Featured Artist

Jeff Whitlow - Guitar, Vocals
Lee Burch - Bass
Leverette Blankenship - Drums
Mike Thompson - Keyboard, Vocals
Porter Dutton Jr - Guitar, Vocals
Wayne Reburn - Lead Guitar

Interview with Jeff Whitlow of Jeff Whitlow and the Old Barn Band
by Sarah Powell

Staying true to their style and their original passion, Jeff Whitlow and the Old Barn Band bring their listeners back with the good ol’ country music.

Jeff Whitlow shares how the band came together, “The band’s been together about seven years. It started in 2003. The first CD I did in 2002, I did not have the band put together yet. I was just going out playing by myself. I didn’t have any choice. I just grabbed me up some tracks or grabbed my guitar to go sing. People would say ‘We’d really like you to come do this, but we’d really like for you to have a band.’ After several of those missing a chance to play because I didn’t have a band, I started the process of putting a band together, which is not an easy task. Yeah, there’s a lot of people that want to play, but you’ve got ego conflicts, you’ve got people saying ‘Well, I want to play but I don’t really want to play your kind of music.’ So it took me basically two years going through people finding the right mix - people that have common goals and common interests to create the group that I’ve had for the last six years. We all know what we’re going to do and what we like to do. I don’t take jobs that we don’t like to do. We don’t really care to go play in a bar from 10:00PM to 2:00AM in the morning so we don’t take those kinds of jobs. We’re all older I guess you’d say” Jeff laughs congenially. “’Cause we’re the Old Barn Band… The drummer and the electric rhythm guitar player, Porter, they two are the original members that came to the very first practice that we ever had; the first group I ever put together. So there’s three of us who has been there since day one. My lead guitar player, I heard play with another band that played a little different kind of music - Oak Ridge Boys type stuff. He’s a really awesome picker. I just approached him to see if he’d be interested in playing with us. We play the older stuff. He said ‘I like that better than what we’re playing over here.’ He still plays with both groups, but the other group he plays with only plays but a couple times a year… He played on the road after he got out of high school. He went straight to Nashville. At age eighteen, he played at the Opryland Theme Park all summer then he was found by Dave Dudley whose hit was ‘Six Days on the Road’. He toured with him about a year to a year and a half then he toured with Bobby G. Rice for a couple of years. So he was out on the road from age eighteen to like twenty-two or -three. He can play anything, any instrument, any song- just tell him what key… He’s just a great musician. Then my keyboard player, I just heard him playing out in a park one night. My wife went up and talked to him… he was just playing by himself, just solo. She asked ‘Would you like to be in a band?’ He said ‘Yeah’ that he’d like to do that. He came out and practiced with us - as a matter of fact - that night after he did his gig in the park, he came out and practiced. He’s been with us ever since. My bass player, who is playing bass right now since the first of the year, Lee Burch was actually doing the sound. He was my sound engineer. So he wanted to play bass and Philip wanted to do something else so that was just a good time to make a switch. So it’s me, Wayne Reburn, Mike Thompson on keyboard, Leverette Blankenship on the drums, Porter Dutton Jr. on the other electric guitar, and Lee Burch on the bass… When we hit the road, it’s just like a bunch of kids going somewhere. Sometimes the wives go, sometimes they don’t. We’re always getting into something… The wives enjoy going, we take them whenever they want to. They know what the situation is. A lot of the times, it’s a private corporate thing we do and it’s not like bring everybody you want to type situation.”

Over the years, Jeff Whitlow and the Old Barn Band have traveled throughout the area and developed a strong following in Alabama and southern Tennessee. “We pretty much played everything that we can around in north Alabama, middle Alabama, and southern Tennessee. We’ve pretty much been to every festival in the last three or four years around here - some of them every year… In the north Alabama area, when we go out and play, we have a core bunch that comes out pretty much every time. Hopefully we can broaden that and expand it somehow. It’s been a slow go. We’ve been playing for six or seven years.  When we started out, if they let us, we loaded up in the back of a pick up truck somewhere at a grocery store and we’d play. We kind of evolved from that to doing more of the stuff we want to do now. We do have a pretty good following. I’d like to get out and play new places where people have not heard us and see their reaction… I’d like to hear the comments.  We did that this Christmas. We went to Lawrenceburg, Tennessee to the Crockett Theatre. We did a country, Christmas, and gospel show… Most everybody that was at that show, we’d never seen and got some very positive feedback so we’ll probably go back up there this summer and do just a straight country show.”

