[“Girl in a Hurry,” by Shelly Bush: “I’m a girl in a hurry so make up your mind, if you don’t know what you want I’ll leave you behind. Life’s too short and there’s no time to worry”]

Welcome back to Girl in a Hurry: the Shelly Bush story.

[“Girl in a Hurry,” by Shelly Bush: “Break my heart, make it fast. I’m a girl in a hurry.”]

I’m your host, Ellen Angelico.

When we left off in episode 5, Shelly was sick. But she didn’t know–or wouldn’t admit–just how sick she was. Doctors at Vanderbilt wanted Shelly to begin hospice care, but Shelly wanted to be treated at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas. So over the objections of the doctors, her longtime friend Rod Janzen and her cousin Sheila Bush Carver accompanied Shelly on a plane to Texas.

I have a screenshot of a text I sent her on February 3, 2015. It said, “Heard you’re off to Texas. Thinking about you. Everyone downtown misses you tons.” Shelly responded, “i miss u and I’m gonna be back soon.”

Shelly, Rod, Sheila, and Shelly’s parents made it to Houston in early February. Here’s Shelly’s mom, Shirley Bush:

• Shirley: When we got to MD Anderson, they told Woody and I that she had some kind of cancer that started in her kidneys or bladder or something and just went off in her body. And just, like, it exploded.

Rod told me at Shelly’s insistence, the doctors began the process of getting Shelly prepared for chemotherapy. This included reading a medical disclaimer about what could happen as a result of the treatment.

• Rod: I remember standing in the room with the guy, basically, like, okay, we’re going to do this. But I legally have to tell you this. This could happen. End of life. It could be this. And they’re like, okay. And you have to sign right here. And I was thinking, you know the guy at Vanderbilt was right. You might have lasted another month or two.
• Shirley: I was holding her hand and I said, Shelly, I’m right here. You’re going to be okay. And I kept telling her that. You’re going to be okay. It’s just going to take a while for you to– and Woody would say, he’d hold her hand and he’d say, “Shelly,” you know, “Dad’s holding your hand.” And he said–he’d talk to her but she wouldn’t respond.

I was crying when Shirley told me that story, trying not to ruin the tape. Man. Nobody should have to go through that with their kid.

• Shirley: It was the awfulest thing I’ve ever went through, I thought.

Going ahead with chemotherapy had the effect the doctors at Vanderbilt were worried about.

• Sheila: They gave her, I think, one treatment and she went into a coma and died late in the evening on Valentine’s Day.
• Shirley: She just never woke up.

My journal entry on February 15, 2015, says, “Shelly died this morning. It hasn’t sunk in yet.”

• Rod: It’s brutal, you know? It makes you think, man. Fucking music. You know what I mean? People chase that shit till they fucking die.

[“Between Leavin’ and Gone,” by Shelly Bush: “Yeah, my heart wants to turn back but I’ll keep moving on this long stretch of highway between leavin’ and gone.”]

The first thing I remember after Shelly passed was doing her gigs with other singers. She had a funny habit when she sang “My Kind of Party” by Jason Aldean. I think I’m going to have to get a guitar. [tunes guitar] Okay, so the intro is kind of like this: [music] “Worked all week.” But instead of coming in there, she came in right on beat one, like this: [less music] “Worked all week.” I remember playing her shift, two to six Thursday at the Full Moon, with some other singer. And we were all so used to Shelly coming in on beat one, we came in at the wrong time for the new singer. And she must have thought we were terrible.

Meanwhile, Woody and Shirley were going through the motions and making arrangements for a memorial in Stover.

• Shirley: The church where we went to wasn’t big enough, and they wouldn’t allow country music, so the girls come up on a bus.

Rod, an angel, had rented a tour bus so the members of Broadband could attend her memorial.

• Shirley: They had her funeral in the community center. Oh, it was packed. There was so many people, I mean, they couldn’t hardly all get in there.

In addition to all the family and friends in Stover, lots of members of Broadband came, like Amanda McCoy and Paula Jo Taylor.

• Amanda: So many people had sent flowers. Shelly would’ve loved it. We were all, like, damn.
• Paula Jo: Shelly definitely was loved. There was no doubt about it. It was in an auditorium, like a big hall. Because there were that many people. I was one of the pallbearers and I was grateful to be that.

