Bob Bailey’s Voice Takes Center Stage

Nashville’s top background vocalist reclaims his solo career—and his story.

Bob Bailey is a legend among backup singers in Nashville. His is a very familiar name for folks like me who grew up reading liner notes on albums out of Music City on projects from everyone from Mark Knopfler and Billy Joel to Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton, and Wynonna, with whom he toured for nearly 20 years. Bob has been on the road with Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood for the last decade-plus.

What I didn’t know until now is that Bob released three solo albums in the 1980s! Those collections, two Gospel and one R&B project, have now been re-released. Bob joins me to share his story of recovery and perseverance as a Black, gay man navigating the choppy waters of the music industry.

(Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Full, unedited interview is available for subscribers below.)

Hunter Kelly: Bob Bailey, thank you so much for talking with me today. You have been part of my musical life since forever. Like you, I’ve studied album liner notes my entire life, and I studied no liner notes harder than Wynonna Judd liner notes. So, I’ve seen your name there and I’ve seen you on stage with her many times starting in 1993.

Of course, you’ve been performing with Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood on the road for a long time now. You’ve sung on so many superstar albums, but I had no idea you had this history as a recording artist yourself until now that you’ve re-released your records. I’ve known you in those liner notes as Robert Bailey all these years, but your solo albums are under the name Bob Bailey, just to be clear.

They’ve been back out for a few weeks now. So, what has it been like for you to have those records available again where people can listen to them again?

Bob Bailey: First of all, Hunter, let me just say it’s an honor to be on your program and to talk to you. I’ve been following you for awhile, and I didn’t know we had this connection. That is so cool.

But yes, I started singing when I was four years old, and that’s been my life for all my life, basically. I started out singing in church and singing Gospel music with my family to begin with. That turned into a scholarship to the University of Oregon to study classical voice, if you can believe that. From there, I ran away from school, basically, and joined a band and traveled to Europe for a year. Coming back from that, I did my tenure at the PTL Club with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. That’s a whole other book. Then I moved to Nashville to start my own solo music project.

That’s a brief summary of 25 years, but it was always a dream of mine to make my own music. I grew up listening to pop and R&B and, of course, Gospel was the staple in the household. I just always dreamed of being a pop singer that delivered music with a message, and I got to a chance to do that in 1981 when I made my first record. But almost immediately, I discovered the pitfalls of the music business and how weird it can be, how racist it can be, and how homophobic it can be. I was able to make great records, but then they never get out. They didn’t get out like they should have gotten out.

HK: I’m just so glad they’re here now! So, I want to talk about the first record, Looking Forward, which, I have to say, that album cover is a little “come hither” for a Gospel record, I gotta say!

BB: [Laughs] There’s a story behind that cover!

HK: I understand this was the album cover that led the head of the record label to say, “No, I’m not releasing that?”

BB: Yes.

HK: I can see why. It’s a little hot to trot.

BB: And at the time I was a deer in headlights. Had no idea. I was excited about making a record and doing a cover, and we just did a cover. That’s the picture the record label chose. I didn’t choose it.

HK: Well, you can’t hide money, and with the quality of this production, you can tell a lot of money was spent making this album. One of the songs, “No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus,” features strings recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London. It seems like you got to realize some big dreams right out of the gate with this album.

BB: Back in the day when I traveled and sang, I couldn’t afford to take a band. So, I performed with these little instrumental tracks that came on cassettes. You could go to the Baptist Book Store and buy them. The company that made the best-sounding tracks for my money was The Good Life Company out of Scottsdale, Arizona. It was owned by John W. Peterson, who was a big hymn writer. He had five or six hymns in the Baptist Hymnal, and you know if you’ve got a song in the hymnal, you’re making some money. So, he parlayed his money from songwriting into this company that made tracks.