Jeff also spreads the word about the band by tapping into corporate and political events. “Saturday [February 13, 2010] we play a corporate gig for the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association. One thing I try to do, like for the cattlemen back in 2004, is write songs. I wrote a song called ‘The Cattlemen’. I was going around to each county in north Alabama, and I was doing the county’s annual banquet and dinner. So I would go around to each county that would hire me to do a little show just by myself… Eventually it came around. The state convention is every year. They rotate it from north to middle Alabama to south Alabama on a three year rotating basis. The last time it was in north Alabama, they contacted me about playing the state convention and that was the same night we were already opening for George Jones so I couldn’t play it. I asked them to put me down for three years from now so that finally rolled around. When we do a show like that, I try to write a little song of some sort to relate to whoever they are and it makes it more personable. They feel like ‘He really tries to do a good job and thought about us other than just getting up there and to sing twenty-five songs and go home.’ It makes them feel like they got their moneys worth. That evolved into writing of political songs. In 2006, we were hired to play a BBQ for Bob Riley who ran for re-election as governor. I wrote a song about him. We played it that night at the BBQ. His wife came up to me on stage after we were through and said ‘I want a copy of that song.’ I said ‘I just wrote it two days ago so we haven’t done anything with it except play it for ya’ll.’ She said ‘What will it take to get me a copy?’ I said ‘Well, we’ll have to go into the studio and record it.’ She said ‘Talk to that man right over there. Whatever it costs, we want it.’ I said ‘OK. We’ll get it.’ So we went to record it the next night and sent it to him. They used it in his campaign. He was re-elected. Then they invited us to the Governor’s Mansion to play at his inauguration so we got to play at the Governor’s Mansion in January of 2007.  From that, I met some people running for lieutenant governor, and different things so now this year’s election came around and those people remembered me and two of them contacted me.  One is running for attorney general and the other is running for governor so I’ve written two songs this election year. I gave one of them to Luther Strange for attorney general. They’ve been using it in some of his ads and rallies. We played a couple of his rallies and fundraisers back in the fall. The one running for governor, I just delivered his song to him two weeks ago so we kind of got a little sideline deal of writing political songs… The songs are factual and they tell a story about what their platform is, some of their history and where they come from, and how they evolved in the political arena. Two of them I went out on a limb and took a little jab at their opponents. They really liked it. The opponents didn’t like it too well. For all the stuff they put on TV, I’m not too worried about what I put in my songs. Those are on my MySpace page [http://www.myspace.com/jeffwhitlowcountry].  ‘Heading to Montgomery Again’ is the one I wrote for Governor Riley and ‘Luther for Attorney General’ is the Luther Strange song. I haven’t put the Bradley Byrne song up there yet. I didn’t want to stick it out there before they did. ‘Don’t Back Down’- that’s his platform saying. When you pull up his website ‘Bradley Byrne for Governor’, it’s the first big thing he says ‘He won’t back down’ or ‘Don’t back down’ or something like that. So that’s the whole gist of that song… It kind of helps to get your name around the state… In the Luther Strange song, they took some photographs the first night we actually sang that song. They had kept it a secret. I was dealing with his campaign about it and he knew I was writing him a song, but he didn’t know anything about it. They wouldn’t tell him any of the wording. We just did a rally one night and got him up on stage. I went through explaining how we came up with each line then we sang it for him. We watched his and his wife’s facial expressions. Every line that we sang, they were just ‘Wow! Where’d that come from?’ We videoed that and we’ve got it out there on MySpace and YouTube. It’s pretty neat to watch.”

Jeff Whitlow and the Old Barn Band have recorded several CDs over the years and are currently working on another one. Jeff shares about the CDs and other projects, “I’m in process of doing another one. I will probably have it out sometime May or June. It will have at least five original songs and five cover tunes is kind of what I’m shooting for. I’ve been working more and more on my writing here lately so I’m trying to get some of my own music. When you go to play these gigs, they still want to hear these Merle Haggard songs and you have to appease them. As far as the ones I’ve already done, the favorite country one I did and liked the best was ‘Stone Country’. It had four original tunes on it. The first four were originals which I recorded in Nashville. Then I did a gospel CD in 2008.  It went over exceptionally well. Most of the venues that we play at, we are able to throw a gospel song in there occasionally. People always enjoy hearing Hank Sr. type gospel stuff - that tempo stuff.  Those are the two favorite CDs. I also have two DVDs. One from 2007 of a show we did with Martin Delray. Then in 2008, we actually did a gospel show. The first three-quarters of it were the gospel songs off that CD. We recorded that whole show and turned it into a DVD. So we’ve been selling those for a couple of years.”

