CMT Blog: Archive

Editor's note: Patsi Bale Cox's new book, The Garth Factor: The Career Behind Country's Big Boom, provides an in-depth look at the phenomenal success of country superstar Garth Brooks. In this blog, she recalls hearing his music for the first time and how it led to her latest book. Enter the CMT.com to win a copy of the book signed by the author.

I discovered Garth Brooks the same way most of his fans did: through radio and CMT. It's odd that I hadn't heard his music before it hit the airwaves, because not only did I work in the industry, but his producer, Allen Reynolds, was a dear friend. In fact, Allen had been telling me about Garth for months, this "unbelievable kid from Oklahoma" in which he saw the potential for greatness.

But just as Garth's 1989 debut album was released I had a death in the family, and in many ways went underground. An advance of that album, Garth Brooks, arrived in the mail but remained in a stack of other things I just didn't have the heart to get into. Then one day when I was driving to Music Row, I heard a song that demanded attention, "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)." As a fan of the West and of rodeos, I was excited to hear it. I thought that the singer, though he wasn't identified, was a tremendous song stylist.

Time went on, and I attempted to come to terms with our family's loss. And then one day over my car radio came a ballad that spoke straight to my heart, "If Tomorrow Never Comes." It addressed death and the importance of letting people know you love them through some of the most powerful lyrics I'd ever heard. This time, the singer was named, Garth Brooks, and the video he released for the song was both heartrending and healing. I searched through my "music to listen to" pile and found Garth's album, the one Allen Reynolds had sent me months earlier. It knocked me on my rear.

The third single turned out to be one of the songs I most loved from the album, a mid-tempo swinger with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, "Not Counting You." Then, came a blockbuster final single from Garth Brooks, "The Dance." The video Garth created for "The Dance" had a similar effect on me as had "If Tomorrow Never Comes." I found closure in the song, an understanding that it is not an individual's death that matters, it is the life led.

The video had just been released when I was hired as a writer and public relations staffer for Gurley & Company, the PR arm of Capitol Records at the time. For the next 15 years, I wrote all label-generated material about Garth's music. I continued to work with him when he left Capitol, released The Lost Sessions, and when he put together his first Web site. Through those years I came to know him well, to respect him as an artist and love him as a friend. One of the things I appreciated about his musical vision was his belief in country's big tent. Garth loved it all -- the stone country, bluegrass, western swing, cowboy, rock and pop edged country -- and my favorite, honky-tonk.

I had grown up much like Garth musically, with many influences. Like Garth, I was the youngest in a big family and listened to a rich tapestry thanks to parents and older sisters. My father rocked me to sleep at night with cowboy songs, "Streets of Laredo" and "Ghost Riders in the Sky." My mother played the old-time mandolin music of her North Carolina ancestors. She played beautiful gospel music on the piano, but on a dime could switch into bring-down-the-house full-tilt boogie. My sisters loved the great vocalists -- Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney, Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee. They played the records of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Faron Young and Frank Sinatra.

What Garth Brooks did was incorporate many elements from many wonderful styles into his recordings. It was pure joy, sitting with Garth at Allen Reynolds's studio and listening to each album just after it was finished. He never let me take notes the first time through. "Don't listen to it like a writer," he'd say. "Listen like you're hearing it for the first time over your radio."

And I did. I listened to them all first as a fan. That was, after all, how I had started on that road, the one that led to The Garth Factor.