It's cliche to compare the life of a country music star to the events of a country music
song, but the real-life life story of Randy Travis sounds like it was ripped from a tragic
ballad.
Randy Travis was pushed into music at an early age by his father, who gave all of his children
instruments and entered them in conventions and contests.
A strict taskmaster on and off the stage, Travis' mother sometimes bore the brunt of
her husband's darker impulses.
Travis said that when he was about ten, his father, quote, "got drunk and started beating
on Mama."
That's when Travis sprang into action, writing in his memoir, Forever and Ever, Amen,
"So I took up for her, jumped on him, and pulled him off her."
Immediately after, Travis ran out of the family home, his father giving chase with a raised
gun.
Travis wrote that he hid in a nearby cornfield for 2 days without food or water.
Travis described his teenage self as a juvenile delinquent.
He wrote,
"I was smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol by the time I was ten years old.
Not long after that I was using marijuana regularly."
Travis routinely skipped school and got such poor grades that he dropped out for good after
the eighth grade.
He also earned a hefty rap sheet.
The future star was charged with breaking and entering, public drunkenness, driving
under the influence, and attempting to elude police.
Back in February 2012, Randy Travis was living on the Chrysalis Ranch, a fancy spread outside
the small Texas town of Tioga.
Tioga is about 20 miles away from the town of Sanger, and that's where Travis had a very
boozy run-in with the law.
A Sanger police officer was doing his rounds at about 1:30 AM, on the morning after the
Super Bowl.
He noticed a suspicious vehicle parked outside the First Baptist Church.
When the officer went to investigate, he found Travis behind the wheel of the 1998 Pontiac,
smelling of alcohol with an open wine bottle in the passenger's seat.
Travis, who reportedly slurred his words and stumbled while exiting his car, said he'd
had an argument with his girlfriend and was trying to make his way home, and that he already
thought he was in Tioga.
Travis was arrested and booked on a Class C misdemeanor citation of public intoxication.
Unfortunately, the rest of 2012 didn't go much better for him.
According to a Dallas NBC affiliate, Randy Travis went to a convenience store in Tioga,
Texas, one night in August 2012 and asked for cigarettes.
It was a normal exchange, except that Travis was naked.
When the clerk asked Travis how he planned to pay for his smokes without a wallet, Travis
got angry and left.
Several parties made calls to 911, and soon officers found the country star bruised and
drunk, not far from a totaled Pontiac.
Travis refused field sobriety tests, so police told the singer they'd have to take him in,
at which point Travis threatened to kill them.
"I know the head of mafioso family, I promise you I do."
After posting bond of $21,500, Travis was released from jail the next morning.
In his later memoir, Travis blamed the incident on the effect of just two drinks combined
with the prescription sleep aid, Ambien.
Less than a year after this ordeal, Randy Travis endured a chain of increasingly awful
and alarming medical events, after which his appearances have been limited.
According to one of his doctors, who spoke with Today, Travis was in otherwise fine health
until June 2013, when he contracted a viral upper respiratory illness.
Before long, Travis was diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle infection generally
caused by the Coxsackie B virus.
Travis slowly recovered, and appeared to be out of danger.
During recovery, though, Travis suddenly experienced a massive stroke, which necessitated surgery
to relieve pressure on the singer’s brain.
Fortunately, he made it through the operation, and was out of the hospital three weeks after
his medical crisis began.
After two years of intensive rehabilitation, Travis could finally walk, shower, and dress
himself without assistance.
However, at that point, he still hadn't regained the use of the right side of his body.
Travis described his overall state as "damaged."
The stroke also stripped Travis of his iconic singing voice.
However, during his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, three years after his
stroke, Travis delivered a whispered rendition of "Amazing Grace."
"You comin' back?"
"Well...I dunno."
Randy Travis apparently has a way with children.
Travis was never a biological father, and it's something he seems to regret.
Wife Mary Travis explained to Taste of Country,
"He wanted children.
I think his relationship with Lib, who was so much older than him, and they were not
able to, is what he explained to me."
Lib is Lib Hatcher, Travis' first wife and manager, and she's 16 years older than the
singer.
By the time they were a couple, Hatcher was nearly too old to become pregnant.
When that relationship ended and Travis moved on to his second marriage, it was similarly
too late in the game for kids.
But that's far from the only regret Travis has regarding his relationship with Hatcher.
According to People, Travis met Lib Hatcher in 1977.
He was 17 at the time, and she was 33, and they met at a weekly talent contest at the
Charlotte club she owned.
At the time, Travis was about to earn a five-year prison sentence for breaking into a store,
until Hatcher convinced the judge to release Travis into her custody.
The singer went to live with Hatcher...and her husband.
She then became Travis' manager, which led to friction in the marriage.
Ordered to choose between the marriage or managing young Randy Travis, she chose the
latter.
Around 1982, when the pair moved to Nashville, the arrangement turned romantic.
They married in secret in 1991.
The marriage fizzled out in October 2010, when Travis filed for divorce.
Travis and Hatcher decided to continue their business arrangement, but that wouldn't last
much longer either.
Randy Travis fired Lib Hatcher from her job as his manager in 2011.
In April 2012, per the Nashville Business Journal, Hatcher sued Travis for breach of
contract of their post-divorce management agreement.
Travis filed a countersuit, which according to The Daily Freeman accused Hatcher of publicly
revealing confidential information to intentionally cause harm to the singer's career and reputation.
During this time, Travis suffered his stroke.
Fortunately, he believed he'd insured his voice with Lloyd's of London, but in truth
he had no such coverage for disability or concert cancellation...even though he'd paid
out around $250,000 annually in premiums.
"And he knows all the words to every song.
That's the funny with a stroke and aphasia is the brain knows it all."
Travis called this discovery a,
"financial oversight, or perhaps willful disregard or mishandling of my fiduciary affairs."
In an interview with Taste of Country in 2019, Travis called his financial situation, quote,
"dire," with his memoir co-author Ken Abraham adding that, quote,
"Hopefully the book will help."