A&E's 'Garth Brooks: The Road I'm On' reveals how the country singer's mom gave up her musical career for family
There's a lot of things that helped Garth Brooks become one of the biggest musical stars in the US including plenty of hard work, his own natural talent, and more than a little bit of luck. But what most people don't know about the country music superstar is that he had an amazing musical inspiration right from childhood: his mother, Colleen Carroll Brooks.
Brooks' mom was a very talented country singer in her own right, having appeared on the 'Ozark Jubilee' and signed by Capitol Records, the very same label that would one day sign her son as well. But after she met Brooks' father and started a family, she chose to leave it all behind and focus on being a mother to her six children instead.
"It could be that generation," Garth explains in the new A&E documentary, 'Garth Brooks: The Road I'm On'. "Where the women felt like they had to kind of sacrifice their own dreams for the children's dreams. She gave up a ton for us." Though she didn't end up becoming a national icon like Garth, Colleen would still go on to experience the life of a country music star second-hand through her son. Both she and her husband made it a point to stay by Garth's side after he got signed by Capitol Records to make sure their beloved child wouldn't be taken advantage of.
"My mom and dad, they immediately went into 'well, you signed a record deal. So now we have to be on point to protect you from these bad people in the record business'," Garth laughs. "They were just parents. So never did you take that because you'd signed a record deal, you had made it. I took it, that because we signed a record deal, now the war was about to begin."
His mom would continue to be a major influence on him right up until her death in 1999 after a long battle with throat cancer. In fact, she could see how big he would become even when other people with more experience in the industry could not.
"I remember Garth's mother Colleen Brooks being at the studio when we had the listening party for 'No Fences'," songwriter Pat Alger recalls in the documentary. "And we were all excited about that record because we thought it was gonna sell a million copies. But she comes out of the control room where everybody's listening and she declares, 'This record's gonna sell 10 million copies'. And we're all kinda going, 'Well, that's what mama would say'. Of course, she was wrong. It sold 18 million copies or something."
Part 1 of 'Garth Brooks: The Road I'm On' aired on A&E on December 2 and Part 2 was released the very next day, on December 3.
