Editor’s note:

This series on Billy Ray Cyrus appeared several years ago in The Greenup Beacon. It was a work provided by Gregg Davidson a frequent contributor to the paper. This series has been revised with some new information ad restructuring by its author. The content presented is of his work and we have protected his poetic license. Any content or opinion in this series is his work and doesn’t express the paper’s stance or opinion.

 By Gregg Davidson

Contributor

The Greenup Beacon

To recount only the complex details of how Greenup County native Billy Ray Cyrus came to world prominence as a Country music artist and subsequent actor would be tedious, and for the most part, unnecessary since most of us are by now well familiar with his ever-unfolding story.

But to really understand BRC more wholly, there are a few things about him that most people are certainly unaware of, especially concerning his early life in Flatwoods.

In order to give the curious reader a brief glimpse into the man’s psyche and personal search for identity, I cannot properly do so without including myself into the picture, and I have to explain it in such a fashion for a reason.

Over the years I’ve received a ton of questions about my personal involvements with my classmate, so without further ado, I will attempt to set the record straight once and for all.

Billy Ray and I were both born in 1961 at Bellefonte Hospital in Russell (August 25th and May 15th respectively), but of course most sources state his birthplace as Flatwoods, which is, in my opinion, more appropriate. I would find out many years later that our mothers knew each other as kids and despite my Mom being older, they had attended school together in an age when the classes were relatively small and everyone knew of one another.

Since I went to Advance Elementary School (now the site of a CVS Pharmacy), I didn’t meet Billy Ray until I began 5th grade at McDowell Elementary where his formal education began. I remember him as being a fairly quiet kid except on the playground where he was quite the opposite. Energetic and engaging with a competitive and driving spirit, he was a natural athlete and a good team player that seemed ready to take on any competitors with a sense of confidence and mirth, attributes that would serve him well in the future. I do remember him clobbering me once at tetherball, and I never played it again.

Once we'd reached Russell Middle School, we got to know each other a little better because we sat either beside or very near one another every year in homeroom (a development that would continue throughout high school) simply because our last names were so close together alphabetically.

I was already obsessing over music and art, and he was already into sports, but our worlds being so different, we didn’t often cross paths outside of the school grounds.

In the eighth grade, when he was still largely known as simply Bill or “Bo”, he began working as a hall-roving field reporter for the ill-titled Lucifer’s Log, a monthly, 25-cent Xeroxed student magazine that was passionately (if crudely) prepared by the upperclassmen.

At the time, it served as an events calendar, gossip rag, sports report, and all around entertainment magazine that included bad puns and juvenile jokes.

Some of the features included were the 7th Grade and 8th Grade “Boy of the Month” and “Girl of the Month” profiles, a “(school) Band Member of the Month” profile, a “Song Dedication” segment, and the always anticipated and often completely fictitious “Cute Couples” list (Billy himself was often paired with some of the more attractive girls even if they weren’t actually a couple at all). With pen in hand, Billy approached me one day in the hallway to ask me if I'd like to dedicate one of the current songs on the radio to any "special" ladies.

I declined to participate, instead stating that I wished to keep all matters of the heart private and gave him a knowing wink. Brushing his bangs out of his eyes, he smiled impishly, and thanked me anyway as he slapped me a high-five, then proceeded on to the next unwary student. I turned and went on my way, never imagining for an instant that decades later he would be a household name whose personal life would be so heavily speculated upon by the public and debated upon in a slew of new media formats, and that I would be writing an article about him. I still have my copy of The Spirit, the Middle School’s version of a yearbook that he signed for me in 1975, but I digress.

Billy made friends easily, but always seemed to retain a bit of the lone wolf personality underneath his friendly exterior. He also possessed a strongly instinctive sense of adventure, and loved learning about the Native American Indian way of life, easily and deeply identifying with their plight.

In those days children could still play freely in the open woods like Huckleberry Finn, and Billy romped through the trees with rapturous abandon, playing hide-and-seek or Cowboys and Indians with his brother and other neighborhood children, building “forts” and waging mock “attacks” on the enemy.

I’m not sure when Billy befriended mutual classmate Rob Tooley (a wonderfully warm and sweet guy who happened to also be a gifted drummer), but having been teammates, I suspect their friendship was forged through their mutual love of competitive sports.

Rob was a lot like Billy, slightly shy perhaps, and highly sensitive, but willing to play the fool for the sake of a laugh, or suddenly brimming with bubbly school spirit when asked about the ball team and upcoming games. They became fast friends and soon started to pal around both inside and outside of school. Sometimes you might spot them in the school’s field house working out on the weight machine, or passing ball near the high school or in the open field beside McDowell. You could tell that they were also both deeply introspective thinkers with a lot more going on inside their heads than would appear on the surface. According to some of his friends, this aspect of his personality had amplified after his parents divorced when he was still only five years of age.

Both later remarried, and Billy stayed with his mother and stepdad Cletis Adkins, but because Ron and his wife Joan lived only about a mile away, any separation anxiety could be quelled by simply jumping on his bicycle. And when it comes to action, Billy had a robust case of wanderlust and wasn’t one to sit still for long at all. When not in school, he might be spied in Flatwoods having a bite to eat at L&J’s restaurant (now a Little Caesar’s Pizza), enjoying a refreshing ice cream cone at Edmond’s Frosty Treat (until recently the site of The Dancing Oil Can), sipping a soda on a counter stool at Scott Drugs (now a Rite-Aid), or chowing down on some lunch at Giovanni’s Pizza.