John hired a guy named Bob Krogstad, who was an absolutely amazing orchestrator and arranger. I bought four or five of the tracks, and “No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus” was one of the tracks. I just loved the arrangement of it, and sooner or later, of course, I’m reading the credits and start wondering “Who is this Bob Krogstad? I’ve got to meet him.”

I met Bob at Cam Floria’s Christian artists music camp and seminar in Estes Park, Colorado one summer, and we instantly hit it off. I suspected he was family, and I found out later that he was a Log Cabin Republican. We got to be friends, and he liked to drink. He persuaded me to drink, and we would get inebriated and talk politics, but I’m getting sidetracked. Back to the point…

Bob had the connection with John W. Peterson at the Good Life Company, and they were going to branch out from just making tracks to become a record label. They signed several artists to the label, and there was a space for another artist and a budget of around $45,000 to make a record. Bob came to me and asked if I wanted to make a record? I was still at PTL at the time. I said, “If I make the record, ‘No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus’ has got to be on it. We’ll save money and use the track I’ve been using.” Bob said, “No, we’re gonna write you a whole new arrangement.” And he did.

HK: I’m looking at the track listing for Looking Forward, and Reba Rambo is singing on the title track. I understand she came in and sang her part in one take?

BB: Reba and I met when she came to PTL when I was still working there. She was a big deal back then, and I kind of ghermed her. I was a PTL singer, and she was impressed by that. We got to talking, and I was traveling a bit on weekends playing shows at churches around the country. We did some concerts together.

When I was cutting Looking Forward, Reba just happened to be in L.A. We talked on the phone, and I jokingly said, “We’re here at this studio in Studio City if you want to come by.” And she did. We were cutting the lead vocal for “I’m Looking Forward,” and I was like, “We’ve got to make this a duet.” And she did it.

HK: Let’s go back a bit. How did you get your gig singing on PTL? Was there an audition process?

BB: Back in Eugene at the University of Oregon, I did a lot of odd jobs, and the school would pay you $25 to sit in the student center during lunch hour and perform for an hour. I rolled in an upright piano and played and folks would come by and listen.

One day, a guy named Randy Hiller heard me playing there. He was the youth pastor at First Christian Church and was mesmerized by the music. He invited me to come to the church, and it was full of blue-haired old ladies who fell in love with me. Cam Floria’s traveling musical group, The Continental Singers, came through and did a concert at the church, and the minister of music at the church, Gene Hill told me I needed to audition for that group after the concert.

I didn’t want to do that, but I did it to please him. Well, the Continental Singers director was overwhelmed and asked me to join the group immediately. I said no, but he kept calling me for six months. The last time he called, he told me the Continentals have different groups that go out all over the world and stayed on the road for three weeks. You raised your own money to go and do this but one of the groups was called New Hope. Their singer, Wally, got sick and they needed a replacement. They called me on a Wednesday and asked, “Can you be here by Friday?” So, that’s how I joined New Hope. A year later, we had been to England for three weeks, Holland for a month-and-a-half and then traveled around Norway, Denmark and Sweden for another three months.

Scott V. Smith played trumpet in New Hope, and he got a job working at PTL after the tour ended. He was there about six months when he called me to tell me PTL had an opening for a singer and suggested I audition. I called my friend, Randy. He found a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I sat down at an upright piano in the church basement and played and sang 10 songs. We put it on tap and FedExed it to Thurlow Spurr at PTL. He liked it, and a week later I was in Charlotte, North Carolina.

HK: Are there any classic Tammy Faye Bakker songs you’re singing backup on? I know most of them from the recent Oscar-winning movie, The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

BB: I sang on that soundtrack for that movie.

HK: Oh my Gosh. Your life! It’s pretty incredible that you’ve worked with both Tammy Faye and Wynonna so much — two icons with big personalities.

BB: There’s a scripture I’m going to paraphrase. “God does all things well.” There are things that have happened to me in my life that at the time I’m going through them, I’m like, “WTF? Why am I having to go through this?” And Spirit keeps tapping me on the shoulder and says, “Just hold on. It’ll be clear to you in a minute.”

