Brian Mansfield
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 9
Jimmy Wayne: Prison Guard
Wayne, whose hits include 'Stay Gone' and 'I Love You This Much,' had some early experiences with prisons: His mother and stepfather both spent time in them. So shortly after high school, he went to work as a prison guard at the Gaston Correctional Facility in North Carolina...
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 8
Trace Adkins: Oil Worker
A colleague of Adkins told him he wouldn't work five years in the oil fields without getting hurt badly enough to miss work. Sure enough, during his time as a roughneck, Adkins had his forehead busted open by a snapped cable and a leg injured by an exploding fiberglass tank...
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 7
Joe Ely: Llama Wrangler
The country-rock icon left Lubbock, Texas, to join the Ringing Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, but the job turned out to be less romantic than Ely imagined. He recalls getting covered in llama spit and having the World's Smallest Horse repeatedly bite him on the knee.
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Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 6
Aaron Tippin: Fence Builder
"I never hated a job," declares the man who once claimed a 'Working Man's Ph.D.' But working for his dad building fences nearly wore him out. Tippin would take a chainsaw to creosote-soaked posts and cut the tops at a 45-degree angle so water wouldn't settle on them...
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 5
Jimi Westbrook: Coal Truck Washer
The 'Boondocks' co-writer grew up in Alabama mining country and cleaned coal-truck wheels by spraying them with an acid solution from a pressure washer. "The spray back would sting really badly as well as make me itch," says the Little Big Town member...
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 4
Johnny Cash: Cotton Picker
By the time the Man in Black was 8 years old, he was dragging a six-foot-long canvas sack through the fields of his family's farm, picking cotton. "The bolls were sharp," he recalled in his 1997 autobiography 'Cash,' "and unless you were really concentrating when you reached out for them, they got you...
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 3
Reba McEntire: Cowgirl
The Oklahoma redhead started gathering cattle on the family ranch at age six. She also helped turn bulls into steers. "I would stand behind the bull and hold his tail while Daddy sliced the sack and cut the cord and let the testicles fall," she wrote in her 1994 autobiography, 'Reba: My Story...
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 2
Billy Joe Shaver: Sawmill Worker
Singer-songwriter Shaver -- who penned John Anderson's 'I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal' and has had songs covered by the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley -- was involved in a sawmill accident in 1960 that severed most of two fingers on his picking hand and severely injured the others...
Worst Pre-Fame Jobs: No. 1
Dierks Bentley: Toilet Cleaner
During a summer working at Arizona's Lake Powell, Bentley had to clean 250-gallon portable toilets from the returning rental houseboats. "It usually had a week's worth of 'stuff' in there from the 10 to 12 houseboat guests," he says...
Country Songwriter Arrested in Death of ‘SNL’ Star’s Dad
Nashville songwriter Richard Fagan, who has written songs for John Michael Montgomery, Clay Walker and Hank Williams Jr., has been charged with criminal homicide following the stabbing death of the father of 'Saturday Night Live' comedienne Cheri Oteri...