Martina McBride

A Purple Envelope Start
Michael Holloway

Born: Martina Mariea Schiff
July 29, 1966
Birthplace: Medicine Lodge, Kansas, USA

As a child, Martina Schiff was exposed to country music by her father, Daryl Schiff, a farmer and cabinetry shop owner in Sharon, Kansas where she was raised. When she was almost nine, Schiff began singing in a band fronted by her father, called The Schiffters. As she grew into her teens, her role in the band progressed from singing to playing keyboard.

Although she enjoyed performing, she never considered it a full-time profession, until she had won a scholarship to a local college. Schiff only attended college for a single semester before realising music was her passion and began playing with local bands. In 1987, she formed her own band of musicians and started looking for rehearsal space. She began renting space from studio engineer John McBride, whom she married.

One interesting story of McBride’s early days in the music business is referred to by both McBride and her fans as ‘The Purple Envelope Story.’ “McBride had heard RCA Records was looking for a new female vocalist to add to their roster. Neither she, nor her new husband had any contacts at RCA and they knew record labels usually avoid accepting unsolicited material. So, they got a big purple envelope and wrote Requested Material on it, enclosed a bio, some photos, and two demo tapes John had produced, then dropped it off at RCA.

Normally, an approach like this does not work, but about three weeks later RCA called and asked McBride to come in for an interview. Naturally, they were impressed and asked her to do a showcase at a local club to see her perform live. The result was a record deal with RCA-Nashville. Her first album, The Time Has Come, was released on May 15, 1992 (the McBrides’ fourth wedding anniversary). On June 2, 1992 in Denver, Colorado, McBride started her first gig as Garth Brooks’ opening act. Since then she has released a steady stream of hit albums and won many hearts with her powerful and expressive voice.

Incidentally, the songs on the demo tapes were: I Can’t Sleep, Regular As Clockwork, I Put You Behind Me, Wild Side Of Life, When You Leave Me, and You Win Again.

Shine

On March 24, 2009, McBride released her tenth studio album, Shine which fans are eagerly awaiting. McBride has already had success with one single from the new album, Ride skyrocketed to the top of the charts.

A New Challenge

McBride has teamed with producer Dann Huff (he also works with artists like Rascal Flatts and Keith Urban) who is helping her to create something new. For someone who has been heavily into the production side of things for years, relinquishing the controls to someone new was a challenge for McBride.

McBride said, “I wanted to move forward, which isn’t always easy. It was time to find somebody with a different, fresh perspective on my music. The hardest part for me was letting go of the reins after being so heavily involved in the production side.”

In turn, Huff said, “She was very willing to expose herself. That takes a lot of guts because she’s built up a body of work and has created quite a legacy.”

It is also interesting to note in 2004, Meredith Brooks also released an album called Shine. Even more uncanny is the fact that both McBride’s and Brooks’ albums contain a song called Walk Away. Here McBride describes her version of Walk Away (it is important to stress that they are different songs to avoid confusion.)

“It sounds like something that’s familiar, like my older records, but there’s still an element about it, both lyrically and from a production standpoint, that is very fresh. It’s the best of both worlds,” McBride said.

Anyway a First Time Writer

McBride’s previous release, Waking Up Laughing from 2007, was also an exciting challenge for the songstress. She decided to try her hand at writing her own songs for the first time. McBride had always relied on talented songwriters like Beth Nielsen Chapman, Gretchen Peters, Tony Perez, Matraca Berg, Adrienne and Keith Follese, Leslie Satcher, Rachel Proctor, and Stephanie Bentley.

For Waking Up Laughing, McBride wrote or co-wrote three songs herself, Anyway (which became a smash hit single), How I Feel, and Beautiful Again.

I Dare Ya

In 2008 she released a live album and DVD in which she performed stellar covers of Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot and Judy Garland’s Over The Rainbow, the latter of which also appeared on McBride’s 2003 album, Martina.

Besides the original songs McBride has performed, either written by herself or by other talented singer-songwriters, she has also expressed a unique talent for creating soulful renditions of classic standards from bygone eras. On her My Heart album in 2005, McBride covered At Last by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren and Together Again by Buck Owens.

For At Last, McBride issued a unique and comical challenge to fans in the liner notes. She said, “This one is perfect for a slow dance in the living room. Do it. I dare ya.”

Prolific Singer Sharing the Special Moments

Also in 2005, McBride released an album called Timeless which features a collection of classic country songs by artists such as: Kris Kristofferson, Hank Williams, Ray Price, Don Gibson, Joe South, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Bill Anderson, Harlan Howard, Jack Rollins, Buddy Holly, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, John Volinkaty, Eddie Miller, Buck Owens, and Hank Cochran.

McBride sang Kristofferson’s Help Me Make It Through The Night. In the liner notes from the album, she spoke of her feelings about performing the song.

“I wanted this song to be a conversation between two people in a dark room…quiet, tender, and vulnerable. I consciously didn’t belt this one out. I really wanted it to feel intimate. I kept sending musicians out of the cutting room until we had pared it down to just two acoustic guitars, an organ, bass, and a steel guitar. I absolutely love it when the steel guitar comes in on the solo. This is my favorite vocal of the record, I think. It is the live vocal that went down as we were tracking the song. I didn’t even try to re-sing it. I just thought it had lots of emotion,” she said.

