Country Music Runs In The Family For Ha

For Wade Hayes, becoming a country singer was almost a birthright.

“There are generations of Hayeses who for hundreds of years were musicians that I’ve never even known about until recently,” says the 25-year-old musician from Bethel Acres, Okla., whose hit single, “Old Enough To Know Better,” is taking country radio by storm and is now No. 1.

“My grandpa was a fiddle player and all my uncles also. I’m finding out I have cousins everywhere who have been pickers and I never even knew it.” His father, Don Hayes, is a musician who for years had supplemented his income by playing the honky-tonks and dance halls around Oklahoma City. By the time Wade was in his teens, he’d persuaded his dad to let him join the band, and that’s where his apprenticeship in country music began.

Hayes remembers, “At first he tried to keep me away from it, because of all the troubles and heartaches that go with the music business. That really showed me he cared about me. But after a while, he got sick to death of me throwing such a fit when I couldn’t go with him to play in the clubs. When I was 9 years old I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let kids in bars.”

Under his father’s guidance, Hayes learned to play for the crowd and keep them dancing. The band’s repertoire wasn’t just limited to the traditional country classics, either - healthy doses of Waylon Jennings and Gary Stewart also found their way into the group’s playlist. “There’s nothing like Haggard and Lefty Frizzell,” says Hayes. “But there are other songs which are pretty edgy and still have a real Texas/Oklahoma sound. After all, just because the cowboys wear hats doesn’t mean they don’t like to get down and boogie.”

By the time Hayes was well into his teens, his father had landed a promising deal with a Nashvillebased record company, and the family sold their possessions and moved to Music City. Within one year, however, the record company was out of business and Don Hayes was out of luck.

“My parents had bought a house in Nashville which we lost,” says Hayes. “We had to find some way to get back to Oklahoma. So we left those dreams behind and moved back to Oklahoma to get something safe.”

Once settled back in the suburbs of Oklahoma City, Hayes began playing four nights a week as guitarist and background vocalist in his father’s band, Country Heritage.

“I always felt like I was missing out on a bunch of fun,” he recalls, “because all my friends were out cruising on the weekends and I was playing in some bar. I didn’t know it at the time, but all of the time I spent playing with my father and his band was just preparation for something better for me down the road.”

Longing for the security of a career outside of the club circuit, Hayes enrolled in various colleges, majoring in economics while secretly hoping to land a national recording contract.

Though he’d established himself as a solo performer around Oklahoma City, Hayes fell in love with a young woman from his hometown and suddenly walked away from his music to take an assembly-line job in a General Motors plant.

“I almost got married and settled down,” he recalls, “but she ended up messing around on me with some factory-worker guy and I was tore up real bad emotionally. I would pray so hard for her to come back. I was miserable inside.”

Finally, Hayes mustered up his strength, quit the GM plant and “went back to pickin’.”

“Until the time after I left GM,” says Hayes, “I wasn’t always happy with my life because I was trying to mold myself into someone who I really wasn’t. Now I can understand how to be happy with life, because I know singing and playing my music is what’s right for me.”

The attraction to country music drew Hayes back to Nashville in 1992, where he worked on his songwriting skills while making ends meet by playing guitar on recording sessions for demo tapes. Eventually, he landed a songwriting agreement with Tree Publishing and a recording contract with Columbia Records.

Now that Hayes is living out his dream with a hot debut album and a concert tour, he feels he’s also living out his family’s dream: “For a while when we moved to Nashville when I was a kid, everybody’s dreams in my family rested upon my dad. Now everybody has found hope in me. (My success is) not just for me. I have uncles who are old cowboys and I love them with all my heart - my success is for all of them as well as my mom and dad, too. Because they deserve it, they deserve the best I can give them.”