[“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.

In episode 4, we learned about all the ways Shelly set herself up for success, from her image to her business partner Garnett Douglass. But as we’ll hear today, there were changes ahead Shelly didn’t see coming.

• Amanda: She was always watching her weight. She was doing some type of cleanse. She did this often.

Around 2013, bassist Amanda McCoy and the other members of Broadband began to notice something going on with Shelly. Shelly was 47 years old at this point, and on a quest to conform to the beauty standards of the music business. She was always trying the latest fad to stay thin. But according to fiddle player Karen Pendley, something was different about this time.

• Karen Pendley: I said, “Shelly, you don’t need to lose anymore.” I said, “You’re really skinny.” She says, “Well, I’m eating a lot and I’m not trying.” I knew then that something was way off.

Around this time, her longtime friend Rod Janzen got together with her and noticed that she was a lot thinner than normal.

• Rod: I said, “Are you, like, trying to lose a lot of weight or something?” “Well, I’ve been stressed about this and that.” And I’m going, “Are you sure about that?” I was worried, like, what the hell’s going on.

Meanwhile, Shelly’s gig schedule was as packed as ever. Marathon travel was totally normal for Shelly. It didn’t matter if it was far, if it was a paying gig, Shelly found a way to get there. And that wasn’t about to change just because Shelly wasn’t feeling well. I have always been a journaler and I found an entry from around this time where I discussed it. “I talked to Shelly about those dates,” I said. “They’re 14 hours away so I really don’t want to do them, but I don’t have anything else that weekend so I guess I’ll probably go. 14 hours though. It’s going to be torture. Also, it’s Duluth. It’s not like it’s 14 hours away and in Miami.” 

Shelly played Sturgis in 2014, as she always did. And it was grueling, as it always was. But this time Shelly was handling it differently. Garnett Douglass noticed she sounded different on the phone.

• Garnett: I started worrying about her when she was, she was in Sturgis and when she called and she just didn’t have any energy. She was still pressing, but that was when I was first become concerned.

Drummer Karen Dee said the Sturgis trip was tough on everyone. They did a whopping 14 gigs in 9 days.

• Karen Dee: We unloaded and loaded that damn trailer so many times, I couldn’t even, I just couldn’t even think straight.

But Amanda McCoy saw it affected Shelly more than everyone else.

• Amanda: At that point I was in my 20’s, but I couldn’t keep up with her, and I just thought, like, this woman is running herself into the ground.

Pit stops on the road made it clear something was not right. Shelly began having to go to the bathroom much more urgently, and she would be in lots of pain if she couldn’t get there quickly. Guitarist Paula Jo Taylor said she started checking on Shelly when she would go to the bathroom on the road.

• Paula Jo: Knock on the door, “Shelly, are you okay?” “Yeah, I’m fine.” Nobody knew to what extent it was, but she was not fine.

Several members of Broadband urged Shelly to go to the doctor.

• Karen Pendley: Karen Dee was, like, preaching at her, “You need to go into–you need to get it checked.”

Shelly would usually say she just had a UTI or an infection, and she was clearing it up with this or that. Bartender and singer Emily Peck recalled Shelly wasn’t getting this information from a regular primary care physician.

• Emily: She’d just go to, like, a walk-in clinic, after walk-in clinic, after walk-in clinic.

And Karen Pendley, among others, tried to tell her that wasn’t enough.

• Karen Pendley: I said, “Shelly, have you been in and gotten blood work?” I mean, I remember saying things like that to her, but I sort of think that she didn’t want to know at the same time. Because on top of that story, Woody had a cancer scare back in August. He had gone through some things, and Shelly didn’t want to worry him.

Shelly’s parents Woody and Shirley Bush had no idea she was sick, let alone how bad it had gotten.

• Ellen: She was starting to have some health challenges. Did she ever–
• Shirley: See, and I didn’t know that.
• Ellen: She didn’t talk to you about it?
• Shirley: She never told me that she was sick or anything. She came home Christmas, she said her legs was swollen. And she’d went to the doctor and he thought she had arthritis in her knees. But she acted okay, but I noticed she’d lost weight.

Not only did Shelly not tell her parents about her health, she seems to have barely acknowledged it herself.

• Karen Pendley: She’s just so used to ignoring her setbacks that she just didn’t really see that there was a serious issue there.

The pressures of the music business were once again exerting themselves on Shelly, only this time rather than leading to airbrushed photoshoots and slickly produced songs, Paula Jo told me it was leading to Shelly working harder than she could handle.