Once in high school, Billy was fully immersed into the sports world that he shared with his buddy Rob, but Tooley (a wiry football center renowned for his lively, high stepping “Tooley Trot”) also loved popular music, so I suspect that much of Billy’s musical tastes were shaped both by him and Billy’s older brother Kevin (or “Kebo”) who played the electric guitar and idolized Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone.

Billy was certainly exposed to music from an early age since his mother Ruth played piano (it still sits in the corner of the garage of their former home on Long Street), and his late father Ron (an Armco rigger who later became a beloved State Representative) played guitar, but also sang with The Crownsmen, a popular Gospel vocal quartet. Ron would often get his two young sons up in front of their church’s congregation to sing along to hymns.

I do know that Billy, like myself and many other music-loving locals, became enamored with Zachariah, a Westwood-based rock-n-roll power trio that was fronted by the late Mike Murphy and included Russell High’s Steve French on drums and Corky Holbrook on bass (both of whom would later become members of BRC’s band Sly Dog). By the mid 1970’s, Mike had already made a name for himself as a great guitarist and vocalist, but stood out among other local acts due to the fact that he wrote a lot of wonderful original material (BRC covered one of his tunes on his debut album “Some Gave All”).

It was during this same time that the whimsical rock band KISS skyrocketed to international fame, and as a sophomore in 1976, I formed a KISS tribute band called KISS II with my school mates Bruce Sallie, Paul Sallie (no relation), and Kirby Thacker, complete with all of the face make-up, colorful costumes, high heels, and stage pyrotechnics that make a KISS concert a spectacle to remember.

We honestly put everything that we had into making it as genuinely true to the originals as possible and much like them, we grew really popular seemingly overnight; playing to sold-out local audiences everywhere we performed. At school, I became a reluctant celebrity-of-sorts with some students, while others teased and mocked me for my love of KISS. Still others bombarded me with long-winded explanations of why the satanic-looking KISS members were in league with the devil and how I was sure to end up in hell if I didn’t give up my penchant for the evil influence of rock-n- roll music.

I often reminded them that our own school’s mascot was a diabolical looking, pitchfork carrying red devil and asked whether they were willing to swear off eating devil’s food cake and deviled eggs for the sake of their own souls, but such defensive rhetoric usually left them angrily confused or blankly speechless.

We dissolved the band amicably in December of 1979, just as KISS were experimenting with disco and pop elements, costing them hordes of old fans in the process. I’m not sure that Billy ever attended one of our shows, but the crowds were so overwhelmingly large and animated that it would have been easy to overlook him. Perhaps at the very least, between Zachariah and KISS II, we proved to aspiring performers that a large and devoted following was possible in our area.

Billy admits that he once tried to take up playing the guitar while still a teen, but didn’t realize that as a lefty, he needed to restring it first, so he quickly abandoned it and focused more on sports.

He’d become quite a good catcher in baseball and aspired to play for the Cincinnati Reds one day like his hero Johnny Bench, but at age twenty (around the time of Rob’s shocking death) while attending Georgetown College on a baseball scholarship, he won tickets to see Neil Diamond perform.

He claims that during the show an inner voice advised him to pick up the guitar once again, and it’s a good thing he complied.

In 1982 he and brother Kebo formed the rock band Sly Dog and as Billy rehearsed on the guitar, he began trying to book shows anywhere they could. A complete unknown to the local clubs, he struggled to find anyone who would even audition his group, so he swore to himself that if he couldn’t find regular employment as a musician within ten months, he would hang up his dream of playing music and try his hand at something else.

As luck would have it, only one week from his self-imposed deadline, Sly Dog landed a weekend gig at the Sand Bar, a smokey bar in the Marting House Hotel across the Russell Bridge in Ironton, Ohio.

They soon became a regular attraction and signed on as the house band, but as is the nature of the business, fellow band-mates quickly came and went and the group struggled for identity.

They slowly began recruiting a few avid fans, a move that was noticed by the other clubs in town, and they were soon offered more money to perform at Changes, a much roomier establishment with somewhat more of a true stage.

I caught his act quite often as my sister Penny worked there for a while and I gotta say that although they weren’t exactly a mesmerizing bunch, as a performer Billy certainly knew how to get your attention onstage.

He would sometimes wear strikingly outlandish clothing or hats, and danced and whirled to the beat during non-vocal interludes. He might also occasionally offer up a funny story or a risqué joke, and wasn’t afraid to talk openly about certain aspects of his life and the impact that being in a band had on it.

His early sets included a lot of covers by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, all known for intense vocal deliveries, and you could tell that when Billy sang, he put his heart and soul into it, becoming quite the self-promoter along the way.

When the Flatwoods Super-Quik first opened its doors, my mother Pauline was one of the first clerks to be hired. Sometimes I’d be there at the sales counter chatting to Mom and in would walk Billy Ray dressed in moccasins and a fringed, brown leather jacket, feeding small apples to a live raccoon named Rascal who sat upon his shoulder like a swashbuckler’s parrot (always wearing a collar carefully tethered to his waist), and fervently talking about his band.

He took his group very seriously and it became painfully apparent just how serious his concerns were when one weekend, upon outside advice, he suddenly let his brother Kebo (and another member) go from the group. The brothers’ split remained a sore spot between them for many years and there is no doubt that he hated to do it, but only he and God (and perhaps a handful of others) know what all of his reasons were for such an abrupt decision.

RMS - The Spirit 1975 Autograph

RMS - The Spirit 1974 Photograph