[“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 last left Shelly, she quit her job at the post office to sing full time in the honky-tonks of Nashville. Folks downtown started to notice the new girl in town with a big voice. Here’s her longtime drummer Karen Dee:

• Karen Dee: She could really sing and that’s unusual in Nashville.

Shelly started making connections showing up at the clubs on Broadway, shrewdly giving over-worked singers a chance for a bathroom break by offering to sit in for a song. She wedged her foot in the door of enough places that she was starting to get her own shows, like at Layla’s Bluegrass Inn where owner Layla Vartanian told me Shelly never passed up an opportunity to gig:

• Layla: Shelly was one of the hardest working singers fronting a band on Broadway. She would do doubles, she would do triples. Anytime I called Shelly, she would always be there.

It wasn’t only Layla’s. It was Legends, the Stage, Second Fiddle.

• Karen Dee: When the Second Fiddle was… what was it before?
• Ellen: The first fiddle.
• Karen Dee: It was something even before the First Fiddle.

I simply couldn’t resist putting that clip in. I’m so proud of it, I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever said. Anyway, Shelly was picking up a lot of gigs. Around this time, guitarist Paula Jo Taylor started to visit Nashville.

• Paula Jo: It just seemed like every time I came, I was lucky enough that Shelly Bush was somewhere because she was the hardest-working person ever. Played every day, you know, sometimes multiple shifts.

Shelly singing ability was great. Shelly’s work ethic, however, was superhuman. Nearly every single person I spoke to mentioned it. From bartenders like Emily Peck:

• Emily: Hardest-working person on Broadway ever in the history of the world.

To bar owners like Layla:

• Layla: If there were quadruples, she would do them.

That’s quadruples, as in 4 four-hour shifts playing music, back to back to back to back. Shelly regularly played triples downtown. That’s twelve straight hours of playing music. I’ve done triples. It’s not a pleasant experience. It’s just a long time to play music. On the rare occasion I agreed to do a triple, I needed a full day afterwards to recover. Shelly was doing triples regularly; once a week, at least. Bonkers. So according to guitarist Beth Garner, she had to have multiple bands because:

• Beth: Not everybody could keep up with her.

In addition to the shifts on Broadway, Shelly was booking gigs at casinos, bars, and festivals out of town. At her busiest in the mid 2000’s, Shelly was playing seven days a week, sometimes two or three times a day. I was able to look back at Shelly’s gig calendars and find years Shelly played over 350 shows. Fiddle player Karen Pendley was there.

• Karen Pendley: She wouldn’t take a day off to do her laundry, I mean, seriously.

Shelly rarely subbed out her gigs downtown, even if they butted right up against her travel schedule. A completely normal weekend for Shelly would involve playing a double shift downtown from 2 to 6pm and 6 to 10pm on a Thursday. Then she and the band would jump in the van and begin grueling drives to casinos in Wisconsin, Michigan, Mississippi, and Alabama. They’d play all weekend, pack up on Sunday, and drive through the night so Shelly could get back in time for her 2 to 6 shift on Monday.

• Karen Pendley: We would have comped rooms and we wouldn’t even stay. We took shifts. We would try to sleep in the van driving, but it was hardcore. She would be putting her makeup on by the time we drop her off at the Full Moon.

No one in the audience of those gigs on Broadway ever knew the singer had just been in a van for 10 hours. Her makeup was perfect, her clothes were clean, and her voice was as strong as ever. The only manifestation of her fatigue–if she was, in fact, fatigued–was her curious tendency to get a little discombobulated with lyrics. Emily Peck was a singer and bartender at the Full Moon Saloon, where Shelly played hundreds of gigs:

• Emily: Nobody ever questioned what she was singing because she’s the singer. She should, she’ll know the words, right? If I screwed up the words, you would know I screwed up the words because I’d start laughing or I’d roll my eyes. Not her. Just kept right on trucking and nobody knew. Nobody knew except the band. That’s it.

