Randy Travis opens up about childhood trauma, addiction struggles and the music industry in new memoir

Randy Travis flatlined. During a serious struggle with cardiomyopathy in 2013, the legendary country singer’s heart stopped beating, and intensive care doctors at a Texas hospital shocked him back to life. Three days later, his family learned he’d suffered a massive stroke.

Travis spent nearly six months in hospitals in Texas and Tennessee -- about six weeks of it in a coma. He had two brain surgeries, got pneumonia three times, was intubated seven times, had three tracheotomies and a feeding tube. While hospitalized in Nashville, Travis caught staph infections from hospital-borne bacteria and, again, doctors told his wife Mary Travis to say goodbye.

But, it wasn’t time. The stroke took his mobility, use of the right side of his body, his independence and robbed him of speech. His distinct baritone, doctors now note, was miraculously untouched. Someday Travis might perform again, but the Country Music Hall of Famer is hungry to reconnect with his fans right now.

With his dazzling grin and his left hand purposefully trained to write his name, Travis will pose for pictures with fans this week at the Country Music Festival in Nashville for the first time in more than two decades and autograph his new memoir, “Forever and Ever, Amen: a Memoir of Music, Faith and Braving the Storms of Life,” which is out now.

“He loves those fans so much,” said Mary Travis, seated beside her husband in a Nashville office building. The singer’s speech is still halted following the stroke, and she often speaks for him.

Randy Travis changed the course of pop-leaning country music in 1986 with the release of his multiplatinum-selling “Storms of Life.” In the next three decades, he charted 16 No. 1 songs including “Forever and Ever, Amen,” “Deeper than a Holler” and “On the Other Hand.”

“I can’t find another artist in any format in the history of music that turned a format 180 degrees right back into itself, a mirror of what it was, and made it bigger than it was before,” Garth Brooks told The Tennessean.

Randy Travis’ sweeping influence and career stats are points of record, but co-writer Ken Abraham, a popular Christian author, wanted more for the book. The author spent about six months conducting interviews with close to 40 people for the memoir and another two fact checking stories with the Travises. Abraham spent time chatting with the singer’s business associates and siblings, and hours and hours with his wife.

While the couple of has only been married since 2015, Mary Travis said that in the years before his stroke they often sat up all night telling stories and talking about life. They laughed about the time his horse stuck its head through the stable and ate his brother’s marijuana plant. He told her about the early days in his career and they commiserated over their previous failed marriages.

“I wish I listened faster,” Mary Travis said. “But I didn’t know the stroke was going to come along a few years later.”

“Man, I wish you had had a recorder,” Abraham replied from a few feet away.

“He talked and told me so many stories and those were the ones I was trying to remember in talking to Ken,” she said, explaining that what she didn’t know, Abraham learned through research. “But the horse was one that he told me so graphically.”

The book begins with Randy Travis’ early life on the farm in North Carolina. It covers his love of horses and his father’s controlling, sometimes abusive, behavior. The pages outline the complexity of his relationship with his first wife and manager Elizabeth Hatcher, who is 16 years his senior. The singer met Hatcher when he was 16 years old and sang in her North Carolina bar.

Travis is open about his experience with childhood trauma, his struggle with addiction and his brushes with the law. He outlines how the blind trust he extended to his business relationships proved harshly detrimental and how other members of his music business family often rallied around him when he was in need.

Abraham collected the information, wrote the chapters and then sent them to Randy Travis to edit. The singer crossed out the parts with which he didn’t agree and shipped the pages back.

“He knows everything, remembers everything,” Mary Travis said.

“My goal was to get Randy’s heart on paper, not just the facts,” explained Abraham, a bestselling author who has also written books with Jimmy Wayne, Chuck Norris and Buzz Aldrin. “There is a standard much higher than a journalistic standard and that’s taking the high road where God will be pleased with what we do. You can tell the truth and tell the story powerfully and emotionally without hurting people.”

“Randy lived the colorful life,” Mary Travis added. “You don’t have to embellish it.”

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Randy Travis opens up about childhood trauma, addiction struggles and the music industry in new memoir