"We're the Trailer Choir. You got Big Vinny..."
"It all started shortly after my senior year of football. That was about 6 years ago. My little brother started teaching me how to play guitar. Then, I fell in love with song writing. It grew and blossomed into the beautiful relationship I have with these two,” tells the hip-hopping hulk from Linden , Tennessee, who'll 'worm' his way into your heart.
" Crystal ..."
"My mother says I came out of the womb singing. I’ve been singing and performing ever since. I was, like, three was my first time on stage. So, that's been my whole life. I've supplemented my income here and there with jobs when I moved to Nashville, but my primary focus has always been music." says the hardworking farm-girl of Cheyneyville , Louisiana , who came as a ray of sunshine upon the choir.
"And I'm Butter," finishes the self-proclaimed northern redneck who made the step from class clown of Ashtabula , Ohio , to public performer. "I've been performing and making a living for the last seven years in my life where I haven't had any other job or any other form of income. It hasn’t provided me a whole lot of extras, but for seven years, I've been basically making a living performing. Vinny and me started Trailer Choir, when we met in Nashville three and a half years ago. We began playing frat parties and traveling around, trying to make a living. We started focusing in on trying to make an original show here in Nashville . We'd known Crystal longer than she's been playing with Trailer Choir, but Crystal started performing with us about a year into it. Over the last two years, we've spent so much time together. The last two summers we've been on a tour bus with, you know, eleven people. I'm impressed with the way our relationship has grown closer together and how much harder we've worked together."
"It's really cool, me and Crystal have actually decided to run off to Vegas next week." Vinny announces.
Crystal laughs, "I've decided it's like this brother-sisterly type of relationship. We pick on each other; these two pick on each other. We all give each other grief quite a bit."
Butter continues, "One night we were playing at Twelfth and Porter for a Billy Block show. Toby Keith happened to come in and caught the last three songs of one of our sets. He came up to us afterward and said he was really impressed by the show and the songs. He asked if we wrote the songs and how long we'd been together. Next thing we know we're out on tour with him, in his movie, having a life of music."
This abrupt adjustment from bars to stars has brought new life to the group. "Everything's changed. We were all kind of doing our thing in town, performing and doing the same show that we basically do now, just on a grander scale, but everything about picking up, packing your bags and going on tour two days after signing a record deal pretty much changes your whole life."
But then, again, success can be relative. "There was this girl working at the Tin Roof. I always tried to ask her out." Butter remembers, "Y'know, 'would you go out with me, would you go out with me?’ 'No, no, no, no!' Then we get signed, get a record deal, and have a video. I went back in there and I'm like, 'Hey, will you go out with me?' and she's like ‘No.’ that kind of success story."
Having been upgraded to a doublewide in the world of music, they thank their lucky star for the chances they've been given. “We're very lucky to be out there with Toby, and all the opportunities that have come with that, but we're going to get back into adding songs to the set. We've been working on new music, writing, and we're looking forward. We've had sort of the same basic show for about the last year. We've got some real neat ideas, things we'd like to add to our live show. Kind of build on our performance right now while we're not on the road.. We are getting back to music for the next couple months," says Butter. Vinny captures the importance of sticking to the creative part of music, “I'll tell you something that helps you with song writing. About two years ago, Butter, Jewels Hanson and me were just sitting in a room where we wrote this song called ‘Off the Hillbilly Hook.’ All of a sudden, it's in a movie, y'know, Toby's movie. We get to be in Toby's movie and perform that song. That'll make you realize that, y'know, sitting in a room one day, writing a song isn't a waste of your time. It's something that can actually be turned into something bigger. We were blessed to be in Toby's movie and also have our song be the featured first single off that soundtrack.”
A Trailor Choir concert is more of an event than anything, "Our attitude towards music is pretty loose and fun. We don't really take ourselves all that seriously. Vinny is coming in at about 360 on any given day doing the 'pop worm' and hip-hopping out there, dancing. We just take a sort of unorthodox approach to everything. We just let it go the way it feels, natural. We love the notion of our music being something the people have fun with. It's the type of music that's open arms. Come on in; tell your aunties and your uncles and your cousins, ‘Let's go eat some hamburgers and drink a cold beer and have some fun.’"
This group understands fun, and lives it as well as sings about it, this is witnessed by Vinny’s story, “When we were up in New York, Butter was going to steal a horse, like Kenny Chesney, but he wasn't tall enough to get on the horse. He actually jumped up on the mailbox trying to get up on the horse.”
“I got stuck in the mailbox,” Butter pipes in.
”His foot went in the hole.”
Butter deadpans, “I got cited for public inaccuracy.”
With songs like “I Dream of Butter,” “Beergut,” and “Off The Hillbilly Hook,” it is a sure bet this threesome will be packing in the pews and setting the congregation swaying for years to come.
| written by Joshua Schrader