Everyone who played with Shelly has a favorite story of one of her creative lyric recombobulations. Here’s bassist Mandy Shucher’s:

• Mandy: Shelly forgot the words to I Feel Lucky.

[“I Feel Lucky,” by Mary Chapin Carpenter: “Well, I woke up this morning, stumbled out of my rack. I opened up the paper to the page in the back.”]

• Mandy: And she sang, “Woke up this morning, stumbled out of my rack, went into the kitchen and made myself a snack.” Which are not the words.

Remember the song, “I Go Back” by Kenny Chesney? Drummer Amy Acklyn remembered a time that one went awry:

[“I Go Back,” by Kenny Chesney: “I go back to the smell of an old gym floor.”]

• Amy: I go back to the smell of an old gym floor. Shelly said, “I go back to the taste of an old gym floor.” Licking many gym floors these days, Shelly?

Or “Chattahoochee?” That’s Karen Dee’s favorite.

[“Chattahoochee,” by Alan Jackson: “So I settled for a burger and a grape snow cone.”]

• Karen: The words were coming out so fast. And she, she gets to the part, she said, “So he settled for a grape and a burger snow cone.” A burger snow cone.

Or how about verse 2 of “Hicktown,” by Jason Aldean, where his woman’s smoking Pall Malls?

[“Hicktown,” by Jason Aldean: “And his woman’s smoking Pall Malls, watching Laura Ingalls.”]

• Amanda: “Grandma, Grandma’s eating Pall Malls,” burned into my memory forever.

That’s one of bassist Amanda McCoy’s go-to Shelly stories.

• Amanda: She could flow. Didn’t make sense, but I know that she could flow, which is hilarious.

The most incredible thing about all this was the way Shelly always landed on her feet. It didn’t matter that she had just been in the car for 14 hours, she was so quick, she was going to outsmart exhaustion itself. 

The rest of us, however, were in terrible shape. I did a few of those overnight hauls with Shelly and they were brutal. I certainly didn’t get much sleep but Paula Jo told me Shelly didn’t need it.

• Paula Jo: I don’t think that girl ever slept. I think she deserves recognition for that. I think a lot of people don’t get that kind of respect.

I don’t know if she got that respect back then, but she’s getting it now. I recently played on the Grand Ole Opry, which I’ve been lucky to do many times. I mentioned that I was doing this project to members of the Opry House Band, and got knowing nods of approval from several of the band members. They had seen her around or played on her records and recalled how hard she worked. I wish I could tell Shelly that her name was bandied about backstage at the Opry with awe and respect. She would have been tickled, and then she would have asked me for tickets.

Everyone who knew Shelly was amazed by her. Here’s Karen Dee:

• Karen Dee: The hardest working lady in show business.

And Karen Pendley:

• Karen Pendley: She was relentless. But I mean, I’m grateful for that, because she, she kept us working.

When’s the last time you heard someone talk about their boss that way? Her longtime friend Rod Janzen played guitar for country superstar Dierks Bentley for many years. He knows what it takes to operate a band at the uppermost echelons of the business, and he said Shelly was in a class of her own:

• Rod: She ran a small country all by herself pretty much, all the time, right? I don’t know anybody else that, in my life, that could really even do all that.

One thing I noticed about Shelly is unlike a lot of folks on Broadway, she was not a big drinker. I’m not a big drinker, but even I was susceptible to the widespread availability of vices in a honky-tonk. It’s not uncommon for audience members to buy a round of drinks for the band, and on a long night, sometimes a drink or 7 sounds like a pretty good idea. Any time I was playing with Shelly, however, if someone in the audience bought drinks for the band, Shelly passed her’s off to someone else. I don’t know if I ever saw her finish a drink, and neither did Layla:

• Layla: She didn’t drink. I mean, I remember if she drank anything, it was Zima. If you remember even what Zima was? Who drank Zima? Shelly Bush.

Beth Garner played downtown with Shelly longer than me, so I asked her if Shelly ever drank:

• Beth: She didn’t. She knew better.

