Four Years Earlier He Had Been An Unemployed Foundry Worker Selling Off His Little Oklahoma Studio
The foundry closed and his marriage collapsed and Joe Diffie sold his studio and borrowed money from his parents and left Oklahoma for Nashville
Before country radio knew his name Music Row already knew his voice
In 1986 Joe Diffie was not waiting around for a record deal and he was working as a machinist at an iron foundry in Duncan Oklahoma a job he had held for years
Music lived around the edges and he sang bluegrass with Special Edition and wrote songs and had built his own small recording studio where he recorded local bands and gospel groups
There had been just enough encouragement to keep the idea alive and Hank Thompson recorded one of his songs and Randy Travis put another on hold although he never cut it
Then the foundry shut down and Diffie lost his job and his first marriage broke apart around the same time and with money disappearing he sold the recording studio he had built
He later acknowledged that if the foundry had stayed open he might have simply kept working there and instead with little left tying him to Oklahoma he borrowed money from his parents and headed for Nashville in December 1986
Music City Handed Him A Job At Gibson Guitar
Music City did not hand him a microphone and it handed him a job at Gibson Guitar and Diffie worked on the loading dock and eventually in quality control
When his shift ended he went after the other job he actually wanted and he wrote songs and worked nights and weekends and began singing demos the rough recordings publishers used to pitch songs to established artists
Soon his voice was everywhere behind the scenes and Diffie sang demos of songs that later became hits for Ricky Van Shelton and Billy Dean and Alabama
He became so busy that by 1989 he could leave Gibson and sing demos full time and hundreds of recordings carrying his voice began circulating through Music Row
One of those trails reached publisher Johnny Slate and Slate took the material of Diffie to Bob Montgomery at CBS Epic and this time somebody was not listening only for the song and Montgomery heard the singer and Epic signed Joe Diffie in 1990
Home Almost Got Away From Him
But there was one more near miss and for his debut album Diffie kept passing over a song called Home and he had heard it so many times that it had stopped affecting him
Johnny Slate asked him to listen once more and Diffie did and the song gave him a lump in his throat so he recorded it
He arrived because too much had fallen apart to keep him where he was
Home became his debut single and it went to No. 1 and now the first single with his own name on it had gone all the way to the top