Even with all that love, Amanda recalls the vibe was a little traditional compared to Shelly’s life.

• Amanda: I remember it was a man and a woman asking like, “Does anyone want to say anything?” I think Karen Dee went first and got up. And I really distinctly remember Karen Dee being like, “Well, Shelly and I fought like cats and dogs.” That was, like, her starting-off point. And I remember slowly every one of the girls that was there got up and the people were getting pissed, the people running it. They were like, “Okay, we’d like to move on.” We’re like, “No!” More people were going up.

In 2014 I played 40 gigs at the Full Moon Saloon with Shelly, and I was only on a third of her shifts there. So in 2014 that’s 120 gigs she had at the Full Moon alone. Plus, I played 65 other gigs with her that year. It’s reasonable to conclude she played around 200 shows the year she died. So it is only fitting that after the funeral in Stover, Shelly’s friends started planning a memorial in Nashville at the Full Moon Saloon.

I had a journal entry on March 2nd, 2015. It is barely legible, which I have seen before in my journal entries. It’s a telltale sign I had a little to drink. I wrote, “There was a big memorial celebration for Shelly tonight at the Full Moon. I felt so lucky to be a part of it.”

• Paula Jo: The memorial at Stover was probably more personal and family-oriented than the Full Moon. The Full Moon was very much all of her Nashville friends, and all of our memories, and all of what we felt Shelly would want conveyed.
• Shirley: The girls got up there and they sang and stuff.

Woody and Shirley came to Nashville and got the royal treatment, or as royal as the treatment could get at the Full Moon from bartender and singer Emily Peck:

• Emily: It’s not like they were partiers or anything, so I didn’t have to do too much to take care of them. Would you like another water, cranberry juice, or whatever?

I remember the place was jam packed with people, telling stories about Shelly and singing songs and drinking. I made a point to collect everyone’s favorite lyrics Shelly creatively rewrote on my phone. I knew it was a gold mine of hilarity, and I didn’t want to lose the map to find it in the future. I went back in my email and found a couple that didn’t make it into earlier episodes of this podcast, including an amazing new second verse of “If You’re Gonna Play in Texas.”

[“If You’re Gonna Play in Texas (You Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band),” by Alabama: “So we dusted off our boots and put our cowboy hats on straight. Them Texans raised the roof when Jeff opened up his case.”]

“We dusted off our hats, and started to do-si-do, and then my friend came up to me and said, ‘here we go!”

We all got up on stage at some point and snapped a picture with Woody and Shirley right in the middle. I treasure that photo. I’ve got my arm around Emily Peck. Karen Dee’s on the edge of the stage wearing a patterned purple shirt and a fedora, looking cool as ever. Amanda McCoy is poking out from behind Shirley. There’s members of Broadband from long before I started playing with them, like Jet King, Anita Hill, and Suzanne Mitchell. And we’re all together, multiple generations of a family with the same legendary matriarch.

People called Shelly the Queen of Broadway. So at the end of the night, everyone at the Full Moon lit candles and walked together to the river, down the street where Shelly played so many gigs. Everyone except me, that is. I called a cab and went home to compose my illegible, tear stained journal entry.

[“Don’t Fall in Love,” by Shelly Bush: “Don’t fall in love if you can’t stay. If love’s a game to you, my heart won’t play. If you’re a rolling stone, go on and roll away. Don’t fall in love if you can’t stay.”]

There was an estate sale for Shelly in May of 2015, and I uncovered an old listing for it online. “Family Tree Estate Sales is honored to present the personal property estate sale of Nashville musician Shelly Bush. Just in time for Mother’s Day, this sale is full of contemporary furniture, stylish decor and lots more. There are 3,000+ clothing items, boots, shoes and accessories.” [record scratch] I spit out my coffee. Three thousand plus?

• Amanda: First of all, Shelly died on Valentine’s Day. If that does not scream Shelly Bush, these bitches will never forget me. I will always be in their hearts. I will die on this day. Really? If she had a choice, she’d pick that day.

Shelly did not become the next Reba. But make no mistake, she was the most famous person from Stover, Missouri, which Amanda noticed any time they went back to Missouri to play shows.

• Amanda: She was quite the star. People just thought, “Oh, my God, Shelly’s back.” She, she’s gone to Nashville, and she’s done all this stuff.
• Rod: She is forever enshrined in a little plaque on the wall there in the in the school, town Hall of Fame.

