Halloween is Saturday, and the holiday has some of your favorite country stars getting into costumes, and they also recall memories of Halloweens past.
Audio / Alan Jackson used to take his daughters trick-or-treating when they were young kids, but he recalls one costume that he hated. It was an infant costume that made one of the girls look like a little peapod.
DownloadAJ (Halloween) OC: …cute, but…[laughs] :17
“Aww, I remember some, when they were infants, they had like these little, they looked like a little pea pod, you know, or something. It’s like a little green pea or something. And I thought man, that’s awful. But Denise liked it, and I guess it was cute, but…(laughs).”
Audio / Billy Currington reminisces about his childhood Halloween memories.
DownloadBilly Currington (Halloween) OC: …Halloween. :17
“You know, when I was a kid, I loved the trick and the treat. I loved dressing up. I was always wanting to be Dracula. That was my favorite guy. But, of course, who doesn’t love going door-to-door and getting these buckets of candy? [laughs] So, love, love Halloween.”
Audio / Billy Currington (Trick or Treat)
DownloadBilly Currington (Trick or Treat)
“Trick or Treat, baby.” [laughs]
Audio / Brothers Osborne’s John Osborne talks about carving pumpkins with their dad when they were growing up.
DownloadBrothers Osborne (carving pumpkins) OC: …or something. :25
“With our dad every year, we would go looking for pumpkins, and we would all get our own pumpkin to carve, and he would buy the biggest pumpkin that they had. It was huge. I mean, it was way too big for any one person, but he would love carving. He’s kind of an artsy guy. He was a great drawer and stuff, and he would carve the most terrifying, vicious looking, scary pumpkin you’d ever seen in your life, and it would be massive. It would be like on a 50-pound pumpkin or something.”
Audio / Brothers Osborne talk about their favorite Halloween candy...and not so favorite.
DownloadBrothers Osborne (Halloween candy) OC: (John) …go stale. [laughs] :34
TJ: “I would say, Snickers, Baby Ruth, Kit Kat and Reese’s too.” JOHN: “I always hated those houses that would give you bad candy, though. You’re like, ‘C’mon. Step it up.’ Spend the extra dollar on a bag, you know?” TJ: “A house when we were growing up used to give out whole candy bars. It was the best. You were like, ‘That house – that’s the honey hole of candy.’” JOHN: “I love it, and I love like at the end, like three or four days after Halloween you would see what candy was left, and it was always like those crappy cheap candies, and they would just go stale.” [laughs]
Audio / Brothers Osborne’s TJ and John Osborne talk about dressing up like zombies for Halloween.
DownloadBrothers Osborne (zombie costume) OC: (John) …was so fun! :29
TJ: “Literally, you can dress up like a zombie and drag your foot behind you all day and make weird noises, and everyone finds that completely acceptable.” [laughs] JOHN: “One year I dressed up as a ‘90s redneck zombie with a mullet wig and an Alan Jackson denim coat. I never once broke character. That’s part of the thing — you can actually not break character and get away with it. And everywhere I went, even when I ordered a drink, I ordered it like a zombie that was falling apart. [laughs] It was so fun!”
Audio / Canaan Smith says his Halloweens of today have changed dramatically since he was a child.
DownloadCanaan Smith (Halloween) OC: …cornfields. :37
“I grew up in a Christian family. We went to a private Christian school for a while, so they didn’t allow us to celebrate Halloween like I do now. We did what was called a Hallelujah Party instead, and you still dress up and still get all the candy, but you go to the high school gym. You play games, you just do, like cornhole and the dunking booth and all kinds of stuff and win prizes, but it was nothing ever scary. I think they had like rules about what outfits you could and couldn’t wear. But now I just love freaking myself out and going to, I love going to haunted houses and haunted cornfields.”
Audio / Darius Rucker loves Halloween, especially because it’s his kids’ favorite holiday.
DownloadDarius (Halloween) OC: …I’m into. :06
“Halloween’s big for me, because the kids love it. It’s my kids’ favorite holiday, so anything they’re into, I’m into.”
Audio / David Nail talks about his favorite part of Halloween.
DownloadDavid Nail (favorite part of Halloween) OC: …it better. :14
“My favorite thing about Halloween was just the excitement about picking out your costume and talking to your friends and fighting over if you’re going to be this or if they stole the idea from you and if you can do the idea better.”
Audio / David Nail wants to have the best candy in the neighbrhood.
DownloadDavid Nail (Halloween candy) OC: …neighborhood. :19
“My sister and I would always go out and hide in the trees and the bushes and scare the kids that would come up to our house, which was rare ‘cause we always had the crappiest candy ever. And when I can afford it, I’m gonna have the best dagum candy. I’m gonna blow everybody away. I’m gonna have a line. It’s gonna look like a George Strait meet-and-greet. It’ll be all the way around the neighborhood.”