Me getting dumped in the middle of Charlotte, North Carolina in 1978 was fortuitous because it prepared me for Wynonna. It prepared me to know how to navigate interesting, perhaps difficult personalities, and all that kind of stuff.

HK: The liner notes you worked on with Tim Dillinger for these re-releases are so great. I learned so much reading them. One of the things that really filled in a lot of blanks for me is that you had the same booking agent as Larnelle Harris in the early ‘80s. I grew up in a mega-Southern Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, and we saw Larnelle perform all the time. Larnelle is Black, but the audience at those shows was by and large mostly white. You write about being in that same situation, and running into road blocks there as you tried to market your music. You were told your music was too white for Black churches, but too R&B for white audiences?

BB: Oh God, there’s so many stories I have, but I signed a contract with Thurlow Spurr, who was Larnelle’s manager and booking agent, which is illegal in 49 states. It’s only legal in North Carolina, which was where we was incorporated. [Laughs] Thurlow did a lot of wonderful things for me, but he also taught me very early on in my career how to be in charge and control what happens to me.

I signed a contract with him before I even realized what I had signed. Basically, it was not a a good contract, and I made an executive decision that I would not abide it. I remember going to him and saying, “Okay, I’m probably gonna go to jail, but I’m not gonna work with you, because this is just wrong.” He adjusted the contract on the spot, but the fact that he knew he had done something that he shouldn’t have done and he adjusted the contract told me something else about him. So, then I said, “You get a year, and then we’re done.” That and PTL started a circuit for me.

Being the first and only Black face on PTL on a daily basis was interesting in a lot of ways. I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I was born in Ohio, but when I was four, my family moved to Oregon. So, I grew up being used to being the only one, or the first one, or one of two, or one of a few, everywhere I went and in everything I did. That was not new to me.

What was new to me was living in North Carolina for six months and seeing three Black people. Being a history buff and a student of geography, I knew there were Black people in Charlotte, North Carolina. I just didn’t know where they were. I didn’t have a car for the first six months. Then, I got a little Volkswagen Rabbit and took a drive. I literally crossed a railroad track and ran into more Black people than I’d ever seen in my life.

So, that in a nutshell was my introduction to the South, and to Charlotte, specifically, as well as the ministry. The way I was treated was like an aberration, sometimes as a pet, but hardly ever like a human being. It was like I was this novelty. I’ll never forget being in a grocery store in Charlotte, and having somebody scream, “Oh, it’s that colored guy from PTL!” And I’m like, “Oh, really? People still say that word, ‘colored?’”

The circuit I was playing was white churches. There were occasionally Black churches that would call, but for the most part it was going to sing in white churches.

HK: So, you have the exposure on PTL every week, but that didn’t lead to your debut album, Looking Forward, reaching a mass audience. What happened to that album?

BB: John W. Peterson, the head of the label, looked at the record cover and said, “I’m not gonna release it.” We were scheduled to go promote it at the Christian Booksellers Convention that year. He had taken out a full-page ad for the album and had pre-sold 30,000 copies of the record. He couldn’t take that back. He would have taken that back if he could’ve, but he couldn’t. It was already out. So, he said, “I’m gonna sell those 30,000, and then no more.”

It might have been at the Christian Booksellers Convention were I met Elwyn Raymer, who lives in Nashville. He had signed on with Lorenz Corporation to do a production company and record label kind of thing. Elwyn called and offered to the buy the master of Looking Forward. He wasn’t a huge player in the marketplace, but he had some money. So, they bought the master, and I moved to Nashville. He immediately signed me to his publishing company and said, “You wrote four songs on the record, so I know you’re a writer. Why don’t you develop your writing skills?”

