Biography

Bradley Gaskin is having a Moment – several of them, actually.

The runaway success of his song “Mr. Bartender” has brought the Alabama honky-tonk stylist experiences that he never dared dream about just a few months ago. And those experiences have left him overwhelmed with emotion, filled with gratitude and deeply humbled.

On Thursday, March 3, 2011, Bradley performed at the Sony showcase during the influential Country Radio Seminar. He stood alone on stage with just his guitar and sang “Mr. Bartender” to one of the most difficult and powerful audiences a country performer ever faces. When he finished, normally jaded radio programmers were on their feet, cheering.

“The response stunned me,” says Bradley. “I’m a humble guy. I just unhooked my guitar and looked down, because I was overwhelmed. I had no words. I walked by the label executives. I walked by [his producers] John Rich and Charlie Pennachio. I walked right out and left those guys. I just had to. I was trying to come down.

“I remember reaching in my coat pocket and calling my wife. I said, ‘Adrian, I can’t say anything. I am speechless.’ There are some Moments like that which I will never be able to put into words.”

Within hours, radio stations were flooding the record company with calls, demanding that “Mr. Bartender” be released as a single at once. At the time, Bradley was only just beginning to record his debut album.

“We hadn’t even picked it as a single,” he recalls. “We didn’t have anything ready to go. We thought we’d be putting out a single sometime in May. I didn’t even have a publicity photo. Ever since then, it’s been a crazy ride.”

Bradley Gaskin was at home in Duck Springs, Alabama, with his wife and their two-year-old daughter Madilyn on Tuesday morning, March 8, 2011. He had the radio on, and for the first time, the family heard “Mr. Bartender” being broadcast.

“When they played that song, Madilyn got up, ran over to the radio, put her arm around it and said, ‘I love you, Dada.’ And she kissed the radio. She started singing. Then she climbed up in my lap and kissed me on my cheek. I thought, ‘You know what? If I never sell any records, if I never go out and play for the people on tour, if I never get to be on the Opry again, if nothing ever happens, nothing can top that.’ I still can’t believe all that happened to me in this one month.”

Bradley Gaskin is the only child of parents Thomas and Mary, neither of whom is musical. His dad was a country fan, and had plenty of discs by George Jones, Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard and Conway Twitty around the house. As he grew up, their little boy listened to the Gaskins’ records more than they did.

“My mom says I started singing when I was two years old. By the time I was five, six, seven years old, I wanted to be a country singer so bad I couldn’t stand it. I think it was kind of scary for my mom and dad, because I had vowed at such a young age that I was going to be a country singer and would write songs.

“I found myself caught up in the sadness of a country song. Something about that sadness did something to me. It puts a smile on my face, as weird as that may seem.

“The first tapes I bought as a kid were Ricky Skaggs and Garth Brooks. I was a big Keith Whitley fan, too. I remember the day Keith died. I was nine years old. My dad and I were riding in the car, and it came on the radio that he had passed. I remember staring out the window, thinking, ‘The greatest singer I ever heard is gone, and I want to do that.’”

He began singing in churches and revival meetings at age nine. Already considered something of an oddball by his rock-music-loving peers, Bradley retreated even further into his country-music reverie when he became a teenager.

“I already knew I was ‘different,’” he recalls. “My mom and dad split up when I was 13 or 14 years old. I kind of blotted that part of my past out. They were having trouble and probably should have separated years before that. During the fussing, arguments and feuding, I just kind of shut the world out. I closed the door to my bedroom and would surround myself with music, TV, radio, tapes, records, whatever I could. I was in that little world. I didn’t care about anything else. I feel like Jesus and country music became my two best friends. And that’s all I needed.”

Bradley quit high school, got a GED degree and joined his father in the Sheetrock business, hanging drywall in house after house. He’d been writing songs since age 12, and he continued to polish his craft, often jotting down lyrics on Sheetrock paper at jobs. He also continued singing in churches, but was fired as an entertainer at a local Mexican restaurant for being “too traditional.”

Exploratory trips to Nashville proved fruitless except for a brief stint singing on the morning shift at Robert’s Western World on Broadway. After his last Robert’s engagement, he decided to tour the nearby Ryman Auditorium, and the security guard on duty randomly invited him to sing to the tourists who were there.

“So I got up on stage and played Keith Whitley’s ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes.’ People who were in the room started coming up to the stage. They took pictures. They sat down in the seats. It was the craziest thing. I got done playing, and someone walked up to me and said, ‘We don’t know your name, but we saw you here for free, and someday we will pay to see you play.’”

Back home in Alabama, a new family appeared at church. Their daughter, Adrian, heard Bradley sing and was smitten. One Sunday morning, she approached him on the church front steps.

“She said, ‘Bradley, I know you want to be a country singer and songwriter. I want you to know I pray for you every day that God gives you your dreams and prayers.’ I thought, ‘What girl would do that?’ I’d met girls before, and they never told me that. I was talking to her on the phone a couple of nights after we started dating and said, ‘This may sound weird, but you might be the girl I am supposed to marry.’ She said, ‘If it makes you feel any better, I feel the same way.’ We got married on June 2, 2007. So God knows what He’s doing.”

One day in 2008, Bradley returned home covered in dust from another hard day at work. Adrian told him she’d heard a radio commercial about a talent contest that singer-songwriter-producer John Rich was holding in Nashville. She urged him to put “Mr. Bartender,” which he’d written in 2005, on MySpace. Initially, Bradley resisted the idea.

“I was like, ‘Adrian, I’ve been to Nashville before, trying to meet people.’ I was just frustrated by then. All I could do was to pray real hard that somehow, someday I could make it. I put my trust in God. If it was meant to be, He’d open a door for me. I was content with being who I was: a blue-collar guy, working paycheck to paycheck. But while I was taking a shower, I thought, ‘God, did You put her in that car today for her to hear that commercial?’

“I had no idea what MySpace was. I didn’t even own a computer. My wife, who is an RN, had one, and she put it up there. Three weeks later, John Rich and his partner Charlie Pennachio invited me to Nashville.”

Bradley won the contest. John Rich signed Bradley to his publishing company and began introducing him to top-tier collaborators. He booked Bradley into his first recording session. He scheduled a series of showcases for the Sony staff, and Bradley eventually signed a record deal with the Columbia Nashville label.

“This was all new to me,” Bradley comments. “Suddenly, I was in a studio where anybody who was anybody has recorded, even Keith Whitley. For me to even be a speck of dust in there, man, it was an overwhelming feeling. I didn’t even feel worthy to walk in this room.”

His talent was such that he was invited to perform on the Grand Ole Opry before he even had a record released. He was booked to sing at the Ryman – for real, this time – on October 7, 2010.

“I was a nobody, a nothing. Standing on that stage, I did Keith Whitley’s ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes.’ I remember those people standing to their feet. I looked down at the floor and stared at it. I looked back up and tried to find my wife and little girl in the audience. I started wiping the tears from my eyes as I stood there. I could hear my little girl calling, ‘Hey, Dada.’ It was another speechless Moment that I’ll never be able to put into words.

“I just turned and told the band, ‘Alright, let’s go into the next song.’ We did ‘Tennessee Whiskey’ by George Jones. When that happened, they stood to their feet again. I don’t say this in a boastful way, but it was the first time in my life when I felt like people took me seriously. I had a sense of confidence that I never had before. From that day on, my life has changed forever.”

Bradley Gaskin’s changed life includes a hot single with “Mr. Bartender,” and his debut album will be released later this year.