• Paula Jo: She read everything on the internet there was to read. She took every natural substance there was to take, and she just was sure that she could control it. You run the risk in this business. It’s not like a “real job,” you know, where you can take sick time off and you go back to your job. No, it’s not. We know that. And the more time you’re off, the more they just forget about you, and you’re done. And I know that was a fear for Shelly, and so she did not want to accept it at all. I’m not going to accept it.

In October of 2014, Shelly played one of her last road gigs at the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas. It’s a pretty big gig, I just glanced at the calendar for 2024 and acts like Hoobastank, Chris Janson, and Joe Nichols were playing. It’s a big accomplishment to land a gig like that, and Rod went to support Shelly and see the show.

• Rod: And I went down there to watch her and she was, like, coughing, couldn’t stop. I’m going, “Are you–should you even be here doing, like, like a normal person?” “Well I just got one more day and then I’ll be fine.” And I’m going, “Shel, I don’t know. Is something wrong?” “Well, I don’t know.” You know, she wasn’t well. 

Karen Pendley said that even while Shelly was barely able to stand up on that Vegas gig, she was booking even more gigs.

• Karen Pendley: She was not in really good state, but she was determined. She was gonna do it. I mean, she was even making plans and still booking things in February, trying to get us into a casino in Tunica. I mean, she got through it, but you could tell it, it was all she could do to stand up on the Vegas gig.

In addition to not being able to stand for the whole gig, Shelly was bundling up and wearing extra clothing so people wouldn’t see how thin she was. Something about Rod showing up at that Vegas show made it hit home for Karen Dee.

• Karen Dee: And I saw him, when he saw her. When you’re with someone every day, you don’t always pick up on every little thing. And truly, we were together every day. But when he saw her, the look on his face, it was, like, then you kind of look from a different perspective and you realize that Shelly’s sick.

When she came home from Vegas, she got lunch at Olive Garden with Rod.

• Rod: At the Olive Garden, I was like, I looked at her and I said, “I’m taking you, I’m throwing you in the truck right now, we’re going, I said, “You’re going to the doctor right now.” “Oh no, I’m fine. I’m this.” You know, you couldn’t tell her anything.
• Karen Dee: It went downhill, pretty fast after that, it really did. And the thing is, Ellen, she was still so determined to work. She worked right on up until the first week of January.

I knew that, because I was working with her at the time. She needed to take a lot more breaks on gigs, and sometimes she would sit down for the whole gig. She always walked a little wobbly because of her congenital disability, but I wouldn’t have ever described her as unsteady. Now she was unsteady, and it’s because she was in a lot of pain. Eventually she started calling out of shifts, leaving the band to fend for themselves, which was utterly unlike her. In my journal, I wrote that Shelly called out sick for the umpteenth time and I was going to put a bunch of lyrics in my iPad so I could cover for her on her shifts.

I played Shelly’s last gig, January 5th, 2015. Bassist Erin Holiman was there too.

• Erin: We were playing at Layla’s, and she had to sit on a stool, and I knew that there was something wrong. I was like, “Honey, what’s wrong with you?” She was just like, “Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m just sitting on a stool because, you know, whatever.” Man, she would still sing, her voice. Oh my God, Shelly’s voice.

The owner of Layla’s Bluegrass Inn, Layla Vartanian, was at the bar that day, and she sent Shelly home.

• Ellen: You sent her home.
• Layla: Yes, I sent her home. Oh, God. I can’t believe that you were there and remembered that. I’m like, “Oh, God. Shelly, your legs.” I knew she walked with a limp, but then I looked at her legs and I’m like, “What is wrong with your legs?” She said, “I’ve had allergies.” I said, “No, that’s not… You need to go home.” She said she was in pain. And I’m like, “You have to go to the hospital immediately.” I think that was her last gig.

That was really remarkable to me, to have a bar owner send a singer home. I’ve never seen that happen. Why would they send home the very thing that was going to sell their drinks for the next four hours? Layla did that, because she cared about Shelly, not just as a machine that brought patrons into her bar, but as a person. 

At this point, Shelly could barely walk. Between the show in Vegas, Olive Garden, and getting sent home by Layla, Rod had seen enough and made the decision to call Shelly’s parents.

• Rod: I called them one day, and she said, “Well she said she was playing downtown.” I said, “She hasn’t played in two weeks.” She hadn’t. So they were like, what?

Woody and Shirley did not ask permission, they just drove to Nashville right away.

