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Second oldest in a family of six kids, Travis (born Traywick) grew up on a turkey farm in Marshville, N.C. He took up guitar at age eight, and with the encouragement of his parents, learned to play it just the way he does now: badly. "I can hear things, but I can't play them," he admits. Onstage he will strum a few chords as he fronts his band. In the recording studio, "I don't play anything. The producer uses session players. I have input, but he tells them what to play." Travis has logged some of the hard knocks required for solid country writing, including dropping out of school in ninth grade and, on occasion, getting bailed out of jail. "I thought I knew it all, and wanted to do just what I wanted to do," he recalls. "Run away from home, maybe run with the wrong crowd, just trying to be a tough kid." His father wasn't always fast about getting him out of the lockup: "Once in a while he'd get mad and leave me for a day or so to teach me a lesson."
With all this background, however, Travis is still a reluctant writer. Of the 20 songs on his two albums, he is credited or co-credited only with five. "I'll never get to the point where I just record what I write," he says. "First off, I don't write that much. And there's not that many people that write that good. We don't care who writes a song as long as it's great." But ask him about the early days, when he was 14 and won a talent contest at the Country City U.S.A. club in Charlotte, N.C., and he will describe them by saying "That was 1977. I was singing whatever was hits. I wasn't doing anything of mine." Spoken like a man who knows, even now, all he has to do to make a tune his own is sing it.
Country City Owner Lib Hatcher encouraged changing his stage name from Randy Ray, and when she moved on to the Nashville Palace, took him along with her. He sang, cooked and did odd jobs around the place, until someone from Warner Bros. Records caught his act in 1985 and signed him up. He uses different tools now, but the work, under the careful guidance of Manager Hatcher, is still tough. Randy remains unmarried, the better to handle the road. Bus it. (But no drugging, drinking or smoking on board. "People are sure gonna be healthier working with us," Randy allows. And besides, smoke irritates his "real bad allergies.") Break. Bus. Set up. Play. Bus it again. Keep it professional; put the personal stuff on hold. It's that same old endless highway that circles the heart of country, a road that Randy Travis is already well along. "Do what you love, and be what you are," he says. "To me that's country music. With me, what you see is what I got." When Travis met Roy Acuff at the Grand Ole Opry, country's elder statesman told him, "We need you." Randy was flattered. The rest of us can make do with feeling lucky.