Elwyn had another writer in his stable named Raymond Brown, who was also the accompanist and a big writer for Cynthia Clawson. Raymond was family, but very closeted, and we became great friends. We began to write together, and he really helped me develop my skills. So, much so that the second record, I’m Walkin’, was all songs that I either wrote or co-wrote with other people.

HK: There’s so much more to talk about with I’m Walkin’ because this is your songwriting and this is your experience coming through. One of the songs I want to highlight is “Rainy Day Christian.” I identify so much with your story about growing up in the church and being in the evangelical world and having to hide, tamp down and police the fact that you are gay. I understand that experience at PTL led you to write “Rainy Day Christian?”

BB: If I’m being totally honest, I got caught in a sexual situation while at PTL. I won’t go into details, but I was reported to the ministry, and they decagon efforts to fire me almost immediately. They couldn’t do it. It took them a year to do it. I went through that process, and that caused me to come out to my parents. Surprise! They already knew, and the conversation is gonna be in the movie. It was so hilarious.

Bottom line is, after the agonizing outing, I talked to them over the phone — I was in Charlotte and they were in Oregon — and I just felt a warm hug from the both of them saying, “It doesn’t matter who you are, what you are, we love you. We have always loved you. We will always love you.” That became the foundation for how I continue to life my life, and I’m so grateful and thankful to them for that.

But I struggled at PTL. They finally found a reason to fire me, and at the time they fired me, they were planning a big trip to Hawaii to do a live remote broadcast from Waikiki Beach. They were gonna be there for a total of three weeks, and the show was gonna air live for a week. They had chartered two 747 planes to go over. People that I knew within the ministry that worked behind the scenes were calling me saying, “One of the 747s was canceled because the partners who were signed on to go are not going now, because they heard you’re not gonna be there.”

Shortly thereafter, I get a call from Thurlow saying, “Do you wanna come back to go to Hawaii?” Of course, I did. I went to Hawaii, and then it was over. I went through the whole meltdown, and this song, “Rainy Day Christian” came to me. I started thinking about going back home to Oregon, and if you’ve ever been to the Northwest at all, you know it rains. That’s the norm. Rain doesn’t stop us. We just keep moving. But anywhere else in the world when it rains, people say, “Oh, God, where’s my umbrella? I can’t get wet.” That was a metaphor to me about faith and Christianity. There were people who were in my corner when I was on top of the world, but they weren’t anywhere around when I fell. I just started to write my hurt, to write my pain, and that’s the result of it.

HK: There’s so much on this record that captures what I love about Christian music when it captures real-life experiences. And people noticed. The title track, “I’m Walkin’” was nominated for Song of the Year at the Dove Awards. The album got a Grammy nomination, but once again, you heard from the powers that be in the Christian music business that it just doesn’t fill a slot for them.

BB: So much of the music I grew up listening to was somebody pointing a finger saying, “You ought to be doing this. This is the way you ought to be going.” Very few songs were talking about what the writer was going through with a personal experience. [At that time,] I’m so defensive about my personal life. You can’t tell everybody because you could lose a job. You could lose your house. You could lose income. So, I’m very defensive about somebody telling me what to do. If somebody sings a song or tells a story about their own life, then I can see myself in that. I can identify with that. That quickly became the way I wanted to operate. I didn’t want to stand onstage and preach to people. I wanted to tell people about my life. I wanted to tell people about my life with Jesus.

HK: On I’m Walkin’, you do balance out the hard times of “Rainy Day Christian” with hopeful songs about your relationship with God, like “Now I Have a Song to Sing” and “Poem.”

By this time you’d met your partner, Dale, and you can’t shout it from the rooftops, but there seems to be a self-acceptance of yourself as a gay man going on. How were you synthesizing all the parts of yourself at this point?

