Rodney Atkins Biography

Rodney Atkins is country - every essence of country. He comes from it, writes about it, and sings about it. He loves it. And he's proud of it. He believes in how its music affects people. "There are values and beliefs inside of country music that speak to people, and it's that spirit that lives at the Grand Ole Opry. I think that's why they call it the 'Mother Church of Country Music'. Every time I'm on that stage, I'm reminded of the message I'm supposed to carry out on the road and on the radio to represent this format. It makes me proud and very humbled."

"The first time I heard Rodney Atkins' 'Honesty' I knew it was a very important song for the country radio format. It had everything that great country stories have!"
Phil Sweetland, New York Times Country Music and Radio Correspondent

A native of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, Rodney's interest in music began when he was given a guitar as a Christmas gift while in high school. "Cumberland Gap, Tennessee was a great place to grow up," Atkins says. "It's a place where we'd play guitars on the front porch, or jump in the truck and go down to swim in the river. It's a place where you didn't have to lock your doors at night."

Still, a shadow or two darkened this idyllic landscape. Atkins was an adopted child, and as an infant at the Holston Methodist Home for Children in Greenville, TN, he was so sick that two different couples had taken him home, just to return him just a few days later. A third couple took him home for adoption as well, and even though Rodney's ailments worsened, they refused to give him up. "It never crossed their minds to take me back," is how Rodney explains it. "I was theirs."

Times were sometimes tough at the Atkins home, but his parents made sure that his start in life was easier than theirs had been. His mother had been raised in a coal mining family near a tannery camp, and his dad survived an upbringing marked by poverty and episodes of abuse. None of their deprivations rubbed off on their adopted son. In fact, years would pass before Rodney understood just how much he had inherited from them.

"A few years ago, after church, we were at my sister's house for dinner," he remembers. "We're looking at family photo albums, making fun of old haircuts. In the back of one album I found this picture of my dad. He's ten years old, skinny, scrawny, and barefoot. That picture stirred a conversation that day about how he grew up, and where my parents came from. I learned how he was so afraid sometimes that he would sneak out through his window at night and sleep in this cave he'd found nearby, then sneak back in the next morning -- when he was six years old."

"That night, after I went home, it got to me that my mom and dad were punished when they were kids, but they gave me a normal life. I carried that picture of my dad home with me, laid it on the kitchen table, and just started writing. 'I've got a picture of him, barefoot in the mud, behind his grandpa's plow and two gray mules" -- I believe it was a song that was inside of me for a long time. 'My Old Man' was my way of saying thank you."

When not doing chores or playing baseball with his friends, Rodney spent time in high school with his guitar. He played, solo or with a band, at county fairs, festivals, and shopping malls, most of the time receiving little or no pay. Later as a psychology major at Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, TN, he started traveling west to Nashville, playing more gigs and writing songs. Part of his degree program required that he get field experience, which led him to work as a clinical counselor at the Woodland Residential Center.

As Rodney recalls, "It [counseling] was a pretty intense job. There were gang members from Memphis there. There were boys who had been tragically abused and gotten busted for trying to stab a blind man for his money while he was begging on the corner. Some of those boys just wanted to cry. Some wanted to pound my head into the pavement. Soon I realized that if some guy was ready to 'get bucked,' which means to break out of the place, my guitar could be like medicine – it could bring him down. I could sit down with a kid from the roughest part of Memphis, a sixteen-year-old who had already committed assault thirty times, and take my guitar and sing 'Fire And Rain' or 'Please Come to Boston,' and he would drop the façade of being a badass."

Rodney also worked at odd jobs to pay his way through college. It was while driving a delivery truck that he met the young lady who would become his wife. Today Rodney gives her full credit for supporting him as he pursued his musical ambitions. "We're a real couple. Neither of us come from money, but we both come from a good honest family. We work very hard at making it work. We're best friends."

Before long, word spread around Nashville about the big-voiced singer whose vocal sound drew as much from Aerosmith as it did from Alan Jackson. Curb Records signed him up, and in short order Atkins was in and out of the studio - almost overnight - with finished tracks under his belt. It was the opportunity he'd always hoped for? but music, like most good things, isn't to be taken lightly, and something about this project seemed a little too easy.

"After I finished it, I ran into Mike Curb [label president]," Rodney says. "He asked me how I felt about the album. I said, 'Well, it's obviously great to get to make an album, but you know, I don't feel very connected to it. What's on this CD just doesn't match what I do when I play onstage.' And Mike said, 'I agree. I think you should start the project over. If you want to cut twenty more sides and mix 'em all thirty times, do it.'"

Rodney never released that first album ?

Instead, Atkins spent more than two years scouting out various engineers and producers, writing and tracking down songs that told his story, and finessing a sound that slammed elements of rock and country together, with more concern for making an impact than fitting into anyone's preconceptions. For his engineer and co-producer he chose Mike Shipley, a celebrated genre-jumper whose credits include Green Day, Def Leppard, Tim McGraw, and Shania Twain. The musicians selected for the project were equally responsive to Rodney's vision, all the way down to the acoustic guitar parts.

"Rodney Atkins deserves to be a star! His voice, charisma and hard work have made him a powerhouse entertainer and his new Curb record ('Honesty') is an impressive debut."
Crystal Caviness, United Press International

Atkins speaks quietly and maintains a deferential politeness that comes from being raised by caring parents. Whether speaking or listening, he fixes his gaze on whomever he's with. There's a sense that no nuance escapes his attention, and that he would never use what he learns about people to betray a confidence, or tell a lie.

"Night after night," he says, "signs come to him that the music on this album is reaching people." He talks about the concerts where, as he sings 'Honesty,' he sees troubled couples in the audience soften toward each other, tears coming from her eyes and a kind of understanding coming into his. He remembers when a frantic fan pounded on his tour bus as it was pulling out, pleading even for a lyric sheet for that song to give to his wife as a gesture of reconciliation. Or the many people who have thanked him for writing 'My Old Man' and asked for a copy to give to their parents.

Today, though, he's talking about a song that's yet to be written, about his own first birth child, Elijah. "He's my world," Rodney says. "I was with my wife after he was born. Just as the nurse was leaving the room, she turned back and said, 'Oh, by the way, his blood type is A-Positive.' That's my blood type, and it hit me right then that he's the only blood relative I know on this planet. I just completely lost it -- I still do."

Since his single 'Honesty' was released and earned top 5 status, making it to #4 on Billboard from his debut album, a feat that is rare these days, Atkins has spent most of the past year on the road playing various venues. "I've had a wonderful time on the road. One night we may play for 500 people in a small club and then the next day play a festival in front of 50,000. It's been an adventure, and show after show I've watched people recognize the songs they hear. I've felt my band step it up night after night, and we seem to take it to the next level, entertaining folks all over the country. That's the goal, to give them a show they will talk about for a long time. We want to make sure everybody gets their money's worth – fans, club owners, promoters and all. We know that we are building relationships that will last."

Rodney is now working on his sophomore project for Curb Records. "It is an exciting time to be in the studio and writing songs after being on the road. It has allowed me to find out first hand what the listeners react to and want to hear. To really dig in and discover what it is that I love to do, to make the music I want to be known for - country music."