Excerpt:
Born Country
How Faith, Family, and Music Brought Me Home By Zondervan
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Zondervan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061673146
Chapter One
Home
Round Ole Baugh Road,
Is a great place for kids to grow
Some grow up and move away
Most of us decide to stay
Round Ole Baugh Road.
The neighborhood still looks the same
just new kids with the same old names
My Baugh Road’s in a Southern state
Yours may be anywhere, USA
Look around for your Baugh Road.
“Ole Baugh Road” by Randy Owen
My daddy’s name is Gladstone Yeuell Owen. My middle name is Yeuell, and so is my son, Heath’s. Why his parents gave him such an unusual name, I have no idea. His brothers had more familiar names like Johnny, Albert, Virgil, Riley, and Grady. Mama and some of Daddy’s close relatives always called him Gladsten, but the rest of the world just shortened it to G.Y. It made life a whole lot simpler.
I really don’t know much about my daddy’s side of the family beyond two or three generations back. We’ve always assumed that the name Owen was Welsh, but I also remember my grandfather, Joseph Ernest Owen, throwing around terms like Scotch-Irish and Black Dutch when I used to pester him as a kid about our family roots. “Black Dutch” was a term used by Anglo-Saxons that referred to anyone with dark complexion of European ancestry. It was also used by American Indians to hide their Indian ethnicity during the time they were less than second-class citizens. I know I have some Indian blood in me, but as to how much and what tribe or strain, I’m clueless.
The Owen family saga I know best begins with my grandfather Owen. Sometime after the Civil War, my grandfather’s mother, whose family name was Hester, was living around Armuchee, Georgia, about thirty miles east from where I’m writing this. She had apparently lost her husband, my great-grandfather, perhaps in the war or from pneumonia—I’ve heard both theories—and married a guy a good fourteen or fifteen years her junior. Because of four years of the bloodiest carnage ever on American soil, good men in the South were hard to find, so she did the best she could, no doubt.
There was just one catch. Husband number two didn’t want her two very young children, including my grandpa, around. So my grandpa and his sister Josie, after some period of time, were shipped off to his own grandparents in DeKalb County. They came over in a horse-drawn wagon. There they were raised by my great-great-grandparents Hester and never returned to their home in Georgia.
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