Grounded Gretchen

If you sing it, they will come – in search of a legend about a hard-luck gal who’s making it big from a little town called Pocahontas.

They’ve been coming for months now to Illinois’ Bond County – country music fans, truckers, even some big-city TV news crews – taking Exit 36 off Interstate 70 to get a look at the former hometown of Gretchen Wilson.

The hard-rocking singer’s rowdy ballad “Redneck Woman” kicked a hole in the Nashville charts last May and just kept climbing.

Wilson, 31, this month won both the Country Music Association’s Horizon Award for best new artist and the best new artist award at the American Music Awards.

“It’s been pretty crazy,” she said by telephone from a tour stop in Texas.

She said she was so focused on her performance at the CMA show that she hadn’t thought about what she would say if she won.

“I just wanted to give a good performance in front of so many superstars,” she said. “I probably cried four times that day. The whole day feels like a blur.”

Although Wilson left Pocahontas in 1996 to seek her future in Nashville, she has managed to pull the town of 850 – located about 45 miles east of St. Louis – into the spotlight with her. She sings about the village in “Pocahontas Proud,” a cut on her hit CD “Here for the Party,” and wrote about it in the biography on her Web site ( www.GretchenWilson.com).

As Wilson tells the story, she was raised in rural Pocahontas “where numerous trailer parks are clustered among cornfields and pig farms.” Her mother was just 16 and single when she was born and her father, a musician, left by the time she was 2.

When her mother couldn’t pay the rent – which was every few months – they packed up and moved to another trailer park down the road. By age 14 she had dropped out of school and was cooking and tending bar with her mom at Big O’s, a roadhouse five miles outside of town, where she got her first performing experience singing for tip money.

In Nashville, she again worked as a bartender before she was noticed by Big Kenny and John Rich of the duo Big & Rich, who enlisted her in the Muzik Mafia, a group of Nashville artists who jam weekly. She signed with the Sony label last year and a redneck woman was born.

It’s that dirt-to-platinum-record legend that draws her fans to Pocahontas, where they are welcomed by a sign with cheerful drawings of an Indian squaw and a chubby red heart. Tacked below it is a more recent boast: “Pocahontas Proud. Hometown of Gretchen Wilson. Country Music Star.”

Some visitors stop at The Powhatan, a local haunt that’s been around since the late 1960s, promising “big breakfasts” and 24-hour service.

The questions are always the same, said Maxine Mollet, a waitress at the Powhatan for 25 years: “They want to know if I know Gretchen Wilson and if she ever comes in here.”

Though Mollet has never met the singer, she did see her last February when she brought a film crew to town to make a video.

“I saw her sitting on a motorcycle,” Mollet said, pointing out the window. “There were rumors in town that she took off all her clothes. But she didn’t do that.”

Tracy Funderburk, 34, who works at her family’s restaurant and gas station across the road, remembers going to Big O’s and hearing Wilson sing.

“She’d get up and belt out Patsy Cline songs. Back then I used to think, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if she became a star and I would be able to say that I heard her sing.’ And it’s really happened.”

People who ask for directions to where Wilson used to live don’t get far because, as she says, her family moved around a lot and most of their addresses were outside the city limits. They won’t find Big O’s, either, because owner Mark Obermark sold the joint years ago, and it was actually in nearby Pierron anyway.

Truly dedicated fans sometimes make their way into the countryside to find Obermark’s second bar, where Wilson also worked. The white frame roadhouse on Illinois 127 near Carlyle, Ill., was called The Ozone back then, but it’s now Hoosier Daddy’s and it’s owned by a friend of Obermark’s. He lives behind the tavern in a trailer that is one of those many addresses that Wilson once called home.

One recent afternoon, Obermark was sitting in his motorized wheelchair in front of the snazzy silver jukebox listening to Wilson sing a sad song called “Back Where You Belong.” It was written by Bobby Rolens, the fiddler and guitar player in Wilson’s tour band and the brother of Hoosier Daddy’s owner, Jimmy Rolens.

“I like this song better than any song she’s ever done,” said Obermark, 44.

Obermark’s life took a hard turn on his birthday three years ago when he was severely injured in an automobile accident and doctors had to remove his crushed right hip.

They’ve called him Big O since he was a sophomore in high school and weighed 300 pounds. He weighs 395 now, he’s proud to say, having lost 138 pounds since February. If he loses another 150 pounds, his doctors have told him they will give him a new artificial hip.

And Wilson’s road manager has promised Obermark that he can go on tour with her once he’s healed.

Obermark said he always knew Wilson would be a success. “I didn’t think it would take this long, but I didn’t think she’d make it this big,” he said.

Big O has become so much a part of the Wilson legend that he’s been interviewed by about a dozen newspapers, CBS News and CMT, the country music cable channel. He appears in Wilson’s video.

“After she won the Horizon Award the other night, people were calling me and congratulating me like I was her dad,” he said. “I couldn’t be prouder.”

When Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes” shot a segment with Wilson at Hoosier Daddy’s, only Obermark and her uncle were allowed to watch. He said it was rough to hear Bradley quizzing Wilson about her mother’s troubles.

“I was crying through it, but Gretchen handled it well,” he said.

Wilson makes no bones about her dirt-poor upbringing and has said that she wishes she had completed high school. Still, Obermark said, that hasn’t stopped some folks from criticizing her because they don’t like the lyrics to her songs or because she is herself a single mother of a 4-year-old daughter.

“There’s people around here who are jealous,” he said. “I hate people to talk bad about her when they don’t even know her.”

He wants people to know how close Wilson’s family was, even during the tough times.

“There was love in that family,” he said. “I don’t remember one of them ever leaving without telling the other, ‘I love you.’ “

For her part, Wilson said that notoriety and success won’t change her.

“People keep asking me how I can continue to be the same person now,” she said. “I want people to know that I was a really happy person before all this happened. You don’t have to be on stage to be happy.”