The Big, True Story
Life! Lyrics! Music!
Looking out his bedroom window one morning, Ron Brown wrote his first lyric. At the age of six, songwriting wasn't on his mind. He just had a natural desire to observe and write and make the words rhyme.
He also had the music bug. In grade school, he took violin lessons.
Some days he'd spend his lunch money on the latest hit single. At home, his mom played a mix of Motown, country, rock and pop music and somewhere within those years, she unknowingly gave Ron the single bit of encouragement that he would ever need... One day she told him, "You can be anything you want to be".
Throughout high school and the early eighties, Ron was fully involved in music. Cover bands, sound engineering, songwriting...
He took lessons for arranging on piano and for a few years, pointed his guitar toward jazz forms, the blues and classical music.
He helped form an "originals" band in Pittsburgh that went on to garner growing interest from Atlantic Records. Recording, making videos and supporting it all by playing the college circuit, he and his bandmates were definitely making "new waves"...
Around that time though, the digital revolution was kicking into gear. Sequencers and samplers made Ron confident that he could write and produce his own material without having to deal with the distraction of egos, attitudes and tired musicians.
So at age twenty-seven,
Ron joined the army...
Why?
Enlistment bonus!
Recording studio... Sequencer... Sampler...
Beautiful!
And life was great! Ron was writing and producing in between repairing Blackhawk helicopters and flying medevac missions... Then a family happened!
Ron put his responsibilities as husband, father and provider above his music and songwriting ambitions. Raising his kids became his passion and as he says, "They are my best accomplishments. My sons are blessings with no comparison."
In 1996, Ron started writing songs again, and this time with an unshakable determination to succeed.
His career was moving steadily forward until late 2003, when Ron's world came to a life-changing halt...
A rare form of pneumonia put him in a coma -- complete with septic shock.
On a ventilator, he was not expected to survive beyond the first three days. Twenty-five days later, he finally emerged from the coma and was taken off of life support. Every doctor involved called it a miracle.
And then came the ensuing two-year rehab which was, "pure hell" as Ron puts it. Unable to work, he lost everything, yes, everything... the nice house, the suv's, the stock portfolio and even the wife, who found it was too much for her to handle. "I can"t blame her. It was unbelievable hell for both of us", says Ron, "Regrettably, I spent a lot of time being angry at the world after all of that."
Now he looks back with a bit of disbelief and says, "I had to teach myself how to eat again, so that I had the energy to teach myself how to play guitar again"...
Through all of the struggle, Ron subsequently discovered an appreciation for family, friends and life that most people might never know... an entirely different, very rare perspective on what is most important. You'll find elements of that theme in many of his songs.
But to make a longer story shorter...
The kids are just about grown and on their own.
Ron has been writing country music for the last eleven years and his career is in high gear -- a few Nashville indie cuts, a new and promising publishing deal...
He moved to Hookstown, Pennsylvania back in the early nineties, and the nickname, "Hookstown Brown", was born -- casually bestowed upon him by a friend... "Yeah, it stuck."
Ron visits Nashville three or four times a year. He's been a long-time member of Taxi and attributes most of his success as a Country songwriter to that membership. At age fifty, and with his first real publishing deal in the bag, Ron will tell you...
"Nobody ever fails, they just give up too soon..."
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