Q&A: Aaron Tippin — See him 4/26!
Buy Aaron Tippin tickets here!
FRANKLIN, Ky. — High-energy Aaron Tippin — the self-described “luckiest hillbilly that has ever lived” — comes to the Mint Event Center at The Mint Gaming Hall Kentucky Downs this Saturday evening, bringing his full band that includes wife Thea and son Tom and a country-music repertoire of working-man anthems, ballads, blues and honky-tonk.
Tippin twice survived being struck by lightning (once as a teenager helping his dad build a fence; the second while doing maintenance on a dump truck). The licensed pilot (who first soloed on his 16th birthday and became a licensed helicopter pilot, flight instructor and certified aircraft mechanic) has landed safely multiple times after airborne mechanical failure, attributing his survival to following his training and God. He also considers it miraculous to survive 30-plus years in the ultra-competitive music world.
Tippin has had six gold-certified albums and a platinum. The title track of Tippin’s 1991 debut album, You’ve Got to Stand for Something, broke through the top 10 amid the Persian Gulf War, with Tippin invited to join Bob Hope’s USO tour. There Ain’t Nothing Wrong with the Radio in 1992 became his first of three No. 1 songs, followed by That’s as Close as I’ll Get to Loving You (from the album Tool Box) in 1995 and Kiss This in 2000. His 1993 hit My Blue Angel, for which he was rebuffed for trying to bring blues back into country music, showed Tippin’s independence and keen understanding of his market. Tippin’s post-9/11 recording Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly was a crossover hit, reaching No. 2 on the country charts and breaking into the pop Top 20. Tippin’s roots in South Carolina’s farm country and work as a welder, mechanic, bulldozer and long-haul truck driver led to songs such as Working Man’s Ph.D. in 1993 and the 2009 album of trucking songs In Overdrive.
The Mint/Kentucky Downs publicist Jennie Rees recently interviewed Tippin for this Q & A while the singer-songwriter was in Florida and excited to visit a buddy’s junkyard for the first time.
How did you survive those lightning strikes and engine failure, and how did it perhaps impact your life and music?
“I attribute my survival to God. That’s the final authority. I did everything in my human power to save my life in those cases. But it’s like being struck by lightning. You’ve got time to do nothing. You’re just hit. In that case, it’s all God. Losing the prop on the steering (while flying), I did what I was trained to do. On top of that, I believe God decided I had something else to do. It did inspire a song, God’s Not Through With Me Yet. But all of us have a story of some kind when it should have been the end.”
Your Spotify profile describes you as “part of the commercial explosion of new traditionalist country in the early ’90s.”
“What? I look at the guys in my league, Sammy Kershaw, Collin Raye, myself, Mark Chesnutt, Tracy Byrd, Tracy Lawrence — we’re lucky that people are reaching back going, ‘Hey, man, I want to hear those old hits one more time.’ I think that’s what’s happened.”
What can those attending your performance at The Mint Event Center expect from an Aaron Tippin concert?
“First of all, it’s going to be a journey of the hits. I know everybody came to hear the old Aaron Tippin hits. But we’ve got a bunch of stuff we love to throw at folks. I want it to be everything from funny to happy to serious to sad to patriotic.”
Watching video of a recent performance, you might have more moves on the stage than Mick Jagger.
“Well, I do have trouble being still. If you just want to hear the music, you can download it. But if you want to see a show, it’s all about energy and connecting, and all of us having a good time. That’s what I’m about. I work as hard as I can to make people have the greatest night of their life, and they say, ‘Man, we had fun with ol’ Aaron Tippin.’”
Did you have any formal music training? I read that you began playing guitar at age 10 and started singing while doing farm chores.
“I don’t have any formal training, other than when I got to Nashville, I’d go into the studio with the best players in the world. Man, I learned quite a bit from hanging out with those guys. I got my education the old-timey way: school of hard knocks. The educated one in our family on stage will be my wife, Thea. She’s a vocal major from Belmont University. She’s a Gonzaga music student…. My brother was a guitar picker, and my mom wanted me to learn to play. She tried to give me music lessons. Finally, the music teacher said, ‘He’ll never, ever amount to anything in music. You’re wasting your money.’ The lesson was: there was a song I wanted to learn how to play, so I learned the chords. Through learning that, I learned how to put them together and write a song.”
I watched the TikTok video of one of your performances where you tell the audience the back story of My Blue Angel, and how you wanted to put the blues back in country and were told it was too country for country.
“That’s true. Blue Angel was kind of a quest of mine. Who made Aaron Tippin is a guy by the name of Hank Williams, and I don’t mean Hank Jr. I mean Hank Sr. I fell in love with his music as a teenager. That made me pretty much a weirdo at my high school in the rock and roll days, southern rock. I had Conway and Loretta and Hank Williams Sr. blasting in my jeep when I rolled in the parking lot. That was something I wanted back. I love the blues, the yodeling blues. Me and my buddies wrote this song Blue Angel. I said, ‘Man, this deserves a yodel more than any song I can think of.’ It worked for me, and it was a big hit for me.”
