[“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.

All people were born at some point or another, for instance I was born on June 7, 1989. But I found starting this episode with Shelly’s birth to be a bit of a challenge. I waded through a forest of obfuscation, going on an archeological dig through Shelly’s internet presence of the early 2000s. Her flowery, professionally-written biographies on her Myspace and Reverbnation pages touted her “youthful zest,” but never revealed her actual age. I combed through old versions of her website using the Internet Archive’s brilliant Wayback Machine. From the year 2000 to August of 2004, her website said she graduated college in 1995. Then her website was updated to say she graduated in 1998.

With my brain spinning, I decided to ask her best friend Brenda Nolting. Brenda and Shelly became friends in high school and were inseparable. She would know the answer.

• Brenda: Well, it would have had to been ’89 or ’90, I would say.

‘89 or ‘90 is a pretty far cry from 1998. I heard from several Broadband members that Shelly was even reluctant to hand over her driver’s license at hotels, lest the people working the front desk find out her true age. This is the kind of thing that makes doing research for a podcast extremely difficult.

I finally managed to dig her birthdate up.

[Drum roll]

October 7, 1966. I found it in her obituary and talked about it with Amanda McCoy, a mega-talent on guitar and bass who played with Shelly for years. These days, she’s playing bass in Tanya Tucker’s band.

• Amanda: I bet Shelly was really pissed that was in her obituary.

[“Broken Heart,” by Shelly Bush, “What’s done is done, what’s left is in the wind. Just a memory nobody won.”

• Shirley: What did you say your first name was?
• Ellen: My name is Ellen.
• Shirley: Ellen. Oh, I know which one you are. You’re not the barefooted fiddler, are you? 
• Ellen: No, that’s Merna.
• Shirley: Yeah, that’s Merna. Is she still around?
• Ellen: Merna’s still around. Merna still plays a lot, yeah.

Meet Shirley Bush, Shelly’s mom. With her coiffed reddish hair, lipstick, and glasses, she looks like what you’d get if you typed “grandma” into an AI image generator. She and Woody Bush were married in 1964. Shirley worked in the office of a steel company, and Woody was the manager. He was a bespectacled man who I never saw without a pressed plaid shirt tucked into his trousers. They were together until his death in 2023, which unfortunately occurred the very week that I traveled to Missouri to interview them. I didn’t make it in time, so I asked Shelly’s cousin Sheila Bush Carver what they were like:

• Sheila: They were just common people. Woody, you know, hard worker. His dad died when he was 13 years old and lived down on a farm.

Shelly’s longtime drummer Karen Dee echoed the proximity of Woody’s nose to the grindstone.

• Karen Dee: Woody, woo, what a worker. I mean he just, work ethic, like, it’s very rare.

Guitarist Rod Janzen, a veteran of country star Dierks Bentley’s band, was one of Shelly’s oldest friends in Nashville. They dated for a while and remained friends. He still talks to Shelly’s mom and visits a few times a year, driving out for Thanksgiving and that kind of thing. He told me Woody and Shirley were pretty buttoned-up.

• Rod: Woody probably drank about a dozen beers in his whole life.

By all accounts they were typical small town, salt-of-the-earth folks.

• Karen Dee: Just wonderful people. She probably had a really, what I’d call, normal Midwest upbringing. I think they’re Lutheran, if that matters. I always like going to the Lutheran Church, they’ll let you drink and dance in the basement. Nobody cared! Honey, I grew up Baptist. Everything’s a sin! You’re going to hell for everything! Jesus. Lord have mercy. Who’s gonna be in heaven? 

Woody and Shirley were regular folks, although Amanda McCoy and others noted that didn’t mean they were untidy or scruffy. They didn’t leave the house unless they were put together and presentable.

• Amanda: Even today, I’m sure, if you were to see Shirley, she was always done up. And I think those things definitely carried over to Shelly of how, how a woman should present herself all the time.

Shelly was Woody and Shirley’s only child and their greatest joy. Guitarist Paula Jo Taylor told me Shelly was everything to them:

• Paula Jo: They were more proud of her than you can imagine.

[“Sometimes a Thorn,” by Shelly Bush, “I’ve seen love in a mother’s eyes that nothing can ever change and love from a higher power that never goes away. Well, that’s the kind of love I’m looking for.”]

The Bush family lived in Stover, Missouri, a map dot about halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City. It’s a former rail town, population 1,006. There’s less than twenty roads and no stoplights. Rod’s been there:

• Rod: It’s like, when you drive through it on the way to the lake, right? Little town, rinky dink.

Shelly’s cousin Sheila grew up nearby and often visited Stover.

• Sheila: There is one grocery store. There’s one beauty shop. There are two small restaurants, one of them is not even open in the wintertime. That’s really about it for Stover. There’s just not much there and there never has been.

