There was once a time when country-music singers came from rural poverty, rather than suburbia. Country songs used to be inspired by real life rather than movie plots. Country audiences once related to their artists’ hard-luck stories because they could see themselves in those tales of triumph over adversity.
Somewhere in its climb from regional art form to multi-million selling entertainment business, country music lost a lot of that authenticity. Jeff Bates is here to bring it back. His powerfully sung debut album, Rainbow Man, rings with believability because every song he wrote for it is the unvarnished truth.
As its title tune suggests, Jeff Bates is, indeed, a “Rainbow Man” of a multi-ethnic heritage. He swears he’s had family exactly like the folks depicted in the rollicking “My Inlaws Are Outlaws.” The former welder says he relates to every blue-collar line in “Already Spent.” The stomping “Country Enough” is his declaration of purpose. In the spirit of the best songwriters, Jeff’s sensuous ballads “Long, Slow Kisses” and “I Wanna Make You Cry” voice the feelings of the everyman with a poet’s sensibility.
His debut hit single, “The Love Song,” captures the essence of love in its myriad forms and he treats the same topic in more rhythmic terms on “Your Lovin’ Talks to Me” and “Lovin’ Like That.” The bluesy “My Mississippi” is nothing less than his autobiography in song. And Jeff Bates truly did find salvation on “The Wings of Mama’s Prayers.”
This is a man with a story to tell, the kind of story that sounds like it comes from a classic country song. Jeff Bates was given up for adoption as a baby. He later met his birth mother, though his natural father remains a complete mystery. Mississippi sharecropper Ed Bates and his wife Barbara adopted him. Barbara, the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher, raised the baby on gospel songs.
Eight brothers and sisters came along, and Ed and Barbara also took in two cousins. Jeff’s father became a bulldozer operator in the Columbia, Mississippi area. What the Bates family lacked in material goods was made up for with abundant love.
“I didn’t know I was adopted,” Jeff reminisces. “All my brothers and sisters were blond haired and blue eyed. When I was about nine years old, I was on the school bus and somebody said, ‘You know, you’re not their real son. They adopted you.’ It freaked me out. I went home and asked my Mama where I’d come from. She was always honest with me. She told me the whole story and then she said the coolest thing. She said, ‘Out of all the kids we’ve got, you know what makes you special?’ I said, ‘No, Ma’am, I don’t.’ She said, ‘We got to pick you. The rest of ‘em, we got whatever God gave us. But we got to choose you.’”
Jeff showed plenty of promise as a child early on, becoming a straight-A student. He also demonstrated a remarkable musical ability, learning to sing even before he could talk. By age two, he was belting out “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
“My parents had records by Webb Pierce, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline and Jean Shepard, and Mama would get Grand Ole Opry boxed sets through the mail. But Elvis was who caught my fancy. When I was about 10, Daddy had cut down a big ol’ tree out in the yard and there was a big stump out there. I had a plastic toy guitar that my aunt and uncle had given me. I’d get up on that stump and holler my lungs out on Elvis songs.
“Then Daddy found an old black-and-white TV. When I saw Elvis on Aloha From Hawaii, I knew what I wanted to do. I thought he was Superman. That became my fantasy, to be on stage singing.”
By his teens, Jeff Bates was a self-described “geek.” Poor and shy, he had few friends and was constantly picked on by bullies. When he fought back at age 14, he was suspended from school.
“Daddy said, ‘Well, you’re getting too big to go to school anyway.’ He was having health problems and couldn’t run the bulldozer anymore. So I was to stay home and help him. I’d already run his chain saw and driven his pickup truck by then.”
The family was so backwoods that at the age of 17 Jeff had never been outside of Marion County, Mississippi. Hungry to see the world, he joined the National Guard. After that, he took a job on an oil rig. One night, a friend urged him to get on stage at the Colonial Steak House in Columbia, Mississippi. He sang Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds,” George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Conway Twitty’s “I’d Love to Lay You Down.”
“The club owner came up to me and said, ‘How would you like to work here six nights a week? I’ll pay you $50 a night.’ I went in the next morning and quit my oil rig job.”