Jeff has written several original songs, one of which is reminiscent of his dearly departed mother.  Jeff shares the story behind ‘Momma’s Eyes’ and some of his other originals, which will be released on the upcoming CD. “My momma passed away in October 2008. I wrote a song for her. It took me about a year to get it written but I finished it. It’s titled ‘Momma’s Eyes’. The gist of the song is talking about me and my momma and how she always supported me. Whatever happened, whatever point in my life I was, I could always see the love in momma’s eyes. When she passed away, she had cancer, and she had wanted to be an organ donor. Of course, they couldn’t take anything because of the cancer, except for her eyes, so she donated her eyes. So the last verse of the song states ‘She’s gone now. She left her gift of sight. Now there’s a stranger that sees the love through momma’s eyes.’ That song will be on the recording we’re fixing to do…I wrote a Vern Gosden song - I really like Vern Gosden’s music. He passed away; it will be a year this April. I wrote a song about two weeks ago. It’s a tribute song to Vern Gosden called ‘Thank You to Vern Gosden’. We came up with the idea to write it from a perspective of a guy that just lost his love. He was going through the process of getting over her. So he’d listen to Vern Gosden songs to help him get over it. We listed five Vern Gosden song titles in the song. The first verse was ‘He tried every way to keep her love going. He realized he couldn’t so he said ‘I’ll just pack my bags and leave. She won’t hurt me anymore. I’ll just pack my bags and go. This ain’t my first rodeo.’ The next verse, he went to a bar to drown his sorrows. It’s like every time he gets in trouble, he goes to the bar so they’d always take him back and treat him like family. He said ‘I’ll do the house a favor.’ He was going to buy everybody a drink. So he says ‘Set ‘em up, Joe’. The chorus has a couple song titles in it. The third verse represents a song ‘Chiseled in Stone.’ It says ‘Your love is like a razor; it cut me to the bone. What we had before is now chiseled in stone.’ It’s going to be a good ol’ country song. So we’re going to cut it… I also wrote one about the Grand Ole Opry about how the Grand Ole Opry’s not so grand anymore because Porter’s gone, the Rhinestones are not there, Minnie Pearl’s not there, Roy Acuff’s not there. All these new people have taken over. It’s not the Grand Ole Opry anymore… I like the ones that tell a story. I think that’s what makes it a country song; it tells a story. You have to write it in such a manner that delivers a story and whoever listens to it, feels that. They have to feel it in the way you sing it or the wording of the song. If it doesn’t touch them, then it really didn’t do anything. They didn’t really relate to it.” In regards to Jeff’s style of writing lyrics, he shares a method he particularly likes, “I like trying to come up with lines that have positive and negative meanings in the same line. Like the good ol’ song that Kris Kristofferson wrote, ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ it has the line in there ‘I went to the closet looking for some clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt.’ Stuff like that where you say one word and the next word’s right opposite but it means something. They’re hard to come up with sometimes.”

Jeff tells about his story and how he came to play the good ol’ country music, “Well, I grew up in the 70’s with Willie and Waylon and Johnny Cash and Conway, and all of them in my house - always country music oriented. I just kind of got stuck on that stuff. For my junior year, I bought my first guitar. I had a friend that lived a couple doors up from me that could play and he came down and taught me a few chords. First song I ever learned to play was ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’. So I just went from there. He and I actually formed a little ol’ group and we went out and played a little bit - nothing big. Then when I went to the University of Alabama for college, I roomed with a guy that played guitar so he and I spent three or four years sitting around playing guitar. I just really enjoyed it. I really liked singing. Then I came home and got married, got a job, had kids, and kind of just pushed it aside. I’d go back to it every now and then. I guess it was about mid- to late- 90s when karaoke came out. I got me a karaoke box and started singing around on it. My daughter would sing around on it. One thing led to another, and I started doing a few little ol’ private things for people. When people wanted someone to sing, I’d just take the karaoke box and go sing. I wound up getting a little better sound system which slowly evolved to doing bigger things. Instead of being ten people, there’d be thirty people, and then fifty people… I was invited to sing at a few public places in town. We’d have something on the fourth of July or Labor Day or whatever. That’s just really the way all that got started. People started hearing me and I just decided I wanted to stay with that old country; I’m not able to get into the newer country. I will either live or die with this old country because that’s what I like. If people don’t like it, then they can get someone else to sing. That’s just what I did. From that, the band started… The first few years I had the band, I spent every day calling around ‘Ya’ll need somebody to play?’ or ‘When can we come play this?’ or ‘Can we come play that?’ You just have to get out there and get your name out and let people hear you. Then when they call you and want you to come back, that’s what makes it all worthwhile. Then they’ll say ‘We’ll pay your gas money’ or ‘We’ll give you a hot dog’” Jeff laughs at the recollection, “and then it got to making a little money and paying our bills. Then I got to where I was paying the band pretty regular so now they depend on getting paid every gig whether I get it or not. For the most part, we do get compensated for everything we play now.”