BB: There were a couple things that happened on the business front. Shortly after I’m Walkin’ got the Grammy nomination, I’d already been dropped by the label, but the nomination sort of reignited some buzz. The record label flew in Debby Boone’s manager, and she was on top of the world with “You Light Up My Life.” So, the manager comes out to take a meeting with me and basically says, “I'm gonna make you a star. Here’s what's gonna happen. First, you are gonna renounce your sexuality. You’re gonna talk about what you were and how God changed you from that. Then we can do a little rehabilitation in the press. Then, we’ll get started on building you up as an artist.”

I will never forget the feeling I had in the room at the time. I was already smoking dope. I was high when I went in there. I don’t know whether to thank God for that or not, but it put me in a certain place emotionally. And I said, “No.” I was civil about it. I thanked him for coming, but I said “No.” I walked away from that meeting that day feeling like somebody had dropped an anvil on my career, and that I would never recover. That caused me to go into a downward slide. I knew who I was. I had tried to pray it away. It wasn’t going away, but I still hadn’t accepted it.

I got three weeks into drug rehab in 1988, and Spirit came to me on a walk through the woods of the campus. It wasn’t audible, but I felt the words coming. And the message was, “I love you.” I immediately went into, “Yeah, you’ll love me if I get right. You’ll love me if I stay clean. You’ll love me if I’m straight.” And the word came back, “I love you, period.” I hadn’t felt that feeling since I went to the altar at eight and accepted Christ for the first time. I stood in that meadow, and I said to myself, “God, please let me just stay here. Let me just stay in this place. I don’t ever wanna be out of this light right here.” The message was, “Okay, you stay clean, and we’ve got a good shot at it.” That’s the way I have lived my life ever since.

But going back to the period after I was fired from PTL, I made a whole lot of declarations: I could never be married. I could never have a partner. No one would ever love me. I would never find anybody to love me. I basically sat down one day and said, “Okay, God, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m gonna be a loner. I’m gonna be by myself.” And I swear to you, I felt a chuckle coming from on high, right? Two weeks later, I get a phone call from Walter Hawkins saying, “I want you to sing at my church.” And I walk off the plane in Oakland, California, and this young man was sent to meet me at the plane. I’m telling you, I laid eyes on him, and I was in love with him. It was the stupidest thing, and I tried to talk myself out of it for a week. The whole time he kept doing wonderful things for me and taking me wherever I needed to go. He took meet to meet his parents and his whole family. I stayed three extra days in California just so I could be around him.

Then I had to leave and go to Curaçao, Netherland Antilles in the Caribbean to do a concert. I spent an hour on the phone with an operator who could not speak English to get her to connect me with him in Oklahoma. I told him, “I want you to come and see where I live. Just come visit. I’ll get an open airline ticket. You come stay as long as you want, and then when you’re ready to go home, I’ll send you home. And that was 43 years ago. And I’m still trying to get rid of him! No, I’m just kidding.

HK: You’re not trying to get rid of Dale! He’s a looker!

BB: And he’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

HK: I want to go back to the song “I’m Walkin’,” because I did not realize Sandi Patty sang it in a medley on the Dove Awards. Sandi and Larnelle Harris sang a medley of all the Song of the Year nominees. Now, something you have to understand about me, Bob, is that I worship the quicksand Sandi Patty walks on.

BB: Trust me, you’re not alone.

HK: Watching that clip of her performance, you can tell she’s honing in and getting an attitude when she performs “I’m Walkin’” What did you think of her performance of your song?

BB: To this day, I’m still a deer in headlights when I think about it. My folks came to me and told me that she was gonna sing it on the show, and I was like, “Yeah, right!”

I went to the show, and it wasn’t until I sat there and watched her sing it that I KNEW she was gonna do it. I’m still in awe of that. Like you, I don’t like to use the word “fan,” but I adore her and adore her singing and have since day one. I got a chance to sing on a couple of her records, too, and meet her and talk with her. She’s just as sweet backstage as she is onstage.

HK: Oh, she’s an angel. I know you were on her album, Find it on the Wings. Which others?