Audio / Dierks Bentley talks about the Halloweens of his childhood.
DownloadDierks Bentley (Halloween) OC: … …around home. [laughs] :23
“Oh, when I was a kid, I was all into fireworks. Growing up in Arizona, we couldn’t get ’em, so we’d have ’em shipped in illegally. I still remember the name of the guy we’d call. His name was Joe, and he’d bring in, ship ’em in a package with no writing on ’em. We were all about M-80s in the mailboxes and bottle rocket wars. To me, as a kid, Halloween was fireworks, was blowing up stuff around home. [laughs]”
Audio / Easton Corbin has never dressed up for Halloween as an adult, but one of his favorite costumes as a kid was made by his grandmother.
DownloadEaston Corbin (Halloween) OC: …pretty warm. :26
“My grandma made a werewolf outfit for me, and I wore that one year. She got this fake hair and glued it to sweatpants and a sweatshirt. That was a hot outfit. I mean, it got pretty warm.”
Audio / Eric Church recalls his favorite Halloween costume.
DownloadEric Church (Halloween) OC: …Franklin Street. 1:18
“My favorite Halloween costume really came, I remember when I got a little older my first year of college, there’s this thing they do every year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Halloween on Franklin Street. We drove down from Boone, North Carolina. I had a bunch of friends that went to University of North Carolina, and we didn’t have costumes and didn’t realize until we were on the way that we had to have costumes. So, we stopped at a costume place in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s Halloween, so there’s a run on everything and couldn’t find anything. And we end up getting sent around, driving around town. We end up finding this hole in the wall place, but they had the full costume, Sesame Street outfits. The real deal. The real ones [with] feathers and fur. We were Elmo, Cookie Monster and I was Big Bird, and the Big Bird was the actual Big Bird. It’s about 7-foot-4, and yiou looked out of the body and then you had these straps that went on since the head was a lot higher. There’s a lot of beer involved in Franklin Street, so we get down there and as the night went on, my straps broke, so the head would pivot. And so, I would be walking one way and the head would be facing the other, and it just became this funny…I didn’t know the head was on backwards. I had no idea. I see out of the body, so I’m just kinda walking around and people were talking to my ass-end. [laughs] The whole time peiople’d come up and start talking and go, ‘Hey, turn around.’ And I’d turn around, and they’d go, ‘No turn around.’ It was a mess. That year, there was no other Big Bird on Franklin Street.”
Audio / Jon Pardi talks about his favorite Halloween costumes as a child.
DownloadJon Pardi (Halloween) 1 OC: …the Superman. :15
“Man, I went through phases of costumes – the Superman costume, then it was a ninja, then I was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one year. I remember rockin’ the Superman.”
Audio / Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley reveals one costume he’s always wanted to wear on Halloween.
DownloadLady A (Charles costume) OC: …an apple. :19
CHARLES: “I want to be a banana. I think there’s something so funny and understated about a banana, especially when you’re 6’6” and like your little head’s popping through and you’re a banana.” DAVE: “Do they make ‘em your size?” CHARLES: “I’ve been known to sew a thing or two.” HILLARY: “That’s really random.” CHARLES: “I know. I’ve always wanted to dress up like something, just kind of funny like a banana or an apple.”
Audio / Lady Antebellum’s Dave Haywood recalls one of his most embarrassing Halloween costumes.
DownloadLady A (Dave Haywood costume memory) OC: …50 feet. :20
“I was a die (1/2 of a pair of dice) for Halloween. I had a big cardboard box that I had painted white and had the polka dots and stuff. And I remember I was walking up this hill to go to this hill and literally fell back down the entire hill [laughter], rolling in this giant cardboard box that I couldn’t do anything about, because I rolled down about 50-feet.”
Audio / Luke Bryan says you can tell a lot about your neighbors from what kind of Halloween candy they hand out.
DownloadLuke Bryan (Halloween) OC: …your teeth. :18
“You can find out a lot about your neighbors by what kind of candy they put out. So, well, like full bars of Snickers bars, that’s what, and Reese’s cups, [but] the old chocolate popcorn ball of stuff, that’s no good either, like Dots – you get Dots one time of year and they pull your teeth.”
Audio / Luke Bryan says you can tell a lot about your neighbors from what kind of Halloween candy they hand out.
DownloadScotty McCreery (favorite costume and memory) OC: …was happening. :19
“My favorite Halloween memory would have to be me in my gorilla costume running down the street chasing some little girl I was friends with. I knew her, but I was scaring her half to death. My favorite costume, though, would have to be my Elvis Presley costume. I think I was about 10 years old when that was happening.”