Jeff also has a family who enjoys music on and off the stage. “My son, he sings in the truck and the shower. I think he could if he would try but he’s pretty bashful. My daughter is a lot like me. She’s a little bit outgoing. I taught her to play some chords on the guitar about four years ago. I gave her an old guitar I had, and she took it to college. She’d come home every couple weeks, ‘Listen to the new song I learned’. I asked, ‘Oh who taught you that?’ She said, ‘I just got on the internet and found the chords.’ She likes Taylor Swift, I can’t think of all of them but that’s the kind of music she likes, the country of today… She’s graduated from North Alabama with a Chemistry degree. She has moved to Birmingham and she’s attending UAB pursuing a degree in Physical Therapy. My son graduated of course. He’s working here in town in Decatur. My wife stays at home and runs around, cooks my supper every now and then, and takes care of me… She’s really good to go with me. She handles all the PR work once we get to the place we’re going to play. She gets the merchandise table setup and handles all that. She’ll go around with a camera and take everybody in the crowd’s picture and make everybody feel they are part of the show, too. Then we’ll put a lot of those up on the website. We’ll always tell them to go to the website, you might see your picture out there. So she’s the CW of CW Productions. When we promote ourselves, we do it under CW Productions. It stands for Connie Whitlow… If I make up a program, I have the band and show a picture of all the band members and then if we have an MC from a radio station, I’ll list them. Then over in the next line, I put ‘the boss’ and it would be her picture there. We call her the boss in the program. She’s been to enough shows. She knows the sound. If we’re playing such and such song, she’ll always be back there on the soundboard, if somebody’s vocal isn’t right, she’ll be telling that guy - whether it be our guy or somebody else’s… She likes it to sound right. That’s good because otherwise you’d be playing and when you’re on stage listening to the monitor mix, you don’t know what it sounds like out front. She’s our ears on the ground out in the audience… Connie and I married in 2004. We actually started dating in 2001 so she was there when I made the transition from karaoke birthday parties to the band. She was a big influence in saying ‘You know, we need to get a band together.’ So she’s been very supportive since the day the band started in 2002. She’s the one pushing me to get a CD out every year. She says everybody comes up to the table ‘Well, I’ve already got all them three, ya’ll got anything new?’ So I’ve got to try to keep new merchandise out there. It’s expensive to go record a CD especially if you cut all the tracks from scratch… We’ve got to sell a bunch of CDs to cover it. We just keep trying… I’ve done two of my political songs down in Coleman and recording my current CD at Riverland Studios toward Huntsville. I don’t have a set place I go every time. I just move around and see where I can get the best deal. The studio’s not really the cost, it’s getting those Nashville pickers to come down and spend a whole day cutting ten tracks… We knock them all out in a day’s time and be done with it, then I can go back to record the vocals whenever I get ready… If I do a political song, I let them go to the studio with me. We cut that as our own group… We just have fun and make it enjoyable.”

Jeff shares his dream for the band, “My dream might be like everybody else. I’d love to play on the Grand Ole Opry... I have had the opportunity to share the stage with some great people like Doris Jones, Larry Gatlin, Charlie Daniels, Aaron Tipton, we opened for Sugarland a couple years ago. I’d like to play a show with Merle Haggard one day. If you go listen to one of our shows when we play two hours, if you picked it apart and knew every song that I sang, a third of them would be Haggard songs probably. I’d just really love someday to play with him. He doesn’t come around very often to this part of the country… I just want to get my music out to more people and broaden our area of coverage. We gradually move out a little further each year and meet new people. As long as we keep getting positive feedback, we’ll keep trying to go a little further. We don’t depend on it for our livelihood; we do it because we love it. We do it because its fun. Something we want to do like a hobby. Instead of fishing, we’re out playing music. Instead of golf, we’re out playing music. It’d be nice to take a run out in Texas and play a week at some of those line dancing places. My guitar player who was on the road, he’s always saying ‘Boys, we’re going to Texas this fall’. Our vacation will be spent in Texas on a tour bus. Stuff like that would be a dream of mine. Make a little spin run or something like that.”

A message to Jeff Whitlow and the Old Barn Band’s fans…

“Keep it country. That’s the way I close out all my shows. The last thing I tell them is ‘We appreciate you coming. Just keep it country.’”