BB: I can’t even remember. Oh, gosh.

HK: You’ve been on 300 or 400 albums. I get it.

BB: Greg Nelson, her producer, would call me to come and sing on stuff for her.

HK: After I’m Walkin’, you face this issue of not fitting the Black Gospel market and being told you aren’t a fit for the white Gospel market because you’re Black. And then you have the issue of your sexuality. For me, coming out dovetailed with me leaving the church and going into gay bars where I’d meet people and try to find acceptance. This was also the time I started working in country music in Nashville, so everywhere I went, there was an open bar. I was drinking to try to fit into these new worlds but also to mask or numb out from the feeling of rejection I felt. In some ways the drinking was a rebellion against that rejection, too. In reading these liner notes, I know you used substances in a similar way.

BB: It’s hard to climb out of the hole that your environment creates. The first memories I have are church and church people and my parents insisting that we be in church. When I was going through puberty, there was a white guy who played piano and organ at our church. Blonde Hair. Green Eyes. And I never will forget one Sunday morning, my mom grabbed me and dragged me out to the vestibule of the church and pointed at the tent I had pitched. She said, “What are you thinking about!? You’re supposed to be in church! In the service!” I’m, like, 12 years old. I don’t know. So, it’s all of that and people saying to you, “You’re gonna go to hell because of who you are,” and all that kind of crap.

So, then you hide it. You suppress it. You fake it. You try to act like you're not, but that always leads to disaster, ‘cause at some point, if you tell somebody you’re not gay, then they’re gonna want you to prove how straight you are. And I couldn’t do that. And it does take an emotional toll. It takes a psychological toll, and I just wanted to not think about it. I just wanted to not obsess about it.

First, it was marijuana. I didn’t really like the taste of beer and wine, ‘cause that’s really all I knew in the early days. But somebody turned me onto a joint, and it was over from there. Then that quickly turned into cocaine. When I got clean, I was almost okay with shooting myself with a needle of something. It did’t matter what. That was when I literally had to have a “Come to Jesus” meeting to say, “Okay, going down this road, you’ll be dead.”

The moment the chemicals started to drain out of me, I came back to myself. Of course, the overwhelming feeling was shame and dread and panic and all that kind of stuff. But then, all of that began to subside. I was left with asking myself questions. “Who are you? This is what you do. This is how you act out. But really, who are you? And do you like it? Do you like you?”

I had to decide to like myself. I had to decide to love myself. I never thought I would be in that kind of situation, but there I was. So, I’ve decided to like me. I’m okay.

HK: So, when you went into treatment and got sober, had you already recorded your 1988 self-titled album, Bob Bailey?

BB: Yes. I was high as a kite for most of that, and the producer was high as a kite through most of that. And shortly after the record was released, he went over to his ex-wife’s house, saw her with a boyfriend, pulled out a gun, shot and killed the ex-wife, wounded the boyfriend, and went to prison. He’s out now and doing quite well.

Then the record label went bankrupt in six months.

HK: So, once again, you have an album that didn’t get the promotion it deserved, which is such a shame. I absolutely love the sound of this record. I was a child of the ‘80s, and I always say synthesizer is my native musical language. This album is where I live, and the song “Evidence of Love” is AC gold. It’s like a Jeffrey Osborne/Dionne Warwick fantasy come to life. I understand this album was your attempt to talk about love and intimacy because that’s what the folks at the label wanted?

BB: There was a mandate from the label. There was a group of about four or five guys who, in my opinion, hid under their desks at all the major labels for 25 years and then retired. Then they all pooled their retirement money and formed an independent record label, called Airborne. They didn’t know what they were doing, but they had opinions about everything. So, they wanted to make an R&B record. They wanted to create the next Luther Vandross, I think. But they had this song called “Project Girl” that had to be included in this record, and they were gonna make a video of this song as well. So, that was gonna be the hook. It was gonna be $75,000 to make the record and do a video. Videos were the thing at that time.

