My name is David Lee. I'm a third-generation musician, fifth-generation Texan, one of which
tall falls. I grew up in Mesquite, my young life, and then lived in Lampasas, Texas, so
kind of all over. In my early years, with music, I guess my first inspiration was my
step-sister, Sheila, she played music. When I was a little kid, I'd watch her play, and
I was very inspired by watching her perform, and family functions, you know, around campfires
out of the lake and stuff like that. And when I was 10 years old, she killed herself, and
I inherited her guitar, and I guess that's kind of where the very beginning of where
music began for me. When I was 13, I was, well, probably 12 years old. I met my dad for the
first time. I knew my dad was a musician, had traveled to Texas, played all honky-tonks
just like this one, but I didn't know him. I couldn't pick him out of the lineup at that
time. My mother couldn't handle me anymore, so she called my dad, and dad showed up on
the front steps one night, and had a guitar in his hand, and had a cowboy hat, and put
it on my head, and gave me that guitar. He sat down, and he played. My heroes have always
been cowboys, and right then, that moment, I knew that I was going to be a musician.
I knew that that was the course of my life, and that was what was going to happen for
me. And I threw myself into it 110 percent, and in fact, went to live with my dad. And
at the time of moving down to live with him, he was playing in honky-tonks, and he was
in drugs and alcohol and everything else. It was a bad time. And then we lived way out
in the country, and we spent a lot of time going to honky-tonks, watching my dad play,
and a lot of alcohol was involved in my life. It kind of framed my childhood. My stepdad
also was an alcoholic, and so music for me, I guess, was an escape. It was an escape from
reality because of the stories that the guys told, and those songs, and those stories.
I wanted to create those stories. I wanted to write those stories, and I think in that
desire to want to do that, that's how I became a songwriter. At 13, I wrote my first song,
my first fully-formed song, I would call it. It was called Ghost in a Songwriter's Dream.
It was kind of a weird song. I couldn't even play it today, but I created that and played
with my buddies in high school and continued to learn and grow, and heard guys like Guy
Clark and Billy Joe Shaver and great Texas songwriters. They inspired me. I wrote some
other kinds of songs, different, more rockin' kind of stuff, I guess you'd say, because
I was young, and when you're young, you kind of ended that thing. But then I found Wayland
Jennings. I found Wayland's music, and Billy Joe, of course, wrote a lot of that stuff,
but I found Wayland's music, and the energy, and the intensity, and the darkness of it
kind of related to it, I guess, and I threw myself into that. Those were the songs that
I guess inspired me the most to want to be a singer-songwriter.
The day after graduation, Dad told me, you can go to work with me on the concrete job
or concrete, or you can find a way to go to college, which we didn't have the money to
do, or you can do whatever, but you're not going to stay here rent-free. You know, you're
going to do something.
