to practice, and the band wasn't thrilled with my new direction. I was fired on the spot, and that was the end of that!"
This abrupt end to her rock 'n' roll career turned out to open several new doors for Kelley. Up until that time, she'd been a singer with the band, not playing an instrument, "but then when I was fired from the rock 'n' roll band I got a guitar and just spent time playin' it and playin' it, got a chord book, and learned some songs. This was when I was about 19, and it's also when I found out that I was a songwriter," Kelley said. "I would sit down to play songs, then something would come out and I would think, 'Now, is that a familiar song, or where did that come from?' and then I'd realize it was an original idea. It just really snuck up on me, unaware. I'd get a great idea and it would keep evolving and I'd write it down. I really started enjoying the process."
She still does. "Oh, I have notebooks everywhere, a little tiny one in my purse, one in the car, a legal pad in the kitchen — I love paper, that's how I treat myself, with unusual papers and notebooks." They are tools for her creative process, not mere decorations. "I'll have an idea and sometimes it's not always convenient to follow that idea through at the time," said Kelley, commenting that ideas often come to her while she's driving, or cooking dinner, or traveling through a new city while touring. "I'll make a note on a piece of paper, and then at a more convenient time follow up on it, and try to recreate that moment when the idea first appeared."
It's often not a literal translation of the moment however. One of the songs on Simple Path began when she was driving down Music Row in Nashville one day, "and I saw some homeless people and started thinking that they are not so different than anybody else. I wrote a note about that on my idea pad in my car, and later on got with Jeff Hughes to finish it up." The song, which became a single from a Brother Phelps album several years ago, turns the idea about differences sparked that day into a thought-provoking study of understanding and misunderstanding in relationships, called, not so surprisingly, "Not So Different After All." It is also on Kelley's album Simple Path.
Before she moved to Nashville, Kelley started her own country band in Pennsylvania, where she had begun listening more and more to country and bluegrass. "Linda Ronstadt was a big influence vocally. Dolly Parton, of course, and Emmylou Harris — when I watched Dolly's show when Emmy and Linda came on it, I was just sitting there glued to the TV set — I even tape-recorded it and played it over and over again. The I started lookin' for Emmylou's records in the stores and readin' the credits, finding people like Rodney Crowell and his writing, and then Ricky Skaggs and his musicianship. John Starling, too. It's funny," Kelley reflected, "because I felt like I knew all these people, in a way. It all just made sense."
This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #99 (Apr./May '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
