Taylor Hicks ~~ Roads home...

Taylor Hicks goes home to Birmingham this week!

In 2007, as I prepared to fly to Birmingham for Taylor’s Solo Tour, I wrote about returning to the South:

“I’ve never been to Birmingham. When I step off a plane there on March 5, I will be coming home.

“Growing up in the South in the 40s and 50s was as idyllic as Opie in Mayberry. We lived in beautiful white farm houses, and my brothers and I played in the woods. We didn’t own the house or the farm; my father was a tenant farmer.

“The future then was in the cities and, like many Southerners, we moved away. I was eight years old when we left the South with everything we had in an old Chevy. My long journey began.

“Our family never lived in the South again. Roads took me to the gray, frigid winters of Michigan, sunny beaches and Hollywood hills of California, and the scorching deserts of the Southwest.

“I returned to the South only twice since leaving all those years ago, once for my father’s funeral in the white country church I attended every Sunday as a child, then again for my mother’s funeral in the same small church a few miles from the Ohio River.

“I have always known that I must see Taylor in the South. I know now that even though I left the South, the essence of the South is still in my heart. For me, Taylor personifies that unchanging character of a world I knew as a child--a quieter, slower time and place where hearts could dream, and a boy could dance and sing in his grandmother’s kitchen.

“It has been said, ‘Home is where the heart is.’ When I step off that plane in Birmingham, I will close the circle started when I was eight. I will be coming home.”

For me, going to Birmingham felt like reclaiming that connection with the South that I had never really lost. Growing up there was a magical time and place that will always be in my heart.

A lot has happened since I first flew in over Birmingham over two years ago with my face pressed to the window looking at football fields thinking I might see one that said “Hoover.”

Taylor has a new stage, a new album, a new genre, and many new fans. He still commands an audience. He still has fans flying across the country to see him.

I’m going back to Birmingham…

And I will probably, once again, press my face against the window and look for anything that says, “Hoover.”

Make the sweet tea and fried green tomatoes…

Thanks, Taylor, for bringing me back to my roots.

See you in Birmingham!


“Birmingham,” was first published in Taylor’s fan e’zine, The Soul Connection, February, 2007.