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Janis Gill started teaching herself to play the guitar before she had a guitar. "It all started when I was poking around in my older brothers' room," she recalls. "I must've been about eight, and they were five and six year older than me. One of them had dabbled in banjo, and so I found a chord book in there, a guitar chord book. I tiptoed back to my room and opened it up, and I figured it out right away. I thought wow! If you put your fingers in this position on a guitar, you'd be making a chord-you'd be making music! I thought that was fascinating!" she says with enthusiasm. "So, I had no guitar, but I would put my fingers in these positions and try to imagine what it would be like. After awhile my mom and dad got wind of that," she recalls with a chuckle, "and next Christmas I had a Sears guitar, a Silvertone with the spraypainted sunburst design."
Not long after Janis got the guitar, her younger sister Kristine came into the room they shared while Janis was teaching herself She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain. Kristine wanted to join in. Janis recalls "I said 'OK, You sing the melody, and I'll see if I can figure out the harmony. And it's been that way ever since!"
They had their first chance to perform at a neighborhood church function not long after that early experiment at harmony singing. "They had a performance night every Wednesday, and we learned a song out of the hymnal and got up and sang it. I was nine and Kristine was seven-and the crowd went nuts!" Janis recalls. "We looked at each other-and we were hooked! And then, a lady rushed up and asked us if we would sing at her banquet the next week and she'd give us dinner for our pay. We thought, 'All we have to do is sing and she'll give us dinner!' and that was really where it all started."
It's a partnership which has seen them through garage bands, clubs, coffeehouses, and festivals in their native California, a move to Nashville, a major label record contract resulting in seven consecutive top ten country hits, a fall from favor with that label, and a return to their acoustic roots with success and creative freedom with a smaller record company. "I'm just so thankful that I'm involved in this with my sister whom I'm so close to and I love," Janis says. "We've really leaned on each other and if we hadn't been sisters, I'm sure the act would have split up."
They played gigs around their southern California home -by high school they had named themselves Sweethearts of the Rodeo after a song by the Byrds-and up and down the west coast, where they opened for such stars as Flatt and Scruggs. Both women married men in the music business, and eventually Janis took the gamble to move to Nashville when her husband, Vince Gill, was offered a record contract there. After checking out the scene in Music City, Janis called her sister. A few months later, Kristine and her husband Leonard Arnold made the move east as well, and not long after that, things began to take off in a big way for the Sweethearts of the Rodeo.
They won a prestigious country music contest, and soon landed a record contract with a major label. Their first self titled album filled the airwaves with a unique country rock sound, something that was more vigorous and distinctive than other female harmony acts of the time. Despite the years of dues they'd paid on smaller stages, when success finally hit it was, Janis recalls, "like a jet airplane taking off, with us just hanging on to the wings for dear life." Seven top ten hits came from the first disc in the mid eighties, songs such as Midnight Girl/Sunset Town, Satisfy You, Chains of Gold, and I Can't Resist. "It was fun for a while," Janis says. "There was a lot of joy and excitement in watching our songs climb up the charts, and I have some wonderful memories of that time." The second album produced four top ten songs. By their third album, though, the sisters were beginning to feel boxed in by the country rock sound.
"We wanted to branch out creatively," Kristine says, "but every time we tried something outside the sound we'd been known for, radio wanted nothing to do with it." Although they'd chosen from the beginning to record music outside the country mainstream such as David Hidalgo's One Time One Night and Como Se Dice, a song Janis wrote with Matraca Berg which has lyrics in English and Spanish, their label did not want them to follow up on these ideas. "They just kept wanting us to do the same thing," Kristine recalls. "But they wouldn't let us out of our contract, either," Janis says. "It was a real depressing time."
A bit of advice from an old friend helped the sisters find a new direction. Janis and Kristine had gotten to know Grammy award winning country star Emmylou Harris while all of them lived in California, and one day they crossed paths at the Nashville airport. "Emmy came over and said 'So girls, what's up?' We looked at each other, and we looked at her," Janis recalls, "and we said well, it's a sad, sad story." They told her the tale of endless wrangling with their label. " I remember it so clearly," Janis says. "although I'm sure Emmy has no idea how much we took it to heart. We were sitting there in the coffeeeshop at the airport, and she asked us, Can I give you a piece of advice? There comes a time in every artist's life when you have to, instead of making music for the business, you have to get down to the business of making music. Remember what you started singing for-maybe do a project that has nothing to do with any body but the two of you and your singing.' I just can't *tell* you what that did for my sister and me," Janis continues, "that piece of advice, at that time, really saved us, I think."
The sisters eventually signed with independent label Sugar Hill. There they produced their first album with less than a tenth of the budget than they'd had before-but with much more joy and enthusiasm. "For most of the songs we just set the mics up and sang together, rather than recording each part separately, which is the common industry practice," Kristine says. "And we picked songs that we really liked, without worrying if they were going to be radio hits or not. We started pulling out old set lists," she says, " and we'd say "Wasn't that a great song?' and start remembering how much we-and our fans-had enjoyed them."
The album was successful and the sisters enjoyed doing it, but it was almost three years before their next disc, the current release Beautiful Lies, came out. That was because Janis and Kristine were busy fulfilling another dream. "We've always tried to make our living through music," Janis says, "But back in the times when there weren't enough gigs, we'd go get jobs in retail clothing stores. And there, Kristine was right with me too-we usually ended up working in the same stores. We'd be buyers, do displays, manage the floor, sell-just all kinds of jobs, and as we kept getting more responsibility we began to imagine how it would be to have our own clothing store. When we were touring, we'd go into stores in all these towns, and every once in a while we'd walk into a place, and we'd look at each other say-yeah, that's it, that's the kind of place we want to have." They opened GillArnold near their homes in Franklin, Tennessee. Janis is the buyer and Kristine manages the day to day operations on the floor. "It's great," Janis says. "Sometimes when I walk in I can't believe we've really done it."
Right now, Janis Gill and Kristine Arnold, the Sweethearts of the Rodeo, are back on the road touring in support of Beautiful Lies. "We're doing songs that we like, songs that make sense to us, songs that make us feel good when we sing them, maybe say something we want to say, " Janis comments. The pieces they choose range from Janis's original songs to Bob Dylan tunes to traditional acoustic favorites like Muleskinner Blues. "We figure If we enjoy singing them and do them well, our fans will enjoy hearing them. Of course there are trade offs in being with a smaller label," she says , "but in terms of the creative input we have, there's just no comparison.This is really a great creative situation for us."
Sweethearts of the Rodeo recordings include
Beautiful Lies and Rodeo Waltz, both on Sugar Hill, and Sisters, Buffalo Zone, One Time/One Night, and Sweethearts of the Rodeo, on Sony.
web page:
http://www.ceu.edu/~bkarnold/sotr/index.html
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