Terri Clark isn’t ready to hang it up. The Canadian country star sat down with fellow ’90s hitmaker Tracy Lawrence on his Road House Podcast, and Country Now shared the highlights on Nov. 5. Terri said she plans to keep going for as long as she can still sing well. If that ever slips, she would rather walk away than give fans a weaker show. She also says she would quit before she would lean on Auto-Tune.
Whenever retirement crosses her mind, one memory stops her. “I think of that 18-year-old kid that was standing at that bus stop crying,” she told Tracy. That kid, she said, would be plenty mad at her for even thinking about it.
Her new album, “Terri Clark: Live From The Ryman,” came out Oct. 30. It holds 17 songs from her first headlining show at the Ryman Auditorium on Aug. 29, 2024, with surprise guests Ashley McBryde and Trisha Yearwood. Nothing was fixed in a studio afterward. “It’s passion over perfection,” Terri said.
That night meant so much because of where she started.
Terri was born in Montreal and grew up in Medicine Hat, Alberta. In 1987 she, her mom and her mom’s best friend drove to Nashville in a Honda Civic. At the border, they told the agents they were going to the Grand Ole Opry.
Her mom, Linda, stayed about a week and helped her find a cheap room. Before Linda left, they stopped in at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the famous honky tonk across the alley from the Ryman. Terri sang, and Tootsie’s gave her a job. “So they hired me to play, and I played three days a week,” she said on the Kick Your Boots Up podcast. Mom had one rule. “She said she’d drag me home by the ear if she found out I was going down there at night.”
Terri rode the city bus about 10 miles to get downtown. Lower Broadway was a rough place back then. “I got a shoe lace and tied my guitar to my wrist,” she told the Australian site NuCountry around 2003. Her thinking was simple: “if they wanted my guitar that bad they would have to take me with it.”
RFD-TV’s “On the Record” asked Terri about that trip to Nashville and her years playing on Broadway.
Terri talks about her Tootsie’s days on RFD-TV
In 2024, Terri told the Nashville Scene about the day she nearly gave up. It was a sweltering afternoon in late July, early in her Nashville years. She got off the bus at the wrong stop in her stage clothes, guitar in hand. She made one of her many collect calls to her mom and said she wanted to come home.
Linda didn’t argue, and she didn’t send for her either. “She said, ‘You are always welcome to come home, I just want to play devil’s advocate,'” Terri recalled. “‘I don’t want you to be 50 years old and regret not giving it a real shot.'”
Terri stayed. It took years. Producer Keith Stegall kept telling her not to give up, and he later signed her to Mercury Records. Her first single went top five in 1995.
Terri’s first hit, “Better Things to Do”
In 2004, the Opry asked her to become a member. Her mom was reportedly on stage with Steve Wariner when the invitation came. Linda passed away in 2010.
Back in her Tootsie’s days, Terri used to slip over and take the Ryman tour between sets. After her 2024 show, she wrote that she wished she could tell that “naive, wide-eyed 18-year-old girl from Alberta” “that it was going to take 37 years to get to the Ryman… but that it WAS going to happen.”
Tracy posted their whole talk on his YouTube channel.
Terri on Tracy Lawrence’s Road House Podcast
Terri turned 50 in 2018. That same year, she went into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame. Next month she heads out on her “It’s Christmas… Cheers!” tour, Dec. 3 to 19.