While Shelly didn’t have drinking to distract her from gigs, she did have gigs to distract her from gigs. Shelly was never not booking shows, including in the middle of shows. One time Shelly was playing at Legends Corner on a Saturday, when she looked across the street and saw a new bar was opening up called the Full Moon Saloon. Karen Dee said Shelly finished her song and put the band on autopilot:

• Karen Dee: She told us to play a couple songs and she went over there to talk to him and came back with at least one and maybe two gigs.
• Ellen: That’s amazing. In the middle of a gig.
• Karen Dee: In the middle of a gig.
• Ellen: She booked another gig.
• Karen Dee: Happened all the time.

Shelly always had irons in the fire, and the calls didn’t stop coming just because she had to sing “Blue Bayou” for some drunk tourists. I remember Shelly’s multitasking because it often meant I’d have to jump to the lead microphone and cover a song. In the moment it scared me to death, like suddenly being handed the keys to a stick shift car when you’ve only ever driven an automatic. But in retrospect I’m really grateful for it because it forced me to get good at leading a band. While I was learning how to hack my way through classics like, “Walkin’ After Midnight,” bartenders like Emily Peck were like, where did Shelly go?

• Emily: And I’m pretty sure from what I know now, she was probably in the bathroom calling venues and trying to book more gigs.

It’s almost like she was fishing for gigs, and once she got one on the line, she did not let go.

• Emily: And they’d be like, “We don’t, we don’t have music on Thursdays.” She’d go, “What about a Wednesday?” Or “What about this thing?” She just wouldn’t take no.

Shelly was told “no” a whole lot. But to Shelly, “no” was just an opportunity to rephrase the question. Bassist Dawn Richey, who was also one of Shelly’s closest friends, told me a story about a gig Shelly just had to have.

• Dawn: She loved to play at John A’s. I guess he had rubbed someone the wrong way and they did not want her playing there. So she gets me. She says, “Will you come with me to John A’s? And look really nice. I want to get booked in there again.” We go to John A’s.

I know you thought you were listening to a podcast about country music, but, surprise, you’re actually listening to the Aeneid by Virgil and it’s the year 20 BC. This is not a woman booking a show at a steakhouse. This is a giant wooden horse entering the city of Troy filled with Greek soldiers.

• Dawn: She goes, “Okay, now go ask him to book our band.” So I walk over there. He looks at me. He’s like, “Shelly sent you, didn’t she?” I said, “Yeah.” He was like, “Tell her, I said, no.” I went back and said, “He’s not interested.” Three weeks later, we were playing John A’s
• Ellen: So what changed? Did she just wear him down?
• Dawn: Wore him down. We were playing John A’s three weeks later.
• Karen Dee: She never let, she never let a rejection sway her from her path, not one.

According to Karen Dee, it was almost like Shelly didn’t even hear the word “no.”

• Karen Dee: I think sometimes we got gigs so that Shelly would stop calling.

Even while driving to gigs, Shelly was keeping an eye out for places she could book.

• Karen Dee: If we drive by a place, “Well, I wonder who books that?” [laughs] I mean, it could be Joe’s Smokehouse in wherever, you know, “Oh, that might make a good connecting gig.”

Shelly’s contact list and her business acumen were growing and her bandmates were taking notice.

• Karen Dee: She never signed an exclusive with any booking agent. She would call the venue, find out who booked the venue, and then contact that agent on her own. Smartest thing I’ve ever seen. Worked twice as much as anybody else. Because these other agents are so greedy. They know if they send you over here, that’s got an agency on the room, everybody splitting the fee.
• Paula Jo: We always said if Shelly was a booking agent, she would have made millions, okay? Because she really was, she was very, very good.

I hear what Paula Jo is saying there, but I don’t think Shelly would have been as good a booking agent for anyone but herself. She possessed that critical quality all artists need, which is an almost unreasonable amount of self-confidence. You have to believe in yourself 100% to get other people to believe in you too. And you have a little pilot light under you at all times that keeps you working towards your goals. Shelly’s pilot light was more like a bonfire. And to torture the metaphor:

• Karen Pendley: She burns a candle at both ends, doesn’t really, not taking care of herself the best.