[“Our Place,” by Shelly Bush: “That’s how we roll in our place. Saturday night cruising the strip, or laid up on the riverbank taking a sip.”]

Without a doubt, Shelly is the most famous person from Stover. In 2022, she was inducted into the Morgan County R-1 Hall of Fame. The other honorees that year were a couple who owned a Lifetouch photography franchise for 50 years. Stover is not exactly where stars are born.

• Shirley: They’ve got a sign here in Stover on the East Side and West Side, “Home of Shelly Bush, singer and songwriter of Nashville, Tennessee,” or something like that.

Shirley is close, it says “Birthplace of Shelly Bush.” Someone posted it on Reddit in 2024, wondering who she was after driving to Stover to get to “the best gardening store in the state, Morgan County Seeds.”

Shelly’s interest in singing came at an early age. She put on concerts for Woody and Shirley, standing on her bed and singing into her hairbrush.

• Karen Dee: She always wanted to sing. It was just in her. They bought her a karaoke machine.

Karen Dee and lots of folks told me about Shelly’s love for the karaoke machine. After school, she would race to her room, shut the door behind her, and cue up her favorite songs by Alabama, Reba McEntire, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn. Her mom still has the machines:

• Shirley: Matter of fact, I got three of them.

Shelly loved karaoke so much, she would go on to write a song about it.

[“I Hear Him Listening,” by Shelly Bush: “I sing karaoke every day right after school. My microphone and me are rocking in my room.”]

Besides her obsession with the karaoke machine, Shelly was having a pretty normal childhood. She and Brenda got into all the hijinks kids in small towns get into, packing as many friends as possible into a truck and getting ice cream, or shooting off fireworks in a field. Around high school, something shifted and Woody and Shirley started to realize their normal child had an extraordinary talent. Shelly entered her high school talent show. Here’s her cousin, Sheila:

• Sheila: Woody and Shirley had never heard her sing except for the karaoke.

When Shelly sang, the whole audience was gobsmacked, including her mom.

• Shirley: I’ve just never heard her sing like that. And I was just so proud of her when she got up and sang. She sounded so good and you know, I didn’t realize that.

Woody and Shirley’s little girl didn’t just sing good karaoke. She sang good, period. From then on, Woody and Shirley criss-crossed the Midwest taking Shelly to sing the national anthem at local fairs.

• Shirley: Had a ’84 Monte Carlo. Matter of fact, it’s still sitting out in the garage. Woody put over 400,000 miles on it taking her different places.

Shelly signed up for singing contests put on by companies like True Value and Colgate and according to Brenda:

• She would win almost all the contests.

Shelly would urge her best friend to sign up for the contests with her.

• Brenda: I said, “No, I’m going to watch you. I’m your fan club.”

In 1977, Woody and Shirley took Shelly all the way to Nashville to visit Barbara Mandrell Country, a Music Row tourist attraction which featured a recording studio where fans could record their very own version of a Barbara Mandrell hit. Shelly’s dream to be a star was coming into focus. Although, it might not have only been Shelly’s dream.

• Shirley: Before I even got married, I always thought I’m going to go Nashville and sing someday. I couldn’t sing like her and I was too bashful, but she never was.
• Karen Pendley: Her mom was 100% Shelly all the time. I think her mom lived through Shelly a lot.

Recalling Shirley’s devotion to Shelly there is Shelly’s bandmate Karen Pendley. She’s toured with country stars like Eddy Raven and Mindy McCready and pairs her top tier musicianship with a sort of soccer-mom demureness. Shirley would always be excited about Shelly’s gigs, where she was going, the songs she was singing. And why wouldn’t she be? Shelly was a small town girl with big city talent, destined for greatness, and Amanda McCoy said Woody and Shirley acted accordingly.

• Amanda: Shelly was the sun and the moon. She was everything to Woody and Shirley.

After high school, Shelly got a scholarship to State Fair Community College in Sedalia, Missouri. The big city! Well, kind of. It certainly was big compared to Stover. It was about 30 miles north and 30 times as many people. Shelly was in the show choir there, and they traveled to perform at regional competitions and festivals at Lake Ozark. Lucky for Shelly, Sedalia also had a thriving karaoke scene, which she tore up.

• Shirley: Back then, there was a lot of places that did karaoke and stuff and, boy, she’d enter those. She’d go, you know.

Shelly would spend the weekdays in school and then grab her best friend Brenda to line dance and sing karaoke until the bars in Sedalia closed.

• Brenda: We loved to dance. We loved just music. We ate, live, and breathed music. We had to have it. It was like our drug.

Soon, Shelly had an Associate’s degree in the bag. She then enrolled at Central Missouri State University where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. She had half a mind to become a lawyer someday, and honestly, I think she would have crushed that. But she had bigger fish to fry. In order to get to those big fish, she had to fry some small ones, so after college, Shelly returned to Stover and got a job cleaning motel rooms.

