Podcast
It’s not quite on par with “Chinese Democracy,” the long-delayed Guns ‘N Roses album, but local country singer-songwriter Ron Hyden’s new CD has been a long time coming. He started working on it nearly eight years ago.
“Halfway through, my sister was killed in a car accident,” Hyden of Henrietta Township said. “That really devastated me.”
It devastated his mother, too. She died just a few months later.
“I just gave up on music,” he said. “I quit for four years.
“It’s hard to create something when you’re depressed, especially music — for me it is, anyway. If I did create something in that state, it probably wouldn’t be very good.”
It took a brush with his own mortality last year to get him back in the recording studio.
“He had a heart attack the day after Thanksgiving” his wife, Donna Hyden, said, “and I said, ‘You’re going to finish the CD.’ ”
When it was done, “Still Alive and Pickin’” seemed like a fitting title for the CD. He released it in May.
In tribute to his mother and sister, as well as Donna Hyden’s parents — all of whom battled cancer during their lives — they decided to make it a benefit CD, with $3 from each purchase going to the Mission of Hope Cancer Fund.
Many Jackson-area residents probably remember Ron Hyden from his rock band, Sidewinder, and the family variety shows he organized at the Michigan Theatre in the early 1990s.
“I’m just one of the older musicians that’s been around Jackson forever,” he said. “I was always into rock ‘n’ roll. I like playing rock ‘n’ roll live, but I write country.”
That influence started with his mother, who was first cousins with Loretta Lynn and grew up just down the holler from Lynn’s childhood home in Van Lear, Ky. Hyden remembers his mother taking him to Frontier City in the Irish Hills to see Lynn perform before she made it big.
“My mom would take us backstage and we’d spend the whole day there,” he said.
Hyden’s mom also bought him his first guitar at Woolworth’s when he was about 10 years old. One of the songs on the new CD is about that very thing.
Another song is dedicated to his sister, written from the perspective of her fiancé, who also died in the crash a few weeks before their wedding.
In 1994, Hyden took a cassette of original songs to Nashville and gave it to anyone who would listen. That led to a demo session for Castle Records with musicians who had backed such legends as Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson.
In addition to the four songs from that session, he has four songs from the new CD published with Country Barber Productions of Tempe, Ariz. He hopes one of them gets recorded by a professional country singer.
“I wanted to be a songwriter from the time I was 16,” he said. “I’d like to eventually do it as a living if I could.”