Amanda McCoy told me that driving through the night just so Shelly could make it to a shift on Broadway was a remarkable feat of endurance with a downside.

• Amanda: We would drop her off at these gigs. I know you’ve heard all of those stories. You know, just, the hustle was so commendable but also so dangerous to everyone else and her.

Dawn Richey was more emphatic. 

• Dawn: She pushed herself too hard. I don’t know why she did that. I learned a lot of wonderful aspects from her, but I learned a lot of what not to do in life and that’s don’t burn the candle at both ends.

Like other singers, Shelly was constantly looking around town and making friends with sidemen she could take on the road. But a peculiar thing started to happen with Shelly’s side “men.”

• Karen Dee: That was kind of a, almost a fluke in that she started booking all these casinos and road gigs and this and that, and just by chance, she was taking girls.

Shelly’s friends were mostly women, and her bandmates were too. Shelly undoubtedly saw the reaction she got when she booked a gig with a great drummer who happened to be a woman, and Dawn told me that gave the business-minded Shelly an idea:

• Dawn: She realized, “Well, maybe I’m not going to be able to be a star on my own, but if I have an all-girl band, that’ll catapult me to where I want to be.” And that’s when she started hiring just girls, which obviously was very effective.

Shelly was going to start a girl band and that was going to be her ticket to the big time. A band of broads. Thus, Broadband was born and according to Paula Jo, it was quickly a success:

• Paula Jo: She was a marketing genius, okay? It was a big seller for her. And not only just the all-female band, but the name was better than any female band out there in my opinion. What a better name for a female band than Broadband?

When Shelly wasn’t honing Broadband’s chops on the road, she had plenty of gigs for them in town. Here’s Layla again, from Layla’s Bluegrass Inn:

• Layla: I think she was excited that she had, you know, an all-girl band. Me being a female bar owner, I think she was proud of that and I was proud of it for her. She was probably one of the only female artists to have an all-girl band on Broadway.

I’ve put together my fair share of girl bands. One of the projects I’m most proud of is a show I used to do called She’s a Rebel, which was a tribute to girl groups from the 50s and 60s. Everyone involved in the show was female or nonbinary, from stem to stern, from vibraphone to videographer. Sticking to the program required a great deal of intention and focus. It would have been so easy to hire just one guy to do sound or something, since there are so many sound guys lying around. Dawn Richey told me that once Broadband got going, Shelly realized how deep of a roster of musicians she was going to need.

• Dawn: Any time a new girl musician came into town, she was on them like stink on shit.

Karen Dee told me about a time they were playing at a bar called The Wheel and fiddle player Suzanne Mitchell caught sight of a girl playing guitar across the street:

• Karen Dee: She’s like, “There’s a girl sitting in at some other bar. You need, I think you need to go check this out.” Shelly went, beelined across that street. Next thing you know, she’s drug Beth straight, straight over there to The Wheel, put her up on stage, and we’re playing.

Here’s how it happened from Beth’s perspective.

• Beth: All of a sudden Shelly appears. And she’s like, “Who are you?” It was, like, empty. She’s like, “Come across the street right now.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I went down there across the street. And that was it. She was like, “I got gigs for you. Here, can you learn 120 songs by tomorrow?” You know? I’m like, “Okay.”

Shelly tracked female musicians down even if they didn’t live in Nashville, like Paula Jo Taylor, remembering a conversation she had with Shelly’s longtime bassist Jet King.

• Paula Jo: She called me and she said, “Hey, can you move down here?” And I’m like, “What?” You know, and she goes, “Yeah, we’re playing, you know, I’m playing with Shelly Bush. We got an all-girl band, and we don’t have a guitar player. Can you come down here?” And I’m thinking, “Oh my God. Could I, really?”

