SHENANDOAH
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OUR FIRST ACM and TNN AWARDS
By the time spring rolled around in ’89, we were headed once again to California for the April 9 telecast of the ‘Academy of Country Music‘ Awards hosted by ‘Dallas’ tv star Patrick Duffy and country stars K T Oslin and George Strait. We had been nominated in two categories there.
Mann’s Chinese Theater, right across the street from our hotel. This is where the awards were held.
They were being held this year in Hollywood at ‘Mann’s Chiese Theater‘ where all the big movie stars in Hollywood like John Wayne, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe had put their handprints and footprints in cement on their ‘Hollywood Walk of Fame‘.
The Roosevelt Hotel where we stayed at the ACM awards in 89.
We stayed across the street at the historic ‘Roosevelt Hotel‘ where the very first Academy Awards were held in 1929. Legend has it that it is haunted by numerous movie stars from back in the day. Marilyn Monroe actually lived there for 2 years. So that explains the blonde woman laying in my bed the next morning after the award show! haha Just a little joke there. She wasn’t blonde! :) (another little joke there mom)
We had been nominated for ‘Vocal Group of the Year’, but Restless Heart won it this time. A well deserved win by them, I might add. We were also nominated for ‘New Duet or Group’. The Kentucky Headhunters won that one. But still, we had a great time out there. It was always fun and exciting going out to California.
As a foot note, all these guys we were nominated against every year ended up being really good pals of ours over the years. We still call all these guys friends.
Later that month we were nominated for the TNN (The Nashville Network) Views Choice Awards for ‘Newcomer of the Year’ being telecast on April 23. We had been nominated at the ACM’s a couple of weeks earlier but this was our first time to win anything and we were so excited at the possibilities.
Here we are backstage with Reba holding up our awards.
Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens were hosting the show and it was at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville on The Nashville Network. It was the only award show where the viewers determine the winners. That’s why it meant so much.
I still remember the presenters, Juice Newton, Carl Perkins and I believe T.Graham Brown reading off the nominations. I don’t remember all the nominees but I do remember ‘Highway 101′ being one of them and when they read the nominations off and they said ‘And the winner is’…..Juice Newton mouthed the words ‘Highway 101′ as if she knew who was going to win. And then Carl Perkins said, ‘SHENANDOAH’! WOW!!! We couldn’t believe it. We had won!
Jim saying a word.
We had a flood of emotions flow over us like a river and it was just uncontrollable. All those thousands of miles we’d put behind us in that van….all the first steps and first words missed by babies at home….all those 300+ days away from home all of the sudden seemed worth it. Everybody’s wives were there getting to share this event with us and we were all like family! All the sudden all the hard work we had done seemed to matter. After all….it was the FANS that had voted us the winner in this category.
TNN Viewer’s Choice: ’NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR’
Me saying a few words.
All our families…all our friends…everybody was so proud! Even us, through the tears….We were SO proud!
Our TNN ‘Newcomer of the Year’ award from 1989