‘Randy Travis: Storms of Life’
By Diane Diekman
University of Illinois Press, 280 Pages

When the June 2, 1986, release of Randy Travis’s debut studio album, “Storms of Life,” made him a country music star, he was not quite 27 and had been doing kitchen work and singing after being raised by a violent father who made sure his son knew how to play a guitar. Having been convicted of reckless driving, burglary, and public intoxication, it is no wonder Mr. Travis sang about the “storms of life that are washing me away.”

Such descriptions of a Country Music Hall of Fame performer do not do justice to an artist with an exquisite sensibility and integrity, a fundamental decency and kindness that no rap sheet can reveal. It seems that Mr. Travis sang to survive, and then to discover his goodness. That may seem a sentimental way to put it, and yet the music he wrote and performed became his redemption.

Mr. Travis knew as much — that music had saved him, and he eventually turned toward Christian, gospel, and Western music that expressed his rugged yet tender temperament. To achieve that balance he was managed for many years by Elizabeth Hatcher, who married him and made sure he stayed away from drink and hewed to a demanding road show and album recording schedule.

As Diane Diekman shows, if Ms. Hatcher successfully stage-managed Mr. Travis, she also prevented him from maturing in certain vital respects, so that when their professional and personal relationship went to pieces, he did as well, ending up naked on a country road threatening to kill the police, even though they treated him with a respect that he had earned in the music he had created for them. 

Author Diane Diekman won the cooperation of Mr. Travis and his second wife, Mary Davis, and their generosity and her persistence in telling his story pervade every page of this biography, which is as gracefully worded and as moving as many of Mr. Travis’s signature songs, such as “On the Other Hand,” “Forever and Ever, Amen,” and “Three Wooden Crosses.” 

None of Mr. Travis’s faults are overlooked, but they are hardly the driving force of this story, which becomes in the last part of this biography an extraordinary recovery of a man who seemed destined to die from viral cardiomyopathy followed by a major stroke that required risky surgery that would leave him speechless and perhaps deprived of his long-term memory.

In spite of the dire predictions of his demise, Mr. Travis has prevailed — if not to sing again, except in an AI version of his voice. He appears regularly at concerts, able to say a word or two and acting as he did when he was in his prime as an artist, acknowledging his fans and fellow artists, and serving as an inspiration to cheering audiences.  

Reading this biography is rather like attending a Randy Travis performance. Although we learn vital details about the people in his life, the focus is relentlessly on him — on how he seemed never to leave after a show until he had fulfilled all requests for his autograph and treated his backup musicians with affection and respect. 

Mr. Travis became a star, Ms. Diekman demonstrates, at a time when major recording labels were demanding changes in country music as it struggled to compete with the more popular rock musicians and singers. Mr. Travis was told, time and again, that he was “too country.” His response was to become more country, not less.

How Mr. Travis remained his own man and stayed loyal to his art is, in the end, the defining dynamic of this biography.  That Mr. Travis wanted to live after his devastating illness, that he continues to show up at public events, and that he has consented to the penetrating research of a first-class biographer seem one and the same story.

The volatility of a father who was hard to love informs a good deal of Mr. Travis’s music and his life, yet the result is not a deterministic narrative.  The hard-riding Mr. Travis, who loves horses and practicing quick draws that came in handy while filming Westerns, and nearly lost his life at other times in his penchant for fast-driving, has managed, with the help of his devoted wife, to rehabilitate himself in such a way as to make his biography a memorable and stirring story, told in sober and yet prepossessing prose.  

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”