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Travis took up the guitar in a serious way instead ("I'm still not a great player, though. I just mainly play rhythm"). Hatcher remembers that he was "very, very shy. He would hardly talk to me, even after I hired him." He didn't have much to talk about, between guitar and all the handymanning and mechanical-bull handling she had him doing around the club, never mind the singing. He had won a Country City amateur contest, and settled in at the club for what was to be a five-year stay. "One day," says Hatcher, "Randy was rehearsing with the band, and his dad went home for something, I don't remember exactly why, but Randy stayed in Charlotte. He never went back home after that." The father-son relationship is still sometimes prickly. "Randy's father has not ever, not one time has he thanked me for what I've done," says Hatcher. "His mother has. She's a wonderful lady."
Lib and Randy shared a few things in common, including, it is often suggested, a strong romantic entanglement. "It is a great partnership" is as far as Randy will go to characterize the relationship. But Hatcher, fortyish, is as close to her boy now as she was way back in 1978, when she put up $10,000 for his first two singles, released by a local label out of Shreveport, La. They also shared a strong sense of Randy's destiny and in 1981 were already making the rounds and plugging songs in Nashville. Finally, in 1985, a Warner Bros. Records exec tuned in on what Hatcher had been hearing for a decade and signed Travis to a singles contract. His first shot was the lilting On the Other Hand, which flopped at first, but his second, 1982, made the Top Ten. Warner signed Travis for an album, which became the 2 million- selling Storms of Life, and On the Other Hand, re-released, went to No. 1. All of a sudden, Travis was on the fast track, with the pedal to the metal. Would a chorus of I Told You So sound too much like gloating?
"Over the course of ten years' trying, you learn a lot," Travis allows. "Even if you're not very smart, you can learn a lot." He has plenty to show for his efforts, like a new $500,000 whirlpool-equipped tour bus, which replaced the converted bread truck and delivery van that used to freight the musicians from gig to gig. He can also take off-road consolation in the property he just bought in Cheatham County, 20 miles out of Nashville, where he and Hatcher share a renovated century-old log cabin.
Since in the past year he's been off the road only for scattered five-day stretches, downtime is to be cherished. "I love to ride," he says, and he takes one of his three horses over his new spread, sometimes staying near the creek that runs around his cabin in a languid semicircle, like a lucky horseshoe. "Out in the country," he says, "now that feels like home. That is how I was raised, out away from everybody, and that is what I still like." Randy Travis knows his rightful place. And he stays hard by his roots.