Explain the transition from being a pilot to moving to Nashville.
“I was basically flying five days a week, six sometimes. I was already playing bluegrass and enjoying myself pickin’ the banjo. But it all came to pass when I’m 22 years old, studying for my airline transport rating, wanting to get a job as an airline pilot. But the energy crunch in the late 70s hit. When they started furloughing senior captains, I said, ‘I’m not going to make it.’ So I turned in my wings and told the guys I was working for that I quit. I came home and took a job running a ’dozer for my buddy and driving a dump truck. I said, What did I like next best? And that was pickin’ and grinnin’ so I started playing the clubs. One thing led to another.”
How did you find your own sound and not just follow someone else?
“I think it’s a journey, a search. Because you learn, and as you learn from the other great people influencing you, you tend to drift toward that. But once you’ve done the honky-tonk scene for several years, you go, ‘Man, what do I sound like? Who am I? What voice am I really?’ If you listen to me talking right now and hear me singing, they’re very connected. Because I did a search to make sure this is what Aaron Tippin sounds like.”
How did you get to Nashville?
“I’d been on a show called ‘You Can Be a Star’ on the TNN network years ago. I won my daily. Then it came to the weekly competition and got blasted right out. But while I was packing up my stuff, Jeannie C. Riley (of Harper Valley PTA fame) walked by the dressing room and said, ‘You know, Aaron, you didn’t win today, but you’ve got a unique sound. You ought to think about coming and being in the business.’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ I went home, quit my job welding, packed my car, turned around and went back to Nashville. Took a job up in Kentucky at Logan Aluminum working in the hot mill. In the daytime, I’d go down (to Nashville) and pitch myself around. But I couldn’t get arrested as a singer, so I started writing songs through Charlie Monk. Charlie gave me a good place to sit down and write songs. He had first refusal. If he didn’t like ’em, I could take them anywhere in town. Later he moved to (legendary music publisher) Acuff-Rose and took me in as a green songwriter.”
What do you get more satisfaction from: writing songs or performing songs, or can they not be separated?
“There is a big thrill performing a song that you wrote. But I’ve got to say, probably the biggest thrill is like a Charley Pride cut You’ve Got to Stand For Something. Charley Pride cut Whole Lotta Love on the Line. I was beside myself when Charley Pride would put his voice on the words I’d written. That was over the top for me… I’ve had cuts by Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney, David Ball, The Kingsmen, The Cathedrals.”
What keeps you going?
“I don’t know. I love to get up in the morning and get with it. I think the things I haven’t got done yet keep me going. Right now I’m building a hangar door down at my farm where I have a 2,000-foot grass runway so I can remove my airplanes from the big airport and take them down to my grass strip. I’m building a rifle range behind that, and I need to build some targets. I’ve got five airplanes I need to put together and get back to flying. I’ve got a list of plenty to do, and on top of that there’s a honey-do list.”
These are do-it-yourself projects, right? And you’ve got the background for it.
“I do. We even work on our own (tour) bus. I’ve got a buddy who has all the big drive tools — I don’t have them anymore like we used to — to work on the bus. It’s nothing for me and him to spend a weekend taking the engine transmission out of it, as we did two years ago. I was just on top of it (fixing) the air-condition unit two weeks ago with my sound man. There’s always something going wrong with the bus. That’s first priority. Because if that bus isn’t running, we ain’t going.”
So your working-man songs come from personal experience.
“I am the guy who got up at 5 in the morning, threw the lunchbox in the truck and took off to a construction job. I drove semis across America, hauled heavy equipment. I can run excavation equipment. I’m a farm boy; I can run a bush hog and a backhoe. I’ve never been in a position where I couldn’t find a job if I wanted one.”
You also have a wine label with Stonehaus Winery in Crossville, Tenn. (right off Interstate 40 between Nashville and Knoxville), including Ready to Rock Riesling, Kiss This Cherry, and Blue Angel Blueberry.
“Yes, we are the co-makers of our wine. Matter of fact, every month we do what we call Tippin Tuesday, where we just come over and hang out. Everybody comes, and folks get the chance to sample Stonehaus Winery, including my wines. I get to catch up with friends that I haven’t seen for a while. Everybody is welcome. It’s a lot of fun. We start at 12 and go to 3. So if you ain’t doing nothing, come on by and say hi.”
The Mint Event Center’s spring schedule (tickets on sale at hyperlinks)
Doors open 7 p.m. Central; Concert 8 p.m.
Saturday April 26 — Aaron Tippin
Saturday May 17 — John Conlee
Saturday June 7 — Gary Mule Deer
