Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain: Tales of Romance and Tragedy by Oermann Robert K

Author:Oermann, Robert K. [Oermann, Robert K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Music, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781599951843
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2008-10-08T06:00:00+00:00

17

For the Rest of Mine

There have been plenty of romances behind the Grand Ole Opry curtain, but only one Opry star has proposed to his wife in front of it.

While making his Opry singing debut on November 23, 1996, Trace Adkins went down on bended knee in front of his girlfriend Rhonda. He asked her to marry him with the show’s audience and cast as his witnesses. Everyone cheered when she said, “Yes.”

“Who knew if I’d ever be invited back on that sacred stage?” Trace recalled in his 2007 memoir Trace Adkins: A Personal Stand. “So I decided to ask Rhonda to marry me right there on the Opry stage. I knew I wanted to pop the question somewhere special, but I needed it to be something truly spectacular and memorable. That’s how much playing the Opry meant to me.”

Trace adds, “There’s no way I’ll ever forget that night. She didn’t have a clue. She had no idea. I had the ring in my little coat pocket, and my coat was hanging in the dressing room, Mr. Acuff’s old dressing room. I went to do makeup, and somebody told me it was time to go on. She said, ‘I’ll go get your jacket,’ and I said, ‘No! No!’ She kind of thought that was weird, but she didn’t know why I acted that way. But that was about the only surprise that I’ve ever pulled on her.”

At an outdoor ceremony in the garden at Nashville’s historic Belle Meade Plantation, Trace and Rhonda were married on May 11, 1997. After they exchanged rings, he sang “The Rest of Mine” to her with a lump in his throat. Trace had cowritten the ballad with Kenny Beard, who played guitar accompaniment for him at the event. That fall, it became Trace Adkins’s fifth hit single. Listeners loved its memorable tagline: “I can’t swear that I’ll be here for the rest of your life/But I swear I’ll love you for the rest of mine.”

The performance proved that roughneck Trace Adkins has a softer side, and in the case of Trace, the term “roughneck” applies in the classic definition of the word—oil field worker. He dropped out of Louisiana Tech after his sophomore year studying petroleum engineering to take a job laying pipe in an oil field.

Next, he signed on for offshore drilling work. During the lonely downtime at night on the rig, Trace played his guitar and wrote and sang country tunes. His fellow roughnecks liked what they heard. One knew a successful country band in Lafayette, Louisiana.

“On my two weeks off, I went down there and met these guys. They had entered a contest, the Wild Turkey Battle of the Country Bands. They’d won the local competition and were going to the regionals in Dallas. They wanted me to come to the regionals and sing this song I had written called ‘Bayou Sunrise.’”

Billed as Bayou Speak Easy, the band won the regional contest and came in second at the national competition in Nashville.

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