Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 19, 1992 TAG: 9203180220
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In fact, it reads almost like a rags-to-riches cliche: Foundry worker gets laid-off from his job in Oklahoma, moves to Nashville and makes his debut with four No. 1 songs.
You couldn't make up a better story.
In 1986, Diffie was living in Duncan, Okla., and working at an iron foundry, making $12.85 an hour. He had a wife and two kids, a modest house, and although he sang occasionally at the local VFW hall and played some bluegrass here and there, a career in music never seriously crossed his mind.
Life was comfortable.
Then the foundry shut down, leaving Diffie unemployed and looking for work where there was none to be found. "Unless you count McDonald's," he said in a telephone interview last week from Nashville.
Diffie will perform tonight at the Salem Civic Center with Tanya Tucker and Nuthin' Fancy.
At the same time the foundry closed, his marriage split up, and his weight peaked at a heavy 265 pounds.
He stuck things out in Oklahoma for six months, as long as his unemployment checks kept coming, before his friends and family persuaded him to try his luck in Nashville.
He arrived in the dead of winter, an uninviting season for taking on a new city, he said. He had no job prospects and only knew one person in town.
"I was thinking, man, I've never felt so lonesome in my entire life. It was just a totally lost feeling."
He almost turned around and went back home. It wouldn't be the last time Diffie would feel like going home.
He found work, however, in the Gibson Guitar warehouse, arriving late his first two days on the job after getting lost. "I hadn't done a lot of big-city driving," he explained.
He moved into a house that didn't have heat with some other struggling musicians and began writing songs. He said they often burned wood chips, taken from the guitar plant, to stay warm.
He slept on a box-spring bought at Goodwill for $25. At Gibson, he made $6 an hour. "I almost left Nashville again when I got my first paycheck."
It came to less than what he was making on unemployment, he said. "I almost cried. I said, `this ain't going to work.'
"I had a jar of peanut butter and that's about it."
Meanwhile, he spent his off hours hanging around a Nashville bluegrass club, The Station Inn, getting to know more and more musicians and doing "a lot of picking," he said.
"There were a lot of people to commiserate with."
After awhile, a few of his songs wound up as album cuts for Doug Stone, the Forester Sisters and others. More importantly, he started getting hired by other songwriters to make demo tapes of their songs.
Many of those songs went on to be recorded by some of the big names in country music, including Garth Brooks, George Strait, Keith Whitley and Ricky Van Shelton.
By 1989, Diffie was recording as many as 12 demos a day. He also lost 80 pounds and got remarried.
Finally, Epic Records started to notice that the guy on all these tapes sounded pretty good. The label signed him, and last year Diffie released his debut album, "A Thousand Winding Roads."
It produced four No. 1 singles: "Home," "If You Want Me To," "If the Devil Danced in Empty Pockets" and "New Way to Light Up an Old Flame," the last two songs in the foursome being among the best releases in country music over the past year.
Diffie, 33, has since released his second album, "Regular Joe," which has produced one hit so far, "Is It Cold in Here?"
He lives in a house with heat now, and makes more money than he did at the foundry, although he wouldn't say how much more.
"Put it this way, if I want to go buy a new pair of boots, I can go out and do it," he said.
by CNB