Waylon (55 page)

My friends. This town is big enough for the all of us.

W
hen people ask me who I admire most in the world, I always have the same answer: Muhammad Ali.

I thought he was too smart-ass for his own good when I first heard of him, but after I realized what he was doing, he left-hooked
me quick. I guessed he had seen Gorgeous George, the wrestler, and how people loved to hate him as he paraded around the ring
with his blonde curls and mincing walk, before he pile-drived his opponent into the mat. Muhammad talked about himself with
a grand sense of humor, but it helped that he was probably the most gracefully flamboyant boxer of our lifetime.

I enjoyed watching him fight, and respected him because he stood up for what he believed. When they drafted him, all he had
to do was join the army and keep his mouth shut. They probably would’ve let him fight exhibitions and live in a fancy barracks,
but he was one of the first to say that the Vietcong had never done anything to him. They’d never called him a nigger. He
said no, rejecting the draft because of his religious beliefs, and lost the heavyweight championship belt. Muhammad gave up
what he loved most, what he had worked for all his life, because he didn’t believe in the war. For four years, the only fighting
he did was to stay out of prison.

He brought such class to boxing, and even after they overturned his conviction, Ali was never bitter about the fact that the
government had robbed him of his peak years. Later, I found out what a kind and generous man he was. Watching him in the ring,
he’d have his opponent helpless and then start yelling at the referee to stop the fight. He didn’t want to hurt anybody, killer
instinct or no.

Kris brought me back to Muhammad’s dressing room the night he won the belt back from Leon Spinks. Before the fight, he was
the most calm man you ever saw, sitting on his trainer’s table, waiting, sure it was a done deal. When I left, he simply said
“Waylon,” and gave me a big hug.

We had lunch in L.A. a few months later, and after Shooter was born, I called him and told him we were having a christening.
“We’d love to have you,” and sure enough, he showed up and flopped down on the couch. “I’m here to integrate this joint,”
he said with a smile. Then he cast his eye over to Deakon. “And I’m lookin’ for a heavyweight to fight tonight.” It was the
only time I’ve ever seen Deakon say “not me.”

I had just bought the bus we called Shooter I. It wasn’t even furnished yet; I don’t know if it had license tags. Muhammad
asked me for the keys, drove to Louisville to see his momma, and then brought it back. He could have kept it for all I cared.
He means that much to me, and the world.

“I had a terrible dream, Jessi.”

We were up at Big Cedar Lodge, deep in the Ozarks south of Branson, Missouri. It was the Christmas holidays of 1994, and for
the first time we had our entire clan with us, all the kids together at last. Even in the best of families, it’s hard to get
siblings to see eye to eye with each other, or their parents; and given the rough times I’d been through in the past, we’d
hardly had the best of families.

This was our reunion, in more ways than one.

“Jessi,” I said. “I don’t know what to make of this dream. You were smiling and everything, but whenever I’d ask you to get
married, or wonder whether you’d do it again, you’d say no.”

“Well, honey, don’t you worry about that,” she said, giving me a little hug. “I’d marry you a thousand times.”

“Okay,” I replied, a little chirpily. “How about today?”

“Aw, isn’t that sweet.” She didn’t get it.

“I said, let’s get married today.” Slowly it dawned on her that I was serious. And I was.

I’d planned it for weeks. For our first marriage, it wasn’t the most solemn of occasions. I was strung out, and she was laughing
her way through it. After twenty-five years, I thought it was time for me to tell her again, in front of the whole family,
how much I loved her.

I picked out a wedding dress and they fitted it long distance. I called John and Jeanie Morris, and Debbie, at Big Cedar,
and they took care of arranging the details. The funniest part was listening to Jessi on the phone, making dozens of plans
for the weekend, arranging lunches and outdoor events, and them just nodding and going along with whatever she said, knowing
something completely different was going to happen.

The reunion was meaningful for me on a lot of levels. I wanted to get all of my children together; it felt, somehow, a time
that we should make peace and have a healing. Some of my kids have had a tough time, partially because of me and as much in
spite of me. At this point, no one needs to put the blame on anyone else. If I wasn’t there for them when they missed me,
then I tried too hard to make up for it, and maybe that wasn’t right either. Climbing on the bus to drive from Nashville to
Branson, we put all of that in the past. Where it belongs.

Connie Smith came, and Will Campbell arrived to perform the ceremony. Will has united in marriage everyone in my band at least
once, and three of my kids. “What if Jessi says no when you ask her?” he joked. “Does this mean you’ve been living in sin
all these years?”

We hid them in their rooms until the moment arrived. The dress fit Jessi perfectly; she looked like a sixteen-year-old in
it. And when Will got up and said “What the Lord has joined together, man would do well not to piddle with,” I felt we had
come full circle.

Will Campbell is a bootleg preacher. You can find him on Saturday night at Gass’s, near Mount Juliet in Tennessee, sitting
in with the band and having a nip if he feels like it. He’s my “guru.”

He represents the soul of the South, to me, and he’s one of the only people who I care what they think about my doings. He
was raised a Southern Baptist, in Mississippi, which is about as Southern Baptist as you can get. When he graduated from Yale
Divinity School in 1952, he took a pastorate in a small North Louisiana town. His major interest was social issues, and he
was pro-union and pro—racial equality, two topics that didn’t go over too well with some white churchgoers in his 1950s parish.
When he spent his Sunday sermons talking about organizing the local mill, and dwelling more than he should on “The Negro Question,”
as it was called then, he didn’t last long. That’s how he became a bootleg preacher. It just means he does it wherever he
can, and to whoever cares to listen.