I listened to the song, and I’m like, “I am not singing a song about some Black girl that grows up in the projects. I’m just not doing that.” And then I find out it’s written by a white boy. And then he comes to the studio, and he’s hot. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The album had to be R&B — no Gospel, no religious music, no mention of Jesus, nothing. It had to be strictly R&B, so I had to wrap my mind around all of that. I knew there were workarounds on the lyric part of things. But singing that song, “Project Girl,” I just wasn’t ready. But they made me ready, and I did it. Then other songs began to come, and the very first song that came was “Evidence of Love.” The first time I heard it, I was like, “This is a cool song. Yeah. I can sing that song.”

HK: That song should have been a hit. I love how you got to work in a lot of music you’d always dreamed of making here, like the Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder songs you cover.

BB: I knew it couldn’t be a gospel record, but when Stevie Wonder came out with “Heaven Help Us All,” I was a kid, and I taught that song to my sister and my brother. We sang it in church, and it was a big hit for us in the church. It’s a Gospel song, for lack of a better word.

In high school, I was working at a Top 40 radio station for the program director. That’s where I started my record collection, ‘cause they were throwing hundreds of records away. The program director said, “You can take what you want and throw the rest away.” So, I listened to everything. That’s when Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? came out, and it changed my life. So, I wanted to record the title track, “What’s Going On,” But so many people have done that. But not many people had recorded “Inner City Blues.” That song really spoke to me, and I always wanted to record it.

HK: I do love the sounds on Bob Bailey so much, and I’m so grateful they’ve been re-released. By the time I was buying my own records and concert tickets, you were on the road with Wynonna. So, I saw you perform with her, but I had no idea these solo albums existed until now. You and Tim Dillinger have put so much hard work into making them sound great on CD and on streaming services. And the liner notes are so detailed. How did you and Tim come together to work on these re-releases?

BB: Wow. Tim and I have been friends for a long time. He was going to college at the time, but we first met after a Deborah Allen show I was singing on with Vicki Hampton in Nashville. Deborah and Vicki are very good friends, and she wanted live background singers for this project. So, she called Vicki, and Vicki called me. She also had a full choir on the show, and Tim was in the choir.

After the show, I’m on my way back to my car, and this guy is running behind me and singing my song to me. He was singing “Looking Forward,” which he knew because he was a big Reba Rambo fan. He comes up to me and is insisting saying, “I want to talk to you. I want to get to know you. I want to pick your brain about music.” And in that moment, Spirit said, “Don’t dismiss him. He’s for real.” So, Tim and I started a conversation 25 years ago. We would make a date to meet for lunch or coffee, and we’d sit and talk for three hours. I never knew what that would turn into, but just going with the flow 25 years later, I called him and told him what I was trying to do with these albums. He’s got all the connections and said, “Let me help you.” The rest is history.

HK: I’m so glad he did. I first got to know Tim a few years ago when he re-released some Shirley Murdock records. You hear this phrase a lot, but Tim really is doing the Lord’s work.

Well, I’ve seen you performing with Wynonna and then for the last decade or so, you’ve been on the road with Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. I’m wondering if putting out these albums has inspired you to think about doing another solo project?

BB: For my birthday every year, I do something crazy. When I turned 50, I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark and live there for a year. A couple years ago on my birthday, I bought myself some recording equipment and set up a studio in my bonus room upstairs. I’ve been working on some stuff, and I would imaging there will be something to talk about in the next six months or so.

HK: Good! I’m curious to hear where you are now, creatively. You’ve got so much music you’ve soaked up through the years, and you’ve got a lot to express.

BB: Every day is a gift. What does that song say? Morning by morning new blessings I see. There’s great stuff to write about.

HK: Well, Bob, thank you so much. It has been so great to connect.

BB: Amen. Thank you for having me.

Full video of my interview with Bob Bailey below….