Shelly’s plan was working, and the gigs were rolling in. She booked Broadband all over the country, including at major festivals and for opening slots with bigger artists like Michael Peterson, Collin Raye, and Mel McDaniel. Amanda told me about a time the band was en route to a festival in Wisconsin and hit a toll booth right before their exit:

• Amanda: We pull up to the toll and the person says, “Oh, that’ll be a $1.49.” And Shelly goes, “We’re the band, we’re opening for Clint Black.” And does not give the lady the money. And the lady goes, “That’ll be a $1.49.”

Paula Jo was riding up front with Shelly that day:

• Paula Jo: Of course, we’re holding the line up at the toll booth. And Karen Dee hollers from the back seat and she said, “Shelly, he don’t give a crap that we’re the band. Pay him and get out of the way.” Shelly was very frugal. I think she thought, I’m going to get a discount if I tell him that we’re the band. And Karen’s like, “He doesn’t care. Pay him the toll.” It was hilarious.

Now, opening for Clint Black, that makes sense for an artist like Shelly. Shelly did do hundreds of gigs at places that make sense, like honky-tonks on Broadway and casinos all over the country. However I also uncovered quite a few unorthodox gigs on my archeological dig through Shelly’s calendar: a German Heritage festival in Panama City. An Overnight Motorcycle Ride in Natchez, MS, open to any street legal vehicle. To my utter delight, in a publication called South Florida Gay News, I dug up a preview of a Broadband show at a festival called Womenfest, described as a “Sapphic paradise offering a diverse schedule of activities” such as art, dance parties, and “girl-watching by the pool.” Amanda McCoy told me about a time they played a long casino gig in Michigan when the band noticed their audience was a little more orange than usual:

• Amanda: You’re like, “Are you seeing a group of Oompa Loompas walking in?” You’re like, “Is this a fever dream? Have I played too long? This is weird.” But they were unveiling, like, a new Willy Wonka game, and just a bunch of Oompa Loompas came to our gig. When does that happen, you know? Only on a Shelly gig.

Karen Dee told me that a lot of the time, these gigs were Shelly’s attempts to connect other, more sensical gigs together.

• Karen Dee: We did what I called “The Bowling Alley Tour.” We literally played two or three bowling alleys. She talked them into having a band so that we could make 50 bucks or whatever to pay for a room for the night or something. I mean, it paid so little, we just all went, “Shelly, what are we doing?”

Sometimes the head-scratching gigs had upsides for certain members of the band.

• Amanda: We were playing for these bikers, Shelly did a great job, everyone loved her, but then we’d have to take little breaks because there’d be, like, a topless tricycle race around the pool. I remember, like, sitting on the edge of the stage with Karen Dee as she’s, like, smoking a ciggie. Karen would look at me and be like, “This is the best gig ever.” [laughs] I’m like, “Shelly, how did you get this gig?”

No topless tricycle race was going to throw Shelly off her game. And Karen Dee told me it didn’t phase her folks either, who would periodically get in the Monte Carlo and go see Shelly play.

• Karen Dee: But we’re standing there playing and, you know, we get set up and we’re doing our thing and Woody and Shirley are down, down by the fence, you know, how they always were. And I look, and there’s this topless chick and a dude with assless chaps and they’re up with Woody and Shirley just dancing. And Shelly, you know, that… there was this look that Shelly could get sometimes. She just, she just turned around to me at the drums and she just went, those eyes, were just… And then we all just fell out laughing.

Naturally, I had to ask Shelly’s mom Shirley Bush to corroborate this tale.

• Shirley: Do you know, he had just like a G string up his butt. And on the front, he had like a handkerchief hanging down. I didn’t know it, and they just laughed. They couldn’t hardly sing for laughing at me. And they didn’t tell me till afterwards.
• Ellen: Wait a minute. So you were dancing with him and you didn’t realize that he was essentially wearing buttless pants?
• Shirley: Yeah, I didn’t know it. I didn’t pay no attention to him. Oh, Shelly and them girls, they laughed till they couldn’t hardly sing. And I thought, am I that funny or is something wrong, you know?
• Karen Dee: But you know what? Woody and Shirley, it didn’t deter them. Not one bit. And I teased them a little bit later and she said, “Well, Karen, we don’t care. We’re just here to have a good time.” Didn’t bother them bit, that woman having her old saggy tits out. Because most of them places you’re going to, like, put it on! Put it on! You’re a hundred and ten, no one wants to see all that!