The one thing I respect Will most for is that he believes his job is to leave the door open; it’s you who has to walk through.
One time, when I was worried about John, I went to Will and asked him what I should do. I knew in my heart that something
had to be done, but I also figured that the last thing anybody needs is some righteous ex-addict telling him to get off drugs.
He also knew that in my frustration, I was starting to get angry at John.

“Damned if I know, Waylon,” he replied. “I can’t see as we’ve ever been able to straighten anybody out that didn’t want to
do it for themselves.”

Then Will told me the story of a poor black woman, standing by the graveside of the white woman who had employed her. She’d
been treated badly, yelled at and abused over many years, and though the woman wondered if her employer “knew that I loved
her,” she finally couldn’t take it anymore; she left the grave, mad. That night, as she lay there half-asleep, Jesus came
to the foot of her bed. He said to her, “If you just love people that are easy to love, that ain’t no love at all. It’s not
hard to love somebody if they’re good to you. Yet if you love one, you’ve got to love them all.”

Will himself understands the practice of what he preaches. While involved in the civil rights struggle, he had a dear friend,
Jonathan Daniel, shot by a redneck deputy down in Alabama. Will went to the friend’s bedside and was with him till he died,
slow and painfully. Then he went directly to the courthouse, where the deputy was in jail, and ministered to him. That, in
my personal church, is a preacher.

He considered race relations, and improving race relations in the South, as his calling, and Will was very active in the civil
rights movement, more as an observer, he’ll say, since there were no white leaders. They were some who thought they were,
but for Will, that was a black movement, black-led, black-organized. There were certain things he could do, however, as a
white man, that a black person could not do, including relating to a lot of hard-nosed people on the other side, including
some in the Ku Klux Klan.

He knew Dr. Martin Luther King very well, and was the only white person present at the formation of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference in Atlanta. For Will, that was “not quite as romantic and heroic as it might sound.” It was his “job.”
His religious tradition came out of the sixteenth century, where the Baptists’ view of the separation of church and state
meant they would not go to war or condone the death penalty, and that human beings were born free and created to be free.

I saw this in him the first time I watched Will perform the marriage service. Johnny Darrell was the groom, and Will started
out by saying “There’s a passage in the Scriptures which says that you ‘render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.’” He asked
the newly Mr. and Mrs. Darrell for their wedding license, signed it, and tossed it aside somewhat contemptuously.

“As far as the state of Tennessee is concerned,” he said, “you’re married. That’s all that piece of paper is, a legal contract,
and like any legal contract, it doesn’t entitle you to very much. It doesn’t teach you how to love one another, and it certainly
doesn’t grant you happiness. The only thing it gives you is the right to sue each other.”

I cracked up when he said that, and listened harder when he added, “Marriage is about love, compassion, commitment, and caring.
It has nothing to do with legality.”

Will lives out by rural Mount Juliet and does his writing in a small log shack about a ten-minute walk through the fields
from his house. I go out there sometimes when I need to be centered, when the questioning that I always do is calling for
answers. We’ll sit out in the sculpture garden, where he takes metal junk he picks up from his property and welds it together
to form found objects of art, and we’ll talk about this and that.

You’re not supposed to question things in most religions. The church gives you the answer; God talks through them, and not
to you. I can’t accept that. My whole nature is one of asking why, and who made me that way? Why would He put us on Earth
and give us the ability to reason right from wrong, and then tell us to call him about everything we do?

I think people are put on this Earth to make their life count. That is the payback. To be judged by their accomplishments,
and not sitting and shaking and shivering in a front-row pew. When my child does something good, whose chest swells the biggest?
That’s my credit, in the achievements, not him praising me and telling me how great I am.

God has duties, too. He brought us here, and He should see to it that we have enough to eat. That we shouldn’t suffer, or
war over who gets into the uptown section of Heaven. Religion is a personal, individual thing, and everybody that reads their
version of a Bible gets a different interpretation. There’s twenty-eight thousand different faiths, and you can’t tell me
that only one of them is right.

The same is true with music. When I came to Nashville, I wanted the bottom, the insistent kick drum. I brought it into my
songs, and they said, “You can’t use that rock-and-roll beat. It’s not country.” I said, bullshit, there ain’t nothing rock
and roll about it. It’s just a beat. We have beats in all music.

That sort of thou-shalt-not thinking leads to a tribal mentality, dividing and separating and turning brother against brother.
If you don’t belong with us, if you won’t join our exclusive sect, then you’re an infidel and you’ll burn in hell. That’s
what the church says. Ignorance is no excuse, they’ll threaten you, despite the billions who have never heard of the Bible,
or the entire populations that are being killed at this moment over how they worship and pay tribute to their faith. If that’s
a way to honor God, then I need to wonder why. All the hair-splitting, the baggage and the trappings, of how many angels can
sit on the point of a needle and sex is nasty nasty nasty, what’s it worth?

Those were the question marks that turned me against the Church of Christ, what I rebelled against as a young child looking
for reassurance. There was no room for grace; it was all hell-fire and brimstone. I’d gone through enough hell on my knees
pickin’ cotton, and living in poverty, without going to church and reliving the despair, or putting it off to the next world.
I wanted to hear a message of hope, of respect for other human beings and all of humanity. Human kind.

Religion should be liberating, like music. It should be about deliverance, not worship. Freedom.

Will came out on the road with me a few years ago. I gave him a job, but I never told him what it was. Mostly I liked having
him around. After a few days of wondering why he was along, he started cooking for us on the bus. Late at night, we’d talk.