Country band Kneckdown a Spring Garden start-up

By Scott Wright

Jay Shell would be the first to tell you he's just a country boy from Spring Garden, Alabama. In fact, if you care to attend his band's next performance he'll tell you all about it one line and a time and probably have you singing along by the second chorus.

Shell, 30, is founder and lead singer of the country rock band Kneckdown. The Spring Garden graduate started out singing gospel songs in church with his mother and sister as a boy. He wasn't very much older when he realized he had talent as a singer and thoroughly enjoyed the satisfaction of a well-received performance.

“I'll never forget, one of the highlights of my musical career -- it was at a football game, we were playing Woodland and it was one of the few games we won that year so I remember it well,” Shell said. “They announced over the loudspeaker that we were going to be singing at our church the next night and a lot of people from school ended up coming to hear us. That was a real thrill for me, early on.”

Shell's mom, a piano and organ player, passed her ear for music down to her son. But Shell was a freshman at Jacksonville State University before he discovered, almost by accident, that his mother's talent for playing an instrument hadn't skipped a generation.

“My college roommate was trying to learn to play the guitar, and one day I picked it up and started looking through the book he had that taught you the chords,” Shell said. “Mom always told me I sang in the key of G, so I just started banging away at G.”

Shell said isn't wasn't long before he learned a few more chords and began to belt out tunes from start to finish. Before long, a few of those songs were of his own creation.

“If you can play G, D, and C, you can write a song,” Shell said. “And I soon found out I had a lot I wanted to sing about.”

Shell said he was soon spending almost all his free time with a guitar in his hands, jotting down lyrics and hammering out music -- and driving his girlfriend Melissa crazy.

“She'd tell me to stop playing and I'd tell her that someday people would be paying money to hear me play,” he said. “She said it was more likely somebody would pay me not to.”

Shell kept at it, playing for fun at parties during his time at Jacksonville State. “I'd play the only five or six songs I knew over and over again.”

After college, Shell moved to Rome, Ga. and met Coosa native Chris Austin. The two didn't hit it off at first, then one night the topic of music came up and they realized they both liked playing and singing.

“At the end of the night, we went over to Chris's house and played our guitars until dawn,” Shell said. “And I don't think I've gone a day in my life without talking to him since that night.”

After a few months of closed-door sessions in their apartments, Shell and Austin talked another friend who was already playing in front of a crowd into letting them open their show at a restaurant in Rome, Ga.

“We'd never played in front of strangers before in our lives and we both had piece-of-junk, $100 guitars,” Shell said. “We put our buddy Shane McElwee on the bongos -- he'd never even seen a set of bongo drums before in his life -- and opened for our friend's band at the River's Edge.”

Shell said he and Austin were so worried about forgetting the words to the songs that they wrote out some of the lyrics and taped them to the floor around of the stage.

“We were nervous wrecks,” Shell said. “But people liked it and when we played again the crowd was a little bigger, and the next time it grew even more.”

A few months later, after seeing how popular Shell and Austin had become on the Rome music scene in such a short time, Shell's new father-in-law, Melissa's dad, fronted them money for the purchase of a few top-quality musical instruments.

“The next time we played, we had over $3,000 worth of new equipment,” Shell said. “We basically played for free the first year because we were slowly paying him back with whatever we got paid to perform. But it all grew from there.”

McElwee got married and left the band the following year. Soon afterwards, there was a period of several months when Shell played alone after Austin took a new job. Finally, on New Year's Eve 2005, the two got back together for an acoustic performance in Rome. At the end of the night, the restaurant owner handed them about $500 apiece -- their cut of the night's door receipts.

“It had been growing a little bit all year, but that was wild,” Shell said, referring to the one-night payout. “I looked at Chris and told him we could really make a living at this.”

Shell said as time went on, he and Austin began to notice more and more people waving off the well-worn cover tunes they had heard a hundred times before. Before long, Shell and Austin were incorporating more original songs in their sets, and audiences started getting bigger as a result.

“When we really started to take it seriously and went from playing two hours of cover songs to two hours of original music, it really took off,” Shell said. “We were playing in front of 200-300 people on Friday and Saturday nights in places that weren't supposed to hold that many people.”

Shell said it was around that time that he and Austin decided to change the band's name to Kneckdown. He said the name comes for an old saying he picked up one summer while working with his father pounding railroad spikes.

“Like every 17-year-old, I thought I knew how to do everything better than everyone else,” Shell said. “Our foreman was a guy named Johnny Puckett, a friend of my dad's who was like an uncle to me. I got to telling him how to do his job. He looked at me and said, 'Let me tell you something. I'm hired to work from the neck up; you're hired to work from the neck down.'”

Six years after their first paying show, the songs at a Kneckdown show accurately reflect the group's rural, working-class moniker. Most of the tunes are originals, too, and all of them are thoroughly popular with the hundreds who line up to attend their shows. One song, a longtime crowd favorite about Shell's boyhood life in Spring Garden, has already received limited air time on South 107-FM in Atlanta.

“The song 'Country Home' is really popular with all the people from Alabama who come to see us play,” Shell said. “It talks about growing up in a homemade double-wide trailer, because I lived in one for a while as a kid after my house burned down.”

The chorus also mentions growing up on County Road 29, fishing along the creek bank, and attending Sunday morning church services with his father. Shell said he realized his favorite song was just as special to others one day when he got an email from a visitor to the band's page on MySpace.com.

“The guy wrote me that he heard the song on the website and it brought a tear to his eye, because he could remember how big a deal it was for him as a boy to have his dad come to church with the family on Sunday,” Shell said. “I realized that if he could relate to something that happened to me as a child, a lot of other people probably could, too. That's when I really knew we were doing something pretty good.”

As word about Kneckdown's unique, original sound spreads across Georgia and Alabama, the band is spending time in the studio whenever they can between performances in Anniston, Jacksonville, Carrolton, Ga., Cartersville, Ga., and Chattanooga. Shell has already booked a few dates as far in the future as September.

Speaking of the future, Shell is excited about the band's prospects for 2007. But he said he's already drawn a big circle around the 10th of March on his scheduling calendar. Following a noon performance at Bama's Best Burger Festival in Piedmont, Shell and the band will put on a free show in the same place where the whole Kneckdown phenomenon began -- the Spring Garden community.

“I really got emotional when my 2nd grade teacher, Marilyn Hudson, called and asked me to play at their Evening in the Garden event,” Shell said. “For me to get the chance to come home and help my school … I'm honored that they asked me.”

The band is set to perform in the school gymnasium at 7 p.m. For additional information about tour dates, bookings and other scheduled performances visit www.myspace.com/kneckdown.