Clearly, spunk and courage run in the Bush family.

• Shirley: She wasn’t scared of nobody or nothing.

Broadband was open for business, and the phones of talent buyers all over the country were lighting up with calls from Shelly. And right about here is where I, Ellen Angelico, come into this story. I want to tell you a little about what it was like to be a Broad in Broadband.

My first gig with Shelly was on a Thursday from 2pm to 6pm at the Full Moon Saloon. I hadn’t ever played on Broadway and I did not know the standard tunes by heart. I remember asking Shelly for a song list the week before the gig and received something wild like a 5-page, single spaced PDF of country songs. There was simply no way I could learn that amount of material in seven days. I was going to have to learn on the fly. 

Shelly’s longtime drummer Karen Dee is my hero. She’s the epitome of old school cool to me: a classical butch dyke with a durag, a fedora, and an incredible feel on the drums. On those first gigs with Shelly, Karen pretty much single-handedly taught me how to play country guitar by singing licks at me for the songs I didn’t know. There was just enough time in between songs for her to shout at me, “It kicks from the 4, kid! Bwer bwer BWER ga-ber-ga-ber BWER, ga-bwer bwer bow!” That was how I learned to play in the honky-tonks, and a lot of other people did too. According to Dawn Richey, gigs with Shelly became like boot camp for new musicians in town.

• Dawn: When new people come to town, they were told to go play with Shelly Bush. You want to learn how to play country, you want to learn how to get your chops up, go play with Shelly Bush.”

Even the “viral Granny guitarist” Paula Jo Taylor, who anyone would have called a virtuoso long before she moved to Nashville, didn’t feel ready to take on the Shelly Bush setlist.

• Paula Jo: I felt very inadequate because I have no formal musical training. I don’t read music. I mean, I always had a joke, play a diminished, I’m finished. I thought, “I don’t know if I can cut this.” And I sat down and I woodshed it, and I knew that I had to do it.

Fiddler Karen Pendley, who had loads of experience backing up artists of all calibers in the house band for the Nashville Palace, had the same experience.

• Karen Pendley: She gave me like five CDs in material, so I spent hours and hours in front of it. Typical Shelly. She throws you right into the fire.

Once Karen Dee whipped me into shape and I got the hang of playing with Shelly, I started to travel with her to her gigs out of town. This was the era of touring before everyone had maps on their cell phones, but after the era of printing out Mapquest directions the week before you went on tour. Shelly had her trusty Garmin GPS unit mounted to the dash just to the right of the steering wheel. Karen Dee along with Mandy Shucher told me that although it was her trusty GPS, it could not always be trusted.

• Karen Dee: Like the time we’re coming back from the Little Jimmy Jacker gig. Well, that’s when Garmin was the new bright idea. That fucking Garmin, she had it set on, I guess, not main roads but, like, shortest distance? That son-of-a-bitch Garmin took us hours, out of the way. All the way up through Mississippi. We ended up, we’re like, going up this hill and all of a sudden it’s like, no gravel, no pavement no–and then it’s dirt. And we’re like, what the hell? 
• Mandy: We drove maybe two miles down this this gravel/dirt road. And we got to this place where there was a defunct cattle guard and there was nowhere to turn around.
• Karen Dee: And we get up on top and we’re looking out, we’re, like, on the grassy knoll of a new road that’s being put in. Like, where they’re going to put a bridge or something. We’re up on the grassy knoll. I’m like, “Ahhh!” [laughs] And by then Garmin, the little car’s sitting in the middle of Garmin just doing this: circle, circle, circle.
• Mandy: So she drove in reverse all the way back down that road.