McBride also performed a duet with Dolly Parton on the Johnny Cash penned classic I Still Miss Someone, here she describes that process.

“This came up as a result of the musicians and me sitting around and throwing out ideas for songs. I wasn’t really attached to any one version of the song, so we kind of gave it our own twist.This is one of the few on which we strayed away from the original. As I was singing the song I thought how great Dolly would sound on it. I was thrilled when she agreed to do it. Watching her sing in the vocal booth was something I’ll never forget. She sings everything with her heart and soul.”

In 1995, McBride contributed a lovely rendition of Oh Holy Night to a holiday themed album entitled Mother And Child: A Christmas Celebration Of Motherhood. Other artists who were featured on the album included: Belinda Carlisle and Charlotte Caffey, Amy Grant, Debbi Peterson and Siobhan Maher-Kennedy, Suzy Bogguss, Beth Nielsen Chapman, CeCe Winans, Vesta Williams, Shanice and Crystal Wilson, Viola and Wendy Moten, and Olivia Newton-John.

Independence Day for Abuse

Other songs that McBride has performed over the years include Gretchen Peters composition Independence Day, which would become McBride’s biggest solo hit. This powerful and haunting song told the story of a woman suffering from years of spousal abuse who takes matters into her own hands and strikes back at her abuser. This is especially poignant considering the song is told from the point of view of a young child who has grown up in an abusive situation, only to find out her father has died, and her mother’s fate unknown, to the audience at least.

Much like Farrah Fawcett’s gripping and harrowing 1984 movie The Burning Bed, the protagonist from Independence Day purges her trauma through the rite of fire, raising the question of whether using violence against an abuser can be justified. The song neither judges nor condones the action, it merely tells the situation as it is.

“Well she lit up the sky that fourth of July
By the time that the firemen come
They just put out the flames, and took down some names
And sent me to the county home
Now I ain’t sayin’ it’s right or it’s wrong
But maybe its the only way
Talk about your revolution
It’s Independence Day..”

Both Peters and McBride performed stunning versions of this song, and together they raised awareness of the horrific reality of spousal abuse, especially against women. The fate of the abused woman in the song remains unanswered in both versions, as to whether she also died in the fire or whether she was arrested by the authorities.

McBride said, “I wanted to record the song to warn women in abusive or violent relationships to get help or get out before they find themselves in a tragedy like the woman in the song. My interpretation is that the mother does NOT die. I couldn’t have recorded the song if I felt that the mother dies.”

Another song recorded by McBride which deals with abuse is Concrete Angel, written by Stephanie Bentley and Rob Crosby. This song deals with child abuse and deals with a young girl who is being abused by her mother, so the girl turns to her only friend, another child (played by talented young actor/musician Luke Benward) who knows the situation, but is powerless to help, he can only give moral support.

Unfortunately, in this story, the young girl does not survive, which echoes the sad reality that in many situations, children will die at the hands of their abuser. The last verse of the song can be painful to hear, but it is necessary to expose the horror of child abuse, and McBride does so with courage and heartfelt emotion.

“A statue stands in a shaded place
An angel girl with an upturned face
A name is written on a polished rock
A broken heart that the world forgot…”

A song which deals with emotional abuse and neglect, rather than physical abuse is A Broken Wing, (written by Sam Hogin, Phil Barnhart, and James House) in which the protagonist does indeed survive and escapes to freedom after years of having her hopes and ideals crushed by an indifferent or downright dismissive partner.

“And with a broken wing
She still sings
She keeps an eye on the sky
With a broken wing
She carries her dreams
Man you ought to see her fly…”

The scene of an open window at the end of the music video for A Broken Wing led many to believe that the young woman may have found her freedom by suicide, a theory that McBride is very quick to veto.

“And if anybody asks, you can tell them that no, she didn’t jump out the window!! That thought never crossed my mind until someone asked me that after they had heard the song…to me the song is about this woman’s unbreakable spirit, and I always thought she just left, and the window and the curtains were symbolic of her “flying away” and finding her freedom. I talked with the writers and that’s definitely what they had in mind when they wrote the song.”

A Laugh Riot

One song portrays a woman’s flight to freedom in a way that is not only positive, but also hilariously funny. When God Fearin’ Women Get The Blues, penned by Leslie Satcher, tells the story of a woman whose husband has cheated on her, so she gets her revenge by going on a cross country crime spree in a more comical version of Thelma And Louise, without all the drama and double suicide. The woman in this song not only survives, she is hailed as a hero. One woman in the music video even says “You go, girl!”

“Lock up your husbands
Lock up your sons
Lock up your whiskey cabinets
Girls lock up your guns
Lock up the beauty shop
No tellin’ if they’ve heard the news
Call the boys downtown at Neiman Marcus
Tell ’em lock up them high heel shoes…”

This is slap-dang, yee-haw rockabilly at it’s best, you’ll have a laugh riot when she “[takes] out three parking meters and a pedestrian’s purse, the day she quit the Baptist choir and threw that Ford into reverse…”

Martina McBride is a whirlwind of passion, whether she is breaking your heart with stories of abused victims, declaring her love for her man in a world of hearts and flowers, or performing comic gold with a woman’s ultimate revenge road trip, she continues to entertain, educate, and uplift, and will do so for years to come.

For more magic from Martina, check out her website.

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