Prose that just happens to rhyme: Larry Gatlin on books, faith and the America worth passing on

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

Soccer wasn’t really happening for Royal Gatlin. The three-year-old was on the field as a player, technically. But he was picking little purple clovers for his mother and bringing them to her.

When the game break came, Royal found a package of Goldfish crackers in his baby brother Walker’s stroller and grabbed it.

“Papa, I can’t open it.”

Larry Gatlin did.

After eating a few, Royal got a question from his grandfather.

Could Papa have one?

“No.”

What followed wasn’t a lecture. It was a lesson.

“What would the world look like if everybody acted and thought like you did? What if nobody would share stuff?” Gatlin recalled asking. “It’s called the categorical imperative.”

Papa was teaching German philosophy written in 1785 to a preschooler. 

The lesson didn’t end at the soccer field. Weeks later, Gatlin would point to a piece of trash on the golf course and ask Royal what it was an example of.

“Categorical imperative, Papa.”

Gatlin said the idea resurfaced a few weeks later at Royal’s church school.

A teacher had broken off pieces of a granola bar and was sharing them with the children. When she reached Royal, the preschooler stopped her.

“Miss Janet, that’s the categorical imperative.”

The teacher called Gatlin’s daughter-in-law.

“Yeah, he’s been talking to Papa,” Gatlin recalled her saying.

About six months ago, he overheard Royal teaching the same lesson to his three-year-old brother.

Elsewhere in the family, another grandson had become fascinated with Shakespeare.

“My eight-year-old grandson, Joshua Cash Gatlin, he loves The Tempest,” Gatlin said.

“He loves The Tempest because when I read it to him in that English…” Gatlin recited the line he loves. “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

The stories about the grandsons, in an interview with RMV ahead of Gatlin’s performance at Freedom Fest later this month, explained more than they first appeared to.

Gatlin has a Grammy, decades of hits and two brothers he’s been singing with since childhood.

None of those things came up first.

Before he became a country music star, Gatlin fell in love with books and became an English major.

“There’s that guy named Shakespeare,” he said. “I kinda like his deal.”

From there the list grew. William Blake. Ernest Hemingway. W.B. Yeats. Robert Burns was quoted. Gatlin’s favorite Shakespearean play is Macbeth, and proved it—reciting the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy. 

“I think the Holy Bible is some of the most beautiful poetry.”

What he’s read shows up in his songwriting.

Steinbeck got into a Gatlin Brothers song through a car full of “Okies” Gatlin spotted in California.

“Good Lord, these Okies look like the Joad family from Grapes of Wrath,” he remembered thinking. They were about to discover that “all the gold in California’s in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills.”

The image became “All the Gold in California.” The migrants disappeared into traffic, but the song that hit the top of the charts in 1979 didn’t. “That’s been pretty good to my family,” Gatlin said.

Certain sentences still travel with him long after he reads them. One comes from Faulkner.

“Dreams only have one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.”

The line found its way into a song he is still working on. Other lines became songs that changed lives. One of them was “Help Me.”

Gatlin was at dinner when his son called to ask if he was okay. Kristofferson had died.

He said he did not cry at first. His first reaction was gratitude.

“My first thought was to thank God that we had crossed paths.”

Decades earlier, Connie Smith had brought Kristofferson to church. Gatlin sang “Help Me” that morning. Afterward, the pastor invited anyone who wanted to find Jesus to raise a hand.

Gatlin remembers how Kristofferson told him about that moment.

“I was gonna be the last SOB in there to raise my hand,” Kristofferson said, as Gatlin recalled it. But he was first.

Then the pastor invited anyone who had raised a hand to come forward. 

Kristofferson resisted again but told Gatlin, “So I stood up and walked right on up there.”

Looking at Kristofferson’s photo on the wall, Gatlin said only Kris could have said it the way he did.

“I found myself,” Kristofferson said. “I heard myself asking for forgiveness that I didn’t even know I needed.”

What happened in that church followed Kristofferson home. By that afternoon, he had written “Why Me Lord.”

Their friendship lasted decades. Kristofferson had taken Gatlin to Fred Foster at Monument Records, brought him on tour and helped launch his recording career. “Our daughter’s named Kristin Kara,” Gatlin said. “Named after Kris.”

“I believe he’s the greatest writer in the English language since William Shakespeare.”

Two years after Kristofferson, “Help Me” found Elvis Presley. He recorded it in the studio in 1973 with J.D. Sumner singing bass. Sumner told Gatlin about that recording session in a call, how Elvis walked in, reached for the microphone and pulled it down to the floor. 

“He got on his knees and raised his hands toward heaven and sang the whole song on his knees.”

Gatlin’s father drove a drilling rig out of Odessa. The family followed his work as far as the New Mexico line. The boys sang gospel everywhere they went—in Texas churches, and sometimes at the First Assembly of God Church in Hobbs, New Mexico.

The reverence had been there long before the song. He grew up around it.

“Daddy was a Marine. I tell people, ‘Daddy’s a Marine in heaven.’ He only takes orders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and Mama, and maybe not in that order.”

“They taught us to honor the flag, God and country, honor servicemen. Steve and Rudy and I have always done that. I’ve been all over the world singing for the USO with the Air Force Band.”

They went to July 4th parades. They waved the flag.

What he sees being passed down today concerns him.

“Professor Allan Bloom, University of Chicago, wrote his mystical gnomic book, Closing of the American Mind, about academia in America. He said there’s one thing a college professor can be assured of if he walks into the classroom and asks the question, ‘Is there any such thing as right or wrong?’ He said 90% of them will say, ‘No, it’s all relative.'”

“If that’s what you really believe, go out there today, get in your car, and drive downtown. On your way downtown, pretend that red lights are green and green lights are red. And see how that works out for you. It’s not gonna work out very well.”

Then he turned to Jefferson. “Thomas Jefferson said that democracy depends on an educated populace. We’re not educated, and to the point we are, we’re educated with the wrong stuff.”

“If the number one most important plank in your platform is that you believe it’s okay to kill an unborn innocent baby for no reason except that they’re inconvenient, I have a problem with that,” Gatlin said. “That is a non-starter for me because you have put death and a culture of death at the top of your pyramid.”

“Now, see, if a woman is raped or incest or the life of the mother or the child, I am willing to accept that and leave that to God to figure that out.”

Then his tone shifted. “What I’m gonna do is fight in a civil, loving way.”

“Cultural secularism and relativism don’t work for me.”

By the time Gatlin arrives in Colorado, he’ll have spent more than half a century writing songs. 

He’s still figuring out what it means to be on the same wall as Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Elvis Presley, Kris Kristofferson and Paul McCartney. He doesn’t talk much about being among them. He talks about gratitude.

Recently, Gatlin found himself trying to put the journey into words. The reflection eventually became a song.

“I’ve sung my old homemade songs at Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing,” he said. “Every beer joint, dance hall, coffee pull and hog calling, with the Ryman and Grand Ole Opry House in between.”

“It never ceases to amaze me that people stand and cheer when they hear me sing and play my songs,” he said. “It’s more than I could have ever dreamed of.”

“Seems that God was out dreaming of me all along.”

Larry Gatlin performs at Freedom Fest’s Mountain Majesty Gala on Saturday, June 27. Tickets and details at rmvfreedomfest.com.