Early Life
Gretchen Wilson was born in Pocahontas, Illinois, to a 16-year-old mother. Her father left before she was two years old, and she and her mother lived in trailer parks and relative poverty. Wilson's mother worked as a waitress, and Wilson herself dropped out of the 9th grade at age 15 to work as a cook and bartender in rural Illinois.
Wilson began singing in small bars around the St. Louis, Missouri area at age 15. In 1991, Susie Osburn, a bar manager from Springfield, Missouri, went to St. Louis to find a new house band for her bar, the Townhouse. She found 18-year-old Wilson singing Patsy Cline covers so well that Osburn initially thought the singing was coming from a jukebox. Recognizing Wilson's talent, Osburn immediately convinced her and her band, Sam-A-Lama, to move to Springfield and play at the Townhouse. In her biography, Wilson says it was the offer of a lifetime. After playing the Townhouse for two years at six nights a week, Wilson moved back home to Pocahontas before continuing on to Nashville.
Read more about this topic: Gretchen Wilson
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)