LITTLE ROCK — Ben Coulter wants to go the Grand Ole Opry.
He doesn’t want to just take the tourist route and soak up the atmosphere of Nashville’s hallowed stage. The 30-year-old native of the tiny Arkansas Delta town of Montrose wants to go behind the velvet rope and perform at the Tennessee shrine.
Coulter is an aspiring country singer and his website, bencoulteronline.com, is draped with the descriptive banner “Traditional Country from the Heart of a Delta Bluesman.” His Opry quest is front and center in his dream to make it big. He has dedicated a blog to it, roadtotheopry.com, and, to his surprise, he’s dedicated to the blog.
“I never thought I would be able to blog about it every day but I am on Day 122,” Coulter says. “I put something on there every day. When I am coming back late from a show, I’ll put something short and something longer the next day.”
In a recent blog entry, he writes about playing in front of Joe Diffie at the Pink Tomato Festival in Warren. All of the entries are about, one way or another, Coulter’s hopeful trip to the spotlight in Nashville.
That hoped-for trip got a nice boost when an online reviewer posted a favorable notice about Coulter’s show in late May in Nashville. Coulter, who was playing with his band Delta Outlaws, was praised for “captivating the audience with his booming voice and soulful Southern feel.”
“That show in Nashville was huge for us,” Coulter says. He was the opening act for several songwriters, including Brian White, whose 13 No. 1 gospel and country hits include Rodney Atkins’ “Watching You.”
“The house was packed,” Coulter says. “After our show folks were lined up to get autographs and buy CDs.”
As good as that Nashville reception was, it hasn’t yet proved to be the key that unlocks Opry’s door. Instead, Coulter is doing what he has been doing for the last couple of years — playing as many shows as possible and trying to make inroads to Nashville by way of his home in Maumelle.
Coulter is content, for now, to seek out and perform for events like the Pink Tomato Festival and small stages that are way off the map. During the week, he will play solo shows and often during the weekend he will play with his band.
“This is all I do,” Coulter says. “If I am not playing during the day, I am calling around for gigs. I do guitar lessons. It’s paying the bills.”
Coulter marks the beginning of his musical life when he got a guitar as a present from his mother when he was 19.
“I got real involved in playing at church and at deer camp,” Coulter recalls.
Deer camp provided more of a musical education than you would suspect.
“We played more music there than going out after deer,” Coulter says with a chuckle. “One guy in the group played with Johnny Cash. There were some great guitar pickers. I learned a lot just listening to them play.”
When Coulter decided to try his hand at being a professional musician, his first stop wasn’t Nashville but the tourist mecca of Branson.
“I had never been there,” Coulter admits. “I had my guitar, my clothes and three hundred bucks. I was driving down the strip and stopped at the Dixie Country Inn. I said, ‘I need a room.’ They asked what I was doing in town and they noticed the guitar. When I told them, they said ‘This town is going to eat you alive.’”
Coulter ended up spending three years there and spent a good deal of that time rentfree at the Dixie Country Inn because of an Arkansas connection. Coulter was thrown into the fire, learning his trade on the fly.
“That first night I played there I was supposed to play three hours,” Coulter recalls. “I knew 10 songs. In the first 20 minutes I was out of songs.”
Today Coulter figures his repertoire is about 400 tunes, many of those his compositions. A few years ago, he tried out for American Idol but didn’t make it through to Hollywood. Like many other musicians, Coulter has self-made and released his albums while waiting for a label to discover him.
The music he listened to growing up was a heavy dose of Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings and Randy Travis, thanks to his father, along with Poison, which Coulter notes was “real big when I was in high school.”
As he got older Coulter’s appreciation for country got stronger, then he fell in love with Delta blues.
“I really got into old blues,” Coulter says. “It’s the music from where I grew up, though I really didn’t hear it until later. I even got into guys like Jimmie Rodgers, who is all blues but with some yodeling added.”
Coulter understands his mixing blues with country makes him an odd fit for the country genre that’s dominated by bands like Lady Antebellum, who are closer to a standard pop-rock sound.
“When you look at the country award shows, you can get discouraged,” Coulter says. “What I am doing is completely different. I am doing what I am feeling is best. If [audiences] get tired of what they have heard and start looking for something new, we are going to be right there.”
Coulter hopes that right there is the Grand Ole Opry. He intends to keep blogging and playing until it happens.
Style, Pages 27 on 06/28/2011