• Shirley: I didn’t ask her if she was sick. I said, “Dad and I are coming down there this weekend.” She says, “Mom, I won’t be here because we got a gig in Iowa.” I said, “In Iowa?” She said, “Yes.” We went anyway. I could tell by her voice it wasn’t right.
• Rod: So they came here. And her dad picked her up and took her to the doctor. And that was the only way she would even go.
• Shirley: And when we got there that night, we wanted to take her to the hospital. She couldn’t even get off the couch, she was so sick. And we took her. She had a doctor’s appointment the next morning.

Like Paula Jo said, Shelly read everything on the internet there was to read about her symptoms, and the result of all this Web-MD-ing was that she believed she had rheumatoid arthritis. So they made her an appointment with a rheumatologist. 

• Shirley: They did blood work and stuff on her. And then he called me on my phone and he said, “You take her to the nearest hospital. She has no blood.” I said, “Really?”
• Rod: The guy said, somehow figured out that she was, like, down like two pints of blood. And he said you need to go to the ER right now. So they took her to the ER and that was, that was the beginning of the end.

Shelly was admitted to Vanderbilt in January of 2015 and the severity of Shelly’s condition started to become clear to Paula Jo.

• Paula Jo: I didn’t know at that time that it was that serious until I got to Vanderbilt and realized by what was going on with the doctors, that we were talking about something that was quite advanced. I really didn’t know that it would be–because Shelly was such a fighter, I always thought that she would come through it. I really did.

The doctors determined Shelly had stage four bladder cancer and the prognosis was not good. On January 24, 2015, I mentioned it in my journal. “Received word that Shelly is in the ICU and they’re doing biopsies on masses on her brain and spine. Very scary. I really hope she gets better,” I said. I visited Shelly at the hospital on January 27, 2015. Lots of the members of Broadband visited, as I recall, including Amanda McCoy:

• Amanda: I remember the last time I saw her, it was just so brief. She’s just so out of it. I mean, she was so sick. I think she was very optimistic in text, because I remember texting like, “You got it Shelly.” Like, “You’re the toughest person I know,” and I still stand by that, she’s stubborn. It’s like, there’s no way. She’s going to refuse to die.
• Ellen: It’s funny you mention the text though, becauseI texted her before I even visited her, and I was like, “Hey, thinking about you.” Like, “Hope you’re feeling okay.” She was like, “Feeling great. Going to be back soon.”
• Amanda: Really, I was like, same type of shit.
• Ellen: Like, no, you’re not feeling great. You’re dying of cancer.
• Amanda: Fucking cancer.

Shelly might have been dying, but according to Karen Pendley, she was still Shelly.

• Karen Pendley: Shelly would try to talk people into some stuff. She was having some tests, she wanted some water or something to drink, and they were maybe giving her ice chips at best. Shelly was trying her best to talk to that nurse, you know how she was. If you said no, she’d just try to think of another way to rephrase the question again. And he did that a couple of times, and it was–grave as that situation was, it was so Shelly.

Karen Dee told me something similar.

• Karen Dee: She told her mama to dry it up. When Shirley, they were Vanderbilt. Shirley’s over there. Just dry it up, Mom!

The doctors at Vanderbilt took Shelly’s family aside, including her cousin Sheila Bush Carver, and gave them the terrible news: Shelly was likely too sick to recover.

• Sheila: I was in the conference room when the oncologist talked to Woody and Shirley and they said, “Take her home, enjoy the time with her.”

But Shelly didn’t want that. Shelly wanted to get back to work, and in order to get back to work, she was going to have to be treated. The doctors at Vanderbilt said no.

• Rod: They didn’t want to give her chemo because they said, in order to take chemo, you have to be able to be up and walking around at least half the day, kind of thing. I mean, Shel couldn’t do that.

Of course, by now, we know what happens when Shelly is told no. Shelly was going to go somewhere they would treat her cancer: MD Anderson in Houston, Texas, where her dad Woody had been treated for cancer a couple years prior. The doctors balked at this, saying not only was Shelly too sick for chemotherapy, she was too sick to even make the trip to Texas. Shirley said that Shelly wasn’t having it.

• Shirley: Why, she said, “I could put my clothes in my Mustang and I could drive myself there.”

Honestly, as bad as she was, I knew Shelly. Rod and Sheila made the decision to help her take a flight to Texas, because they knew Shelly too. If they didn’t help her, she would probably find a way to drive herself, as ill-advised as that would have been.

Shelly was meeting this moment with the exact same level of determination that had defined her career. She never let anyone tell her no, so why start now? Shelly’s spirit was as strong as ever, but her body was not. In the next episode, Shelly takes a break from playing gigs for the first and last time.

[“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.