If Hank Williams and his mentor, Fred Rose, came back to life in top form, they could not have crafted a more soulful array of songs than singer Teea Goans presents here in her debut album, The Way I Remember It. Goans’ sweetly plaintive voice comes at you like a beam of light through utter darkness. She doesn’t simply sing country music, she delivers its very essence.
While Goans is clearly the star of the album, it is very much a communal triumph, beginning with producer Terry Choate and associate producer Joe Spivey. Choate was the Director of A&R for Capitol Records during the phenomenal rise of Garth Brooks and has lately distinguished himself as producer of Larry Gatlin and The Gatlin Brothers’ adventurous album “Pilgrimage,” as well as the Grammy-nominated and Emmy-winning “Jumpin’ Time” CD/DVD by the 11-member Western Swing ensemble, The Time Jumpers. Spivey, a multi-instrumentalist and long-time leader of John Anderson’s band, is now a stalwart in The Time Jumpers’ crew of Nashville superpickers.
Goans, Choate and Spivey spent more than a year selecting the 11 songs on this album. Naturally, they turned to the master composers, most of whom are members of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. From the great Ernest Tubb came “Walking The Floor Over You.” Willie Nelson contributed “I’m Still Not Over You,” Merle Haggard and Red Lane “I Didn’t Mean To Love You,” Bill Anderson “Walk Out Backwards,” Curly Putman and Sonny Throckmorton “Made For Loving You,” Hank Cochran, Red Lane and Dale Dodson “He’ll Be Back,” Joe Allen “Lying In My Arms,” Rick Holt and Red Lane, “Same Ol’ Song And Dance,” Jim Owen “Two Arms, Two Lips, Too Lonely, Too Long,” Jim McBride, Don Poythress and Jerry Salley “I Don’t Do Bridges Anymore” and Angela Kaset and Rob Crosby “Letter From God.” It’s hard to imagine a more lyrical lineup.
In a stroke of good fortune at which Goans still marvels, Choate was able to enlist Dan Tyminski, of Alison Krauss’ Union Station band, to serve as her vocal partner on the tender “Made For Loving You.”
Teea Goans (pronounced TEE-uh GO-uhnz) grew up in rural Lowry City, Missouri, not far from the Kansas border. “We listened to an AM radio station that played classic country music,” she recalls. “When I started to school in the 1980s, I didn’t even know who Michael Jackson and Madonna were.” Although she was singing in church by the time she was three years old, it wasn’t until she turned nine that she got her big break—performing as a full-fledged member of the nearby Truman Lake Opry. She worked there every week until she was 17, frequently opening for such acts as Bill Anderson, Little Jimmy Dickens and Grandpa Jones.
After high school, Goans earned her associate’s degree at Longview Community College in Kansas City. She remained there after graduation, supporting herself by selling mobile phones. Then, in September 2002, she had an epiphany. “I remember the day vividly,” she says, “It just hit me like a ton of bricks that it was time for me to go to Nashville. I moved into my apartment on Halloween night. I didn’t know a soul in town.” In 2003, Goans married her high school sweetheart. A couple of years later, he persuaded her that it was time to follow her musical star. So she began writing songs and singing demos for other writers. “I always say that God opened doors for me I would have never knocked on,” she muses.
One of those doors turned out to be quite a wide one. Because she had been a life-long fan of WSM, the radio station that carries the Grand Ole Opry, Goans volunteered to work for the station for free. “The first thing I worked was the Ray Price show at the Ryman Auditorium in 2006,” Goans recalls. “I love Ray Price. So I sold T-shirts for him out in the lobby. About a year later, they called and told me that Keith Bilbrey, who was doing the Opry warm-up show, needed somebody to go to the Opry with him every Saturday night and work backstage bringing him artists to interview. I knew nothing about radio except that I listened to it. But all of a sudden, I’m backstage every weekend with these artists I just adore. No one knew I sang. They just knew me as the girl that worked at the Opry and WSM.” Eventually, the Opry tapped Goans to host the intermission program on its Saturday night show.
Even as her Opry responsibilities expanded, Goans continued to write and demo songs. One of the musicians who played on her demos, she learned, was also a member of The Time Jumpers, a western swing band that performed every Monday night at the Station Inn, Nashville’s foremost bluegrass club. “I went to the Station Inn and fell in love--hook, line and sinker--with The Time Jumpers,” Teea declares. “One night they got me up to sing a couple of songs. That’s how I met Terry Choate. He’d been producing and managing the band for years.”
Thus began the journey that culminates in this extraordinary album. “After we cut the first four songs,” Goans says. “Terry took them around to people, and the enthusiasm spread like wildfire. People like Little Jimmy Dickens and Bill Anderson were cheering me on. That blew my mind.” The completed album is sure to blow (and expand) more minds, especially those that ache for authenticity. Teea’s debut is an exhilarating reminder of why so many of us grew up loving country music.
In January 2010, Goans reached a goal she had aspired to from earliest memory. On a Saturday, a snowstorm swept into Nashville, virtually shutting the city down. At 4:30 that afternoon, when she and her husband were in their PJs and settled in for the night, she got a call from the Opry. Some of the scheduled performers were snowed in. Could she possibly come in and sing on the 7 o’clock show? With no time to fret about it, Goans rushed to the Ryman and stood at the side of stage until Opry matriarch Jean Shepard called her name.
“My fear was that I would lose my nerve,” Goans says. “But as I walked onstage, a complete feeling of peace came over me. It was like I’d done it a million times.” She sang “Walk Out Backwards” and “I’m Still Not Over You,” and the crowd loved her. Goans smiles at the memory and, for a moment, she’s that little girl in Missouri again, listening to AM radio and dreaming her long-shot dream of making it in Nashville.