That’s true, and Rod gave me a program from the induction ceremony. There’s a big picture of Shelly in full glam, big blonde hair, red lips. It reads, “Shelly lived her dream and did not take no for an answer to fulfill her dream of becoming a country musician.”

Shelly didn’t ever get that record deal, but fiddle player Karen Pendley wished Shelly could have appreciated all she accomplished.

• Karen Pendley: You don’t realize that, you know, a lot of people with record deals, they have different problems. It’s not what everybody thinks. You just inherit a different set of stuff. I was a little sad that she maybe didn’t appreciate what all she had really actually accomplished. She’s played all these places all over America, recorded CDs.

Rod agreed:

• Rod: Most people that have record deals could not do what she did, you know?
• Karen Pendley: In my eyes, I thought she was highly successful, honestly. I’m like, Shelly, you realize that you probably work more than anybody that has a record deal, I mean, like, seriously. Maybe it’s more attention or whatever, but I thought, to me, she was highly successful.

Shelly left behind a lot more than Miss Me Jeans and unrealized dreams. Shelly Bush was like a dandelion. Someone came and picked her up out of the grass and blew on the seeds, and now there’s a little bit of Shelly running around all over Nashville. She’s in Tanya Tucker’s band. She’s playing the Greek Theater in a couple weeks. And Garnett Douglass told me there’s a piece of Shelly in every female lead singer up and down Broadway in Nashville.

• Garnett: So many young ones down there right now have no clue why they, they’ve got a lead job because somebody broke that ceiling and kept shoving others up there.

She shoved me up there, along with Beth Garner. When I first started doing those downtown gigs with Shelly, I would stick around after my shift and see who was playing. I was always so inspired watching Beth play. This was back when Layla’s still had chicken wire on the side of the stage. Beth would be up there with an enormous Fender Quad Reverb amp, which is comically large for a venue like Layla’s. She just shredded my face off. She could really play. I remember thinking, I want to be just like her. A couple years earlier, Beth was thinking some of those same thoughts about Shelly Bush.

• Beth: She may not have been this huge country star, but she’s a fucking legend to us. Legend. Shelly set the standard for lower Broadway girl country songs. All that list that everybody uses came from Shelly. Shelly standardized it.

Countless careers in the music business started out in Shelly Bush’s band. Mine certainly did. Playing downtown with Shelly led to me playing downtown with another guy at Crossroads Bar. A songwriter friend of mine was showing some family around town and saw me at Crossroads, and she didn’t know I played bass. That led to me playing bass for a showcase with her, where I met another songwriter. In that songwriter’s band, I met a keyboard player who played with Uncle Kracker and then the next year I was touring Japan with Uncle Kracker. Japan, all because of Shelly Bush.

Here’s a line from her obituary in the Sedalia Democrat: “Remembering what it was like to come to Nashville, she took many budding musicians under her wing, giving them pointers and encouragement along the way. Shelly believed in what she did and set an example for others to follow.”

• Rod: She’s a little chunk of Nashville history there.

I really don’t think Shelly’s intention starting Broadband was to lift up and empower women musicians. Her intention was to use it as a marketing tool to get more gigs. But the beautiful thing is while her intentions were pragmatic, her impact was altruistic. Bassist Dawn Richey told me there was a really beautiful side effect of Shelly needing to track down every female musician within spitting distance of Nashville.

• Dawn: Shelly gave musicians a chance, who would otherwise never have had the chance.

It didn’t matter if you were inexperienced or new to town, or pregnant like bassist Erin Holiman.

• Erin: When I was pregnant, she said, “You can come on the road. You can bring your baby.” I had my first kid at 18, and so I thought, “Well, I will never be a musician. I’ve got kids.” But no, Shelly made it happen for me. Shelly made it happen for anybody that came to Nashville.

For so many musicians, including Paula Jo Taylor who still fronts a busy band on Broadway, Shelly was the portal to a career in Nashville.

• Paula Jo: I am always eternally grateful for Shelly Bush. She’d done much for us that I can’t even begin to tell you. She gave me my first opportunity.

If you were Shelly’s friend and Shelly had a connection to someone in the music business, it was your connection too. No weirdness, no stinginess. Just generosity.

