Hillbilly Heart Read Online Free PDF

ask if I could take the truck to get the newspaper. The first time he said yes was one of the greatest days of my life. I ran outside, started up his truck, and drove down that gravel road to where the paper sat. From then on, it became a routine.
    The truck had an eight-track cassette player, and my dad had three eight-tracks—Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Glen Campbell. Every time I drove, I played one of those cassettes. Around the time I was twelve, he had switched to a Buick and my morning excursion began to include a few daring zigzags across the dry creek, just enough to excite me and not damage the car. I’d be listening to Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues,” and I couldn’t help it. I had to do something a little crazy. It just made me feel good—the song, that is.
    Once I got a hold of some Led Zeppelin, like the song “Black Dog,” I got a little crazier, pressed harder on the gas pedal, and did what I call loop-de-loos—360s—while laughing as the back tires spit out clods of dirt and grass. It was simple fun, but also, looking back, it was the beginning of my foolishness.
    I was not much of a student. This became abundantly clear the year my aunt Sue—my father’s sister—was my sixth-grade math teacher. (An interesting side note: She had married Clifford Hatfield—yes, those Hatfields of Hatfield and McCoy fame; and,somewhere down the family tree, I’m a blood relative of the McCoys.) Anyway, one day in class, Aunt Sue politely said, “You may want to avoid being a mathematician when you grow up,” and I didn’t argue with her.
    My academic career may have peaked the following year, when I gave a speech in history class on Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. It included a recitation of his famous surrender speech, ending with “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” I got an A, and at the end of the year when the teacher assigned us to rewrite any speech as a satire, I picked that one and rewrote it as a declaration of what I wanted to do that summer.
    “I will go fishing,” I wrote. “I will go skinny-dipping. I will play baseball. I will ride my motorcycle.” And here I took a long, dramatic pause. I sensed the entire class was hanging on my words. What ignorance was I going to impart? I didn’t let them down as I said with breathless melodrama, “From where the sun now stands, I will learn… no more… forever.”
    All my classmates laughed, and so did my teacher, Mr. Holt. He gave me an A—and more important, he encouraged me to be creative.
    But my most important lessons came when I was riding around with my dad while he was teaching me to drive. One time I was trying to back out of a tight spot. I kept going back and forth, back and forth, turning the wheel one direction, then the other. Laughing, he said, “Remember this day, Bo. Life is a series of adjustments.” My dad’s front seat was always filled with a mess of papers; if you were to get in my car today, you’d find the same thing—CDs, songs I’m working on, and reminders of meetings. But his were notes about people and the problems that really mattered to them.
    One day, out of the blue, my dad announced, “We’re going to pay a visit to John Samson and see how he’s doing.”
    I’d never heard of John Samson. I asked, “Why?”
    “He got cheated out of all them funds he’s supposed to be due for that black lung he caught in the coal mine, and he’s going to need some help fighting for that money.”
    Later, we visited Sister Sheila out on Route 1. Her culvert was stopped up from a flood and my dad was trying to get it cleared. He explained, “If we don’t get that fixed, her creek is going to overflow again and all the gravel will wash out of her driveway.”
    My dad didn’t just talk about helping people and getting things done. He lived it. Whether I realized at the time, I took that powerful lesson to heart, as I did so many other lessons from the school of real life.
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