When I was in the eighth grade, Randy Travis was on the Grammy Award show a lot. Now I cannot tell you what awards he was nominated for or what he won, but I can tell you that night started a love of all things Randy that continues to this day. The funny thing is that it started as a joke. Since I kept hearing his name so much, I said, “Randy Travis is my mentor.” I don’t think I really knew what that word meant, because it did not at all make sense. I remember going to school the next day and repeating that to a friend. I am not sure why but then I started liking him, just because I had jokingly declared him my mentor. That year for my birthday, I got my first Randy Travis cassette tape: Heroes and Friends (click here to hear part of the title track song I recorded when I saw him in concert this past Friday). His greatest hits albums would later be the first CDs that I got that were just for me (our family first had joint CDs since we just had the one CD player. I remember the B52s was one).

In 1992, my mom and sister and I went to see him in concert. I still have the shirt from that tour, which was in support of his High Lonesome tour. I wore that shirt last night when I saw him in concert again. I do believe I was the only one there with that shirt on. I also saw him in concert at a county fair sometime in the early 1990s. I enjoyed his concerts because he always played all the classic songs from the past and intermixed it with funny stories that I am sure he told each and every night (the stories were the same for the two concerts I saw in the 1990s).

My love for Randy Travis is so strong that I even took a trip to his boyhood home. My mom and I were driving back up to Michigan from a trip down south and ventured off to North Carolina for that sole purpose. There wasn’t anything to do there, so we just stopped and snapped a photo. I think his uncle still lived there at the time. I have also been to the Randy Travis museum in Nashville where I got a guitar magnet with his picture on it that also serves as a thermometer.

When I saw that Randy was coming to Chicagoland, I decided that I just had to go. It has been more than 15 years since I last saw him in concert. I managed to get a seat in the third row. I had a great time listening to him sing all my favorite songs and I found myself thinking about all the memories that I have enveloped in each and every song. He still told funny stories every few songs and they were different this time around as you would expect given the passage of time. I tried to get some pictures of him, but didn’t have a flash camera, so the one below is the best I could do.

It was strange that I found myself tearing up a bit during a couple of the songs. I am not sure what it was about seeing him again that just brought me immense amount of joy and made me feel like a teenager again. The past year there has been a lot of musically going down memory lane now that I think about it because last fall my sister and I went to see New Kids on the Block, my other love from the eighth grade. Now if only it were possible for there to be Milli Vanilli reunion, the concert trifecta would be complete.