• Dawn: She took me to meet him a couple times, Kenny Royster, and I actually worked with him to produce a few of my songs.
• Ellen: Maybe you wouldn’t have been able to make that connection.
• Dawn: I never would’ve been able to make that connection. There’s tons of connections I would never have been able to make.

Musicians like Beth Garner got gigs because of Shelly.

• Beth: If it wasn’t for me playing with her, I would not have had my shifts at the Full Moon. She was absolutely that beginning, that heartbeat, the family tree.

Musicians like Amanda McCoy ended up on world tours because of Shelly.

• Amanda: Oh, my God, there’s so many little things. We picked up this random-ass fiddle player at the airport, Abbie Steiling, because she’s a woman, and said, “Yeah, I could do it.” And here, you know, years later, I ended up getting a prog rock gig, because of Shelly, with Pavlov’s Dog and ended up touring Europe with them. It was all that connection to Abbie Steiling.
• Ellen: Incredible.
• Amanda: All because of Shelly.

And to Karen Dee, being a member of Broadband meant breaking out of the doldrums and stepping into a life filled with adventure.

• Karen Dee: Because of Shelly I got to see the Grand Canyon, the dead president’s heads. Right on the way to Sturgis. Deadwood. I mean, just, things that an ordinary life wouldn’t have allowed me to do.

Shelly’s legacy still ripples through country music today, through the honky-tonks on Broadway, in cover bands from Vegas to Wisconsin, on tour with artists in clubs and amphitheaters.

• Amanda: Shelly gathered all these misfits and it’s like we’ve all gone and ended up doing really cool things together and separately. And it’s like we’ve watched this whole Broadband community grow and branch out. But it’s like, we’re a bunch of freaking weirdos.

Shelly changed Broadway and the music scene in Nashville, and everyone who knew her knows it.

• Paula Jo: I think she had a tremendous impact on Nashville, and on music, period. I don’t think there was anybody that was harder working or did more for Broadway, for all of the tourists that came here, and for the people that came and repeatedly wanted to see her. I don’t think there was anybody that did anything more for that. I think she should be in the Hall of Fame for how she managed to do things that the rest of us cannot do.
• Beth: She’s wise. That woman was wise. And we’re only just now really seeing it. She definitely left an impact.
• Redneck: We are remembering her today on this October 6th birthday memorial tribute to Ms. Shelly Bush.

On WRCR AM 1700 in Garnerville, New York, a man named Redneck hosts the Gumbo Ya-Ya Radio Show. Every year on Shelly’s birthday, Redneck dedicates the show to Shelly.

• Redneck: Shelly Bush, when we started this show 10 years ago, was one of the very first artists who reached out to us, congratulated us, told us she was excited about what we were doing. And when we were begging people to be on the show, she was more than kind enough to reach out and say, “I want to do your show, let’s figure something out.” And unfortunately, before we were able to do the program, we lost Shelly in her battle to cancer.

Shelly and Redneck never met. But still, all these years later, Redneck does an entire episode of his show about her.

• Redneck: To all your friends and family and fans out there who are listening, our heartfelt prayers. We feel the love that you feel for Ms. Shelly. So, having said that, let’s get into as much music as we can. We got about 15 minutes to go. Kiss My Lipstick, Ms. Shelly Bush. Happy birthday, Shelly in heaven, God bless you. We love you.

[“Kiss My Lipstick,” by Shelly Bush: “Kiss my lipstick, don’t let it go to waste.”]

Shelly’s going to live forever. She’s still out there road-doggin’ it, she’s just doing it in our hearts instead of in that bumpy old van.

• Beth: Now when I walk around Broadway, I do look around and say, “Shelly fucking did this. She did it. And nobody is even coming close to her. Nobody in the female country scene. Nobody.”

[“Girl in a Hurry,” by Shelly Bush: “I’m a girl in a hurry so make up your mind, if you don’t know what you want I’ll leave you behind. Life’s too short and there’s no time to worry. If you’re gonna break my heart, make it fast. I’m a girl in a hurry. Make up your mind what you want. I’m a girl in a hurry.”]

Girl in a Hurry: the Shelly Bush Story was made possible by Whippoorwill Arts and We Own This Town. Special thanks to Karen Pittelman and Michael Eades.