I don’t go to many Christmas parties but the one I make every effort to go to was held tonight on Music Row.
I get to the party tonight and a valet takes my car. As I walk through the doors I hear a choir singing Christmas carols and as I’m standing at the coat-check I look behind me, and there’s Ray Stevens.
I can remember singing “The Streak” when I was in first grade. Then there was “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival”, “Everything is Beautiful”, “The Shriner’s Convention” and of course, “It’s Me Again Margaret” which still makes me laugh even after hearing it hundreds of times.
I introduced myself, and exchanged pleasantries, and he was off in the crowd. I wanted to tell him how much I’ve enjoyed his music but people in Nashville don’t really do that when meeting celebrities. But it was really really cool.
And a funny thing happened on my way through the crowd. A guy walks up to me and asks “Aren’t you Jamey Tucker?”. After he introduced himself he told me he knew me from tv. Not in Nashville…but he remembered me from Huntsville. I started thinking this guy was probably in grammar school when I was still on the air there. Interesting market in Huntsville. I’d love to see ratings and numbers from all of the tv stations’ newscasts there and compare them to other markets. I would imagine, at least in the 90s, that cumulative numbers for the news broadcasts must have been gigantic.
It reminds me of a story I heard Tom Brokaw tell on Letterman many years ago. He said he was in Omaha, shopping in a department store when a man walked up and said “Aren’t you Tom Brokaw?” The NBC newsman said yes and the fellow said “My wife and I used to watch you do the news here in Omaha in the 60s. We watched you every night!”.
Brokaw told the man he was flattered that he was remembered from those days in the 1960s. Then the man said “what kind of work are you in now?”