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think.
    Whatever I was playing, I’ll never forget what it felt liketo have a master like Hank look at me onstage and say enthusiastically, “Take it, Brad!” In my mind, those are the moments in time when music became a wide-open canvas for me—a place where I could at least try to express something unscripted on the fretboard. Not that I could take any song all that far out. But I’d plink around on something jazzy like “Cannonball Rag” or maybe “Freight Train,” and then Hank would save me by taking it right back and playing something absolutely brilliant. Every time I took a solo, I was well aware that Hank was always standing there cheering me on, hooting and hollering as if I was the second coming of Joe Pass. I’d be struggling through an improvised part of a solo and hear, “There you go! That’s the way!” from the other side of the stage. What a selfless, giving man. I honestly don’t think that I have it in me to do what Hank did for me—stand there night after night with a big, generous smile on his face while some little ten-year-old hotshot in Reebok tennis shoes absolutely
murders
“Dill Pickle Rag.” Hank was a much better man than me in so many ways, and that’s just one. Looking back, though, that’s when I started to become a professional musician. I was learning to solo. Or to “Take it, Brad!”
    So how exactly did a ten-year-old amateur like me end up working for years with a bunch of middle-aged professionals?Like a lot of things in my life, the truth is that it just worked out that way.
    That is the amazing thing about my little West Virginia success story—I never really had to ask to play because people kept asking me. The very same guy who booked that first church picnic also needed a band for a luncheon months later at the Delf Norona Museum in Moundsville, West Virginia. And before that, the Fireman’s Christmas Party called and offered us a hundred dollars plus free beer for the band, and milk for the star. So we took the gig, and we decided to call ourselves Brad Paisley and the C-Notes because it seemed to us like just about everybody who booked us wanted to pay us a hundred dollars to play. From there, it snowballed into steady weekends at every little event you can imagine. There I was fourteen years old, and the guys in the band were close to sixty. By the time I was in junior high school, my friends started to jokingly refer to me and my modernly mature band members as “Brad Paisley and the Seniles.”

    Y ou might be wondering why a bunch of accomplished musical veterans would tolerate backing up someone too youngto get a driver’s license. Well, these guys were really doing this for one reason, and that was to give me this opportunity. They believed in me. They all had children of their own and a soft spot in their hearts for a kid with this much passion for music. It also was fun. I mean, we really had more work than we could handle there for a while.
    Come on, what Lions Club or Knights of Columbus dinner on earth would
not
want to brag about
that
booking? A preteen with his band of card-carrying AARP members? I may not have been all that hot of a guitar player yet, but nobody else knew that. And thanks to my youth and charm, I was, at the very least, public relations gold.
    Think about it this way. Say you’re running a nice local family event in West Virginia and you have a choice: You could book a really in-demand, hip local rock band with all the baggage they carry.
Or
you could get the C-Notes, complete with a nifty twelve-year-old front man and a sweet old-timer rhythm section. It wasn’t even close to a fair fight, and that’s why we won so often. Hank and all the guys in the C-Notes had tremendous skill and seasoning on their side, and I had my youth. Add it up, and we were getting all the gigs we could handle—and gradually earning more than a hundred dollars