“My name is Jason Brown, I was born and raised on a farm, six miles out of Pella , Iowa . I never went into town much unless it was for school or church or to get groceries. I grew up across the street from my grandma and grandpa’s farm.
When I was four years old, my grandma and I went to church every Sunday. Missing one day of church was like missing a week of school. You know the preacher would call, ‘Where you at? Who died? Did the house catch on fire?’
I remember singing the hymnal, not like today where you follow this little bouncing ball and you’ve got a whole rock band. When I went to church it was just the old 80-something year old lady playing on the piano and the whole congregation singing hymn number 84. Grandma musta heard something in me. The next thing I know, she started bribing me, she would buy me a new cowboy shirt when I sang. It got to the point where I wanted a new shirt, so I would purposely learn a new song. When I wore the shirts she bought to church, that was all right, but when I wore the shirts to school, they weren’t all that cool. They had the big flower, the big rose that came up, the gaudy stuff, but that’s actually why I started learning to sing was to stay outta trouble and get shirts.
My grandma had nine fingers. She worked at a window company and she lost her ring finger. She’d sit there and play with all nine fingers and teach me the scales and theory of music, somewhat. Not like college theory, but showing me how to hold my notes and sing from my diaphragm. The first song I learned was Mansion On the Hilltop. I remember singing that song for the first time in front of the congregation at church and everybody clapped. Well, when I was younger I wasn’t used to people clapping for me, it was usually, ‘Damn it!’ or me being in trouble, I was a little hellion. So this was something for me to make up for all the bad times.
I was always connected to the church musically, even when I lived in Texas . Pella , Iowa , was a little Dutch town. We moved to Corpus Christi when I was 14. I spent my 14th birthday waking up in a whole new environment. It was a total culture shock. I sang with a church down there. I was involved in the youth ministry and did summer tours and stuff, during the Spring break, we’d go someplace.
Later, I moved back to Pleasantville , Iowa, and they had a talent contest. The only song I knew was Every Rose Has It’s Thorns. I had broke up with some chick and wanted to get back with her and she didn’t want to, so that song was like, ya know, the chicks dug it, so I learned it. I used to sing during parties and stuff; I’d get out my guitar and just start making up words to songs. There was this one girl named Candy that I went to school with, I even wrote a song about her butt. She had one of the nicest butts in Pleasantville, so everyone loved the song. That’s gonna be on my next album (laughing.) My friends were like, ‘Yeah, enter this talent contest,’ so I did.
A good friend of mine, Frank Hunter’s, mom, Beth, was a singer. She was well known throughout Iowa , she did a lot of county fairs, she was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you come up and sing with us? You like country music?’ I was like, ‘Yeah I love country music.’ I’m the only dork here wearing wranglers and a cowboy hat and a belt buckle in this town. That’s when the transition came, Christian music singing, to singing country music. I’d always been a country fan, but I’d just never had an avenue to do it. That’s when I was 16 and I’ve been doing it ever since. Except for two years, I moved to St. Louis . Those weren’t the worst years of my life, but I always felt like something was missing.
I love meeting people. I like watching people come into a venue and I usually try to find the people that look like they don’t want to be there. You got your ones that won a free ticket off the radio and they didn’t really want to go and they’re like, man you dragged me into this thing. I look for those people and when I play. I purposely try to pinpoint them and if by the third song there’s not a smile on their face then, by golly, I’m doing something wrong.
A lot of people now are open minded though, as long as it’s a good song they don’t care if its rap or hip hop or pop or country. As long as you got a good beat, you can sing a song about an egg roll. You can bring a whole bunch of people from different cultures and different backgrounds, and, if you share that same music, that same interest, you’re in the same boat, you have something in common. What I found when I realized that concept of song writing; it’s not that hard. It doesn’t need to be that hard, just say what it is and let the listeners draw their own picture.
A quote I read one time stuck with me, ‘Try not to be a man of success, rather be a man of value.’ Maybe it comes from living in the Midwest, that’s my wall being in country music and being in Nashville . Being from the Midwest sometimes people read me wrong because, when you do business, you do business. Either you work your butt off for something, or you don’t. Where I come from, growing up on the farm, if you wanted to be eating that cow come next September, you better be getting up at 4:00 in the morning and feeding it for over a year. It takes 10 minutes to eat what you fed, but it took a year to get it there and that’s the thing. That’s the way I look at music and that’s the way I look at life. If you really want something real hard and bad enough no matter where you are in your life you need to make a change.
In the years ahead, I just hope I’m still doing this. I hope I am still who I am today.”
| written by Krystina Rene' Miller
