Montgomery Puts Throat To The Test At Country Music Awards Ceremonies

Nobody can accuse John Michael Montgomery of not having guts.

The young country star went onstage to sing his hit song “Sold” at the recent Country Music Association awards ceremonies in Nashville - perennially the field’s most-watched TV production just two weeks after undergoing throat surgery to correct a problem that had interrupted his tour and caused him pain and vocal problems for many months.

“I was really wanting to do that show,” Montgomery recalls. “It was going to take an awful lot to not let me do it, whether I was ready or not.”

As for the problem itself, the Kentucky native says he first noticed “a couple of years ago that something was going wrong.” He was “struggling with low notes and real inconsistency in my singing: some days I would sing good, some days I would sing bad.

“It was just really frustrating, but when you’re just getting your career going, you don’t put it on hold right off the bat.”

So he pushed on, neglecting to seek medical advice. Last January, however, the problem became so troublesome that he made a preliminary attempt to get help at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Hospital. Told that if he came into the rehabilitative program there he probably would need to leave the concert trail for “a couple of months,” he balked and refused.

He was amid his career’s first tour as a headliner, he explains.

“I said, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. I got a lot of people depending on me here. I can’t take off for two months.”’

He says he made it “about three-quarters of the way through” his 1995 tour before the pain became “astronomically bad,” he says. His voice was getting hoarse, and his throat stayed “sore all the time.”

“In September we had a real long run out to the West Coast, about three weeks straight, and after three weeks I barely could talk. Then I had to cancel, so I called ‘em up (at Vanderbilt) and said, ‘I’m coming to Nashville. Set me up a time to go in to the doctor’s office. I need to find out what’s causing me all this pain.”’

(One of his canceled stops included Spokane on Sept. 16.)

What was bothering Montgomery, physicians discovered during an examination, was a salivary gland located beside the vocal cords near the size of “the fingernail on my pinky,” which had “lesions and ulcerations on it” and apparently was “causing just tons of infection.” This infection kept the vocal cords from working properly.

Although he doesn’t say so, he may have gone to Vanderbilt to try to make sure he got a chance to sing on the awards show, perennially country music’s most important event. He says he told them then that he didn’t want to cancel his CMA show appearance unless doing so was unavoidable. Apparently it wasn’t. After removing the salivary gland and watching it for two weeks, Vanderbilt gave him the go-ahead to do one song.

“Sold,” a gallopingly energetic number, isn’t “that hard of a song vocally, as far as pitch goes,” Montgomery says.

“It’s just got a lot of words in it. It’s actually one of the easier songs for me to sing. The ballads are the ones where you have to have a lot of control. Those are the ones that were causing me more problems than anything.”

But didn’t he have some anxiety about singing his first post-surgery song on live television for millions of people?

“Yeah, there was tons of anxiety,” he says. “But I was able to talk, and I was able to sing. It was a little raspy, but … I wanted to do it.

“I’m not one that likes for people to even think that I’m down and out, you know. This was me saying, I might be down, but I ain’t down for the count.”

Montgomery says he had to cancel “eight or 10” shows, most of which were really just postponed (including the Spokane date, which was rescheduled for the Arena on Feb. 16). He has been back on the road for more than a month now, working with such opening acts as Mark Chesnutt (“a great singer who can throw the hits at you one after another”) and David Lee Murphy (“a great songwriter” who “has a jammin’ band” and is “cool”).

He says he will take most of December and January off, during which he plans to revisit the hospital and have physicians check his throat again. Then, after briefly resuming touring in February and March, he expects to take “several months off to rest the voice and work on a new album.”

“I came out in the fall of ‘92,” he says. “I’ve been hitting it pretty hard for the last three years.”

Mattea sees gender reversal

Kathy Mattea says the roles of women and men in country music have almost swapped places in the ‘90s.

“Traditionally, women were ‘the chick factor’ with the male bands,” Mattea recently noted in the Bravo film and arts network’s “South Bank Show” in a segment titled “Women of Country Music.”

“These days,” Mattea went on, “it’s the men who are stigmatized in that way. They have to be a hunk and wear tight jeans. They struggle for the Garth Brooks image while women are left to be who they are. It’s an interesting twist of events.”

Mattea also indicated that the women were able to carve out their own image because Nashville’s record and video people, so used to dealing with men, “didn’t know what to do with a woman.

“With a guy, it was OK to put on a cowboy hat … with a woman, it’s not that simple … they hired someone to tell me what to wear and how to move, which was a complete disaster. But what that did for me was it got me so ticked that I said, ‘… I’m just going to do what I want.’ … That was when I began to find my own voice.”