That same year Jeff fell in love and married an older woman who was a waitress at the club. That stormy union lasted only a few years. After the breakup, he moved to Seminary, Mississippi and became a carpenter for a time, continuing to sing on the side. Later on he became a welder, but music continued to be his first love. Wanting to pursue his music more seriously, he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. It was there that he met and later married his first manager and in 1993 he formed his own band, Southern Storm
“Southern Storm started traveling. Eventually we played at least 30 of the 50 states, even Canada. We decided we needed an album, so I started writing because I needed songs for it. Wrote 10 and recorded them in Little Rock in 1995. The album was called Country Is My Middle Name by Jeff Bates & Southern Storm. I felt I was ready for Nashville, so we moved here in 1997. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was at home. I really did. Nashville challenged and inspired me.”
Jeff Bates blossomed quickly once he began writing with Music City’s tunesmiths. His wife/manager, however, told him he’d be better off back in Arkansas. So he moved back to his former hometown, a decision that would prove to be detrimental to him in more ways than one.
“Moved back to Little Rock, and it was all downhill from there. I hated it. I felt like I had thrown away all the progress I had made. I resented the whole thing.”
As his marriage began to unravel, Jeff started commuting back to Nashville to write more songs. He was signed by Warner-Chappell Publishing and started doing showcases in hopes of landing a recording contract. He moved back to Nashville. Everything seemed to be looking up.
But by then Jeff Bates had gotten caught up in using drugs. He had even sold all of his musical equipment to fund his drug habit. When that money ran out, he hit rock bottom, and the police eventually found thousands of dollars worth of stolen musical equipment at his home. Jeff was sent to jail.
“I got arrested on March 14, 2001. They handcuffed me and took me to jail. I looked like death. I hated myself. I didn’t believe there was a God. I didn’t care if I lived or died. A couple of days later, when I woke up straight for the first time in months, it dawned on me what I’d done. I started calling everybody I’d stolen something from. I told my wife everything. I told her to leave me, divorce me. I didn’t deserve her.
“I knew I’d lost it all. I’d wasted my life. That’s when I met God and started talking to him. I prayed, ‘I know I’ve messed up. And I’m not asking for anything except tell me what I’m supposed to do. Tell me to go back to Mississippi and I’ll go.’ The next day, I found out that Gene Watson had recorded two of my songs. And that Tracy Lawrence had recorded a song of mine and Kenny Beard’s called “What a Memory.” I cried like a baby.
“Here’s how I got my life back. I called Kenny Beard while I was in jail. He had let me use Old Magic, his prize guitar that he’d written so many of his hits on. I phoned to tell him that I’d pawned it, to apologize and to tell him where it was. He said, ‘When you get out, I want you to promise to come and see me.’
“When I was released, I walked out and my wife was there. The next morning, I went to Kenny Beard’s. He met me at the door with Old Magic in his hand. He said, ‘Here, take this and write songs with it. There’s the case with the pawn ticket still in it. If you get the hankering to do drugs, there’s the pawn ticket to remind you. I love you. Come on in and let’s write.’”
Jeff worked pouring concrete building foundations for houses by day and created new music by night. He got his songwriting contract back. In time, some of his tapes made their way to RCA. On January 29, 2002, Jeff Bates sang in person for the label’s executives.
“They asked about me. For the first time in my life, I was 100% me. I sang my songs and told the truth about drugs, stealing and going to jail. Everything. Stood up. Thanked them for their time and shook their hands. Fifteen minutes after I walked in the front door back home, the phone rings and they tell me that RCA wants to give me a deal.”
This is more than a second chance to Jeff Bates. This is redemption and salvation. He has been to the bottom, but now he looks to the sky. His story isn’t always pretty, but the cold, hard truth seldom is.
“What I want to bring to country music is realism,” says Jeff Bates. “I’m trying to get as Real as it is, as Real as you want to get.”
That’s what country music used to be all about. With this artist, it still is.
Source: http://www.jeffbates.net/
