When record label executives next try to create another country singer, they ought to consider cribbing from Abby Owens’ story, though they’d be hard-pressed to replicate her talent.
The singer-songwriter, who appears regularly at Vero’s Kilted Mermaid, is a fifth-generation Floridian. She was born in a trailer in an Indiantown orange grove and weighed on a vegetable scale, as she mentions in a lyric in “Indiantown,” an EP produced by alt-country icon Jason Isbell.
Daughter of a one-time bull-riding beauty, Owens barrel-raced in rodeos from the age of 5. Today she makes a living as a laborer installing fences and, more recently, building boat docks.
That same toughness extends to her decade-long quest to make it in country music. But she hasn’t quite gotten over the latest blow, when beginning last November, Warner Bros. Music courted her for five months, flew her three times to Nashville, and fronted her the funds to record a four-song demo in its famed Warner-Chapell Studio B.
“Yes, I was excited, I was very excited. I was singing on the mic Emmy Lou Harris used.”
The songs she was given to sing were from huge names in contemporary country: Zac Maloy, Chris Stapleton and Max Martin, the genius behind much of Taylor Swift’s “1989.”
But after April’s recording session, she was finally told by Warner executives that she wasn’t country enough.
“I take that as a compliment. These days, country isn’t country anymore,” she says defiantly, prefaced with a long list of her country bona fides including knocking back whiskey without wincing.
Until Warner realizes the error of its ways, Owens must be content with being acknowledged by what she calls “country music royalty.”
Isbell, formerly with the alt-country, Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers, had Owens sing backup on a cut on his 2011 album, “Here We Rest.” It was recorded at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama.
“I went to Muscle Shoals to record with him, and afterwards he asked me to stay at his house, and that’s when we did ‘Indiantown,’” she says.
Isbell, asked by a magazine writer about the backup singer on “Heart on a String,” gave Owens high marks. “She’s a really good singer and a good songwriter, too.”
That same year – Owens dates it to “when Obama was first elected” – she released her first and only album. “’Fore the Light Comes” is all-original music and was produced by David Barbe, known for his work with Drive-by Truckers, Isbell’s former band. Pedal steel player John Neff, also a Drive-By Truckers alum, played on the album.
Her most recent near-miss with Warner came thanks to a video that went viral of a song written by Owens in one five-hour session. She recorded it on her cellphone, sitting on her bed, playing the guitar and singing to her dog Phoebe.
“I made a pact with Phoebe,” she says. “I had the day off, and I said we’re going to write a hit song and we’re going to send it to Nashville for Chris Stapleton to record.”
In a matter of hours, the song, posted to her Facebook page, had 20,000 “likes” and made it to the L.A. office of Warner’s Jeff Fenster. Famous for discovering new talent, including Britney Spears, Pink and Mariah Carey, it was Fenster who got in touch with Owens’ management team, trying to figure out how best to package Owens’ sound.
The song, “Love Like This Again,” was recorded one year to the day after she left her longtime boyfriend in Macon, Georgia. A singer, guitarist and talented songwriter 19 years her senior, he owned a bar in downtown Macon that frequently featured top-rate musical talent.
“I got to meet so many musicians through him,” she says. Through them, she came to know the lyric-driven ballads of John Prine, Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. She began writing in the more traditional, anti-pop country style that most label Americana, performing when she could around Georgia.
Eight years later, when the relationship went south, Owens packed up her things one weekend when her boyfriend was out of town. She hit the road, telling only her best friend “so no one would talk me out of it.”
She came home to live with her mother, who left the orange grove some time ago and now lives in Port St. Lucie.
That south St. Lucie County location turned out to be convenient to a much wider audience than Macon, where it was almost impossible to survive playing music; the same people showed up whenever she played. “In Macon you cannot play three or four nights a week and not saturate the market.”
Here, she found plenty of venues within an hour’s drive. Owens introduced herself to bar owners the only way she knew how, playing one open-mic night after another.
“As soon as I heard her open her mouth, I could tell that she was anything but a restaurant entertainer,” says Ron Hart, owner of Terra Fermata, an outdoor bar near downtown Stuart that is well respected for its live music.
Hart immediately began to book Owens to open for the larger acts he features, including Leon Russell, who played at the bar last summer. Russell’s management recognized her name right away, Hart says.
“They were more than casually aware of Abby Owens and they were very excited to have her on the bill,” Hart recalls.
“You look around on YouTube and you’ll find her on stage with a lot of high-level performers. She had made a mark on the industry before she happened onto an open-mic night at Terra Fermata.”
Kilted Mermaid’s owner Linda Moore, who books national touring indie bands, had a similar reaction when Owens first played an open-mic night there. “We were just blown away by her voice and the power of it,” Moore says. “It’s so melodic and so beautiful. We have people come in just to see her.”
Further south, Owens plays at West Palm’s Copper Blues Rock Pub in CityPlace, another spot known for live music.
It had been more than a decade since she played in unfamiliar territory. She had left Florida when she was 13; her mother had remarried and moved the family to Waycross, Georgia. That year, Abby bought her first guitar, taught herself to play and started singing with a rock band of 30-somethings down the street. “That’s how I learned to play pool; during the breaks I couldn’t go into the bar area so I just hung around the pool table.”
By high school, she was studying voice – her senior year, she took third place in a state competition, she says. Accepted into Valdosta State University, she decided to pursue her music instead.
That labor of love often seems obscured by just plain labor. Just before taking the stage at Kilted Mermaid, she points out an ugly raw patch where an electric sander had nicked the side of her strumming hand. In the two days prior, she had worked a total of 20 hours in brutal heat; she posted a photo on Facebook of herself grabbing a cold drink at a convenience store in a ripped tank T-shirt, her face smudged with dirt, eyes lolling with exhaustion.
By Sunday night she had transformed. In python cowboy boots and flared jeans – the same she wore to the Nashville audition – she started her set with startling modesty.
“Hi, I’m Abby,” she said absently, tuning her guitar. “Happy Sunday.”
Owens did not even give her last name.
As for her songs, she typically offers no hint of their inspiration: her near-misses in the music business, her life in the Florida heartland, or even her recent heartbreak.
With a face that is mostly stilled, often obscured by a curtain of blond waves, her voice is left to carry all the emotion her lyrics pack. By turns clear and lilting, or husky and hurt, her vocal power seems to defy the inward-facing nature she presents. That serenity is broken only by the occasional thrown-back head when she hurls her voice to the back of the room, accompanied by a grimace she calls “guitar face.”
As customers chatted, sipped beers and ordered food – most did set down their forks to applaud – Owens seemed to have fallen out of her nest and landed amongst another species. It’s a very different scene from Macon, she says, where she typically played to audiences so attentive “you could hear a pin drop.”
“People just want to eat their dinners,” she says. “They don’t want to hear me talk. I had one person pull out the cord on my microphone.”
Owens plays again at Kilted Mermaid on Aug. 7, then again on Sept. 18. Starting in October, she will play on the second Sunday of every month.