• Brenda: She only had a certain amount of rooms. If she could get those done, then she could leave when she got them done.

Sometimes, Brenda would visit Shelly at work, with an ulterior motive.

• Brenda: I’d sneak in and help her clean sometimes so we could get out early. We were headed, you know, we would go dancing.

One day before work, Shelly went to the post office to mail a letter.

• Shirley: This lady at the post office asked her, said, “Shelly, what are you doing?” And she said, “Well, I just got out of college and I’ve been cleaning motel rooms to make extra money.” And this lady says, “Would you like to go to work at the post office?” And Shelly said, “Yeah, I would.” Because it paid good money back then.

That was that, and Shelly Bush got herself a government gig. Fiddler Karen Pendley said a little bit of the post office always stuck with Shelly.

• Karen Pendley: One funny thing about Shelly, she could tell you any zip code of anywhere. I was amazed at her mental capacity with numbers. She was amazing. I was like, “There’s no way I’d remember all that.”

Shelly worked at the post office for a year and half, selling the people of Stover stamps and sorting letters and packages, until one day in 1995, she found out there was an opening at the post office in Springfield, Tennessee.

• Shirley: She said, “I’m going to transfer down there.” And I said, “Oh my gosh. Are you sure?” And she said, “Yeah, mom, that’s my dream and I gotta do it.”

If Shelly could have put a stamp on her head and mailed herself to Nashville she would have, but she wasn’t going to have to. The post office was her ticket to the big time.

I think of Texas native Beth Garner as a blues rock guitar icon of the highest order, but back in the day she played for Shelly just like me. Beth knew what Shelly wanted when she took that job transfer back to the town she visited as an 11-year-old.

• Beth: She wanted to be a country star. And she had the voice for it too. She wanted to be up on the billboards with everybody, all glamorous.

Woody and Shirley loved Shelly so much, and believed in her 100%, but Shirley told me it was still hard to watch her go.

• Shirley: She says, if I don’t go, I’ll never know. It’s my dream and I’ve got to go.

[“Wheels,” by Shelly Bush, “All of a sudden it just hit her. She just had to get out.”]

• Shirley: And I said, well okay. That’s how she went with dreams and hopes that somebody’d notice her.

Dreams and hopes that somebody’d notice her. I love that. That was me when I moved to town too.

[“Wheels,” by Shelly Bush, “Her heart and her head are spinning like her wheels.”]

Alright, so picture this: it’s 1998. Bill Clinton is president of the United States and Garth Brooks is the president of Nashville. Shelly Bush was fresh off the bus, going around town with her friends and sitting in at any bar that would have her. It’s here she meets her longtime friend, and one-time boyfriend, Rod Janzen. When he wasn’t touring with country superstar Dierks Bentley, Rod was playing guitar in the honky-tonks.

• Rod: I was playing with Noel Haggard at Barbara’s and that’s kind of how I met Shel. She would come in there with her friends. They would all want to get up and sing, or a couple of them would, you know. She was always kind of the ringleader, I noticed that.

Today, aspiring singers post videos on Tik Tok or go on reality TV singing competitions. But back in the late 90’s, people like Shelly tried to catch the attention of music industry professionals by singing in the honky-tonks on Broadway. Any opportunity Shelly had to pick up a gig downtown, Brenda said she took it.

• Brenda: She was just always downtown, just getting her foot in the door to sing somewhere.
• Rod: But at that time also, she had a, she also had a job, a full time job.

Rod noticed Shelly’s inclination to take every opportunity put her dream and her employment at the post office increasingly at odds.

• Rod: One day she would have to pick one or the other, you know?

Here’s an alarming passage from Shelly’s obituary: “For a while she juggled a full time day job, with nightly performances. After falling asleep at a stop light on her way home, she knew she had to choose and true to her calling, the country music singer in her won.”

It was a long drive from the Springfield post office to downtown Nashville, and not only that: she was starting to make real money singing. She called one day and broke the news to her folks.

• Shirley: “Mom, I just can’t sing and work at the post office.” And she says, “I can make more money singing than at the post office.” And I said, “Yeah, but post office is such a good job. It’s got such good benefits and stuff.” She says, “I don’t care. I’m going to take the chance.”

[“What She Wants,” by Shelly Bush: “What she wants, money can’t buy.”]

From a little girl singing into her hairbrush to a determined young woman packing up her dreams and heading to Nashville, Shelly Bush was on a mission. She was ditching the mailbag for a microphone and never looking back. You only have to fall asleep at one stoplight to know it’s time for a change. Choosing between a steady job and an uncertain career in country music, Shelly didn’t even blink. On the next episode, Shelly takes the leap of faith from the post office to the honky-tonks of Broadway.

[“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.