Distractions also figured into Shelly’s driving. This was long before handsfree calling was common in cars, and Shelly’s phone was ringing off the hook. Some of the distractions were less technological, however.

• Amanda: I don’t know where she found this thing, but it was just, like, a full-on ice cream cone. She gets in the car and I’m like, “Okay, you’re going to drive with that. You’ve probably done it before. This is not something you try for the first time with another person.” She starts driving and it’s not good, trying to fumble with this and the ice cream and I’m like, “Shelly, you have got to pull over. You have to finish your ice cream cone before we get back on the road.”

I started to realize that there were certain things about life on the road with Shelly I didn’t enjoy, but I also needed the work. In order to make sense of these competing priorities, I made my first “Should I Take This Gig” flowchart. A flowchart is a type of diagram that depicts a sequential process, and diagrams famously work very well on audio podcasts, so hold onto your hats. At the top of the chart, I ask if the gig pays. If it doesn’t, the chart sends you right down an arrow to a bubble labeled, “Don’t do it.” If it does pay, the next question is if the gig is more than six hours away. There are three answers to that question: yes, no, and yes but Shelly Bush is driving. If Shelly Bush was driving, you got sent down an arrow to that “Don’t do it” bubble again. I wasn’t the only member of Broadband who felt this way, as I heard from Amanda McCoy:

• Amanda: I’d like to go on the record and say I’m very happy to be alive. When people asked me to go on gigs, where they’re like, “Hey, Amanda, do you want to get in the van and go to, I don’t know, Iowa for a weekend?” I’m like, “No, I’ve spent about six of my nine lives all with Shelly Bush.”

It wasn’t always strictly about her driving ability as much as her situational awareness. Mandy Shucher told me you had to keep your eyes on the van at all times.

• Mandy: This is the same van that she left me at a gas station in Dothan, Alabama in. Like, I came outside and they were gone.
• Ellen: How far did they get?
• Mandy: At least 10, 15 minutes down the road. I had a flip phone, but it was in the van. I had to call Merna from the convenience store phone. And she called Shelly and said, Shelly, you left Mandy at the gas station. You need to go back.

Paula Jo often drove separately from the band with her husband John. Whether that was to spend more time with her husband or to spend less time in the van, I’ll let you decide.

• Paula Jo: John and I are driving behind her. All this equipment is falling out of the trailer. John’s blowing the horn and blowing the horn. And of course, back then, I had a little flip phone. I’m flipping it open and trying to get a hold of somebody up there. You know, you only got limited service. He’s blowing the horn and pulling over, kind of putting his flashers on, so people don’t hit it. We finally got a hold of them, saying, “Pull over. Pull over. You’ve got drums and equipment falling out the trailer.” They had to go and pick it up and had we not been behind her, God knows how much equipment would have been lost when they got to wherever we were going, you know.

So that’s an example of chaos behind the van. Sometimes there was also chaos in front of the van.

• Amanda: We’re driving back and it’s in the middle of the night. And then all of a sudden, we’re asleep and we hear a [makes “thump” sound] and we’re all like, “What the fuck Shelly?” And Shelly’s like, “It’s okay. It was just a cardboard box.” And we’re like, “Okay.” Didn’t question it. We’re tired. Went back to sleep. She stops maybe a couple hours later at a gas station. So Shelly thought she hit a cardboard box, right? No. She hit a fucking owl.
• Ellen: So, just for the audio, Amanda is showing me a photo of a whole owl on the front of this van.
• Amanda: It wasn’t like an owl and maybe a wing got, it was a whole owl. Truckers were, like, beeping at us at this gas station.
• Ellen: How did you get the owl off of the hood of the car?
• Amanda: We decided just to leave it and it then fell off before our next stop.
• Karen Dee: She got back under that wheel, she started that van. She said, he found his way in there and he can find his way out. [laughs]

One time, Shelly left her phone at a gas station, and they got an hour down the road before she realized her mistake. She wanted to go back and get it, but they were running late, as they often did.

