Meet Country Music Star Steve Wariner

If you take a map, put your finger on Noblesville, Indiana, slide down around Indianapolis to I-65, and keep going south to Nashville, Tennessee, you will follow the footprints of country music star, Steve Wariner.

Noblesville earned birth rites; Indianapolis provided Wariner's first break into the music business; Louisville was home for a brief time as a kid; Bowling Green, KY offered his first television exposure; and Nashville, well, Nashville almost goes without saying ... two Grammys, four Country Music Association awards, an Academy of Country Music award, 16 BMI Country awards, three gold albums and nearly 30 top ten singles.

But, move your finger back up to Glasgow, KY and head east on Cumberland Parkway to Russell County, and there you will find another piece of Wariner's history. A piece of his family's history which has made Steve Wariner, not only the well-respected star, but the well-respected man, that he is today. You will find his parents, Roy and Ilene Wariner, born and raised in Jamestown, KY. You will find a road that bears his name, Steve Wariner Drive. You will find the Star Theater, where Wariner performed just last winter with his dad and brothers. And, you will find a whole lot of people who, despite his official status as a Hoosier, claim him as their own.

"My earliest recollection of our household is of music everywhere," said Steve, this summer, from his home in Franklin, TN. "My dad was one of twelve kids and they all played music. I understand my grandmother played guitar."

With a musical pedigree well established, it's fitting that Steve Wariner's entry into this world reads like lyrics to a country song: Christmas Day in Noblesville, 1954, a blizzard, a car that wouldn't start. "I was almost born in the front seat of an old Plymouth," he laughs.

Luckily, that was not the case, and Steve joined older brother, Kenny, and older sister, Barbara, in the Wariner clan. Younger brothers, David and Terry, would later follow.

Their dad, Roy, and Roy's brother, Jimmy, formed a band in Noblesville and they practiced at the house on the weekends.