• Amanda: Time was only a magazine to Shelly both on stage and off. 

This made Karen Dee crazy:

• Karen Dee: That girl can do just some of the most mind-boggling, excruciatingly mentally painful things. Here’s the thing. That was not the first time these things had happened. An Exxon station in Tunica at 3:00 AM. She got really lucky because we were a ways down the road, and she called back, and someone had actually turned it in. She was the first person I knew that absolutely could not live 30 seconds without the telephone.

Here’s Amy Acklyn:

• Amy: I remember Karen just flipping out on her, like, she wasn’t really saying, like, harsh, mean things, but it was like, “Shelly, we’re already late.” You know, just stuff like that. And Shelly would never really cuss ever, but I remember her just like, she turns around, and she goes, “Karen, I’m a person. I’m a person.” I remember Karen started laughing, like, it was like, everything was all fine and good because it was so ridiculously funny. All of us were laughing and it’s, like, okay, we’re all friends now, everything’s good.

Shelly’s mom, Shirley, told me about that too:

• Shirley: Them girls, I don’t know, they probably got into it sometimes. They got tired of one another, some of the foolishness, but Shelly was just crazy about them. They were her family because she didn’t have brothers or sisters. And so they were her family.

[“Where Would I Be Without My Girlfriends,” by Shelly Bush: “Where would I be, without my girlfriends? Where would I be in this world without my girls?”]

In the time I spent on the road with Shelly, I learned this wasn’t like other gigs. I hadn’t just joined a band, I joined a family. We got in fights about Shelly’s driving and we didn’t see eye to eye about getting to Tunica on time, but we were always there for each other. Even in the weirdest of situations.

• Amanda: Off in the distance, you’ve probably heard this. Really? Oh, buckle up. We see this, like, glowing circle. We’re like, “That’s weird. I wonder what that is.” You know. We’re getting closer. It’s just a weird light kind of a circle situation happening. Drive even closer, and it’s a grown-ass naked man. An old naked man with a glow stick tied around his dick, like, helicoptering. And we just saw the circle. And it was, like, a glow stick penis circle. That was our introduction to this campground.
• Ellen: That’s where you were staying?
• Amanda: No, thankfully, that’s where we were opening for Molly Hatchett.
• Ellen: Got it. Insane.
• Amanda: We’re all just like, “What? No.” We didn’t expect that to be the cause of the light circle. [laughs]
• Ellen: Yeah, wasn’t my first thought.
• Karen Dee: We played a nude fucking campground. Now, thankfully where we were, I think clothing was required. But when we get to the very front gate, there’s two dudes standing there, Long Dong Silver. And we just went, “Oh my god! Really?” I mean, really. And I guess, you have the campground part of it and the pool and all that, you could just be buck-ass naked. But if you came to eat or came to party, I guess you had to put on some, at least, assless chaps.

Shelly Bush made herself a family that happened to be a highly marketable, all-girl band. Here’s a quote from an article in the Muskogee Phoenix, previewing a Broadband performance: “The Saddle Club owner Craig Morgan said broadBAND has a certain engaging appeal for people. ‘They’re great folks,’ Morgan said. ‘They have a lot of charisma. I’ve gotten the chance to jam with them a couple of times, and they’re awesome to work with. They’re also very easy on the eyes.’”

I just kind of realized I haven’t talked about this yet, but Shelly was beautiful in a lot of conventional ways. She had long blonde hair and a warm smile with gleaming white teeth. If becoming the next Reba was about looks, singing ability, and work ethic alone, Shelly had this in the bag. Of course, that is not all it takes. You need to know the right people, you need a little money to grease the wheels, and most of all you need to fit in. The message from the machinery of the music business was loud and clear: don’t you dare color outside the lines and keep those skeletons as far back in your closet as you can.

[“Girl in a Hurry,” by Shelly Bush: “Come on, I can handle it.”]

On the next episode, we’re going to explore how Shelly didn’t fit the mold in Nashville and everything she was doing to fit the mold around her.

[“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.