Halloween is Wednesday, October 31st, and the holiday has some of your favorite country stars getting into costumes, while others are recalling memories of Halloweens past.
Audio / Adam Hambrick talks about one of his favorite Halloween costumes as a kid.
DownloadAdam Hambrick (Halloween) OC: …five-years-old. :10
“My grandmother made me a Ghostbusters jumpsuit, and I had the proton backpack and I went as Peter Venkman, the Ghostbuster, when I was five-years-old.”
Audio / Alan Jackson used to take his now grown daughters trick-or-treating when they were young children, 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 / JOHN AND TJ OSBORNE TALK ABOUT THEIR FAVORITE HALLOWEEN CANDY.
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 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’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 / Brothers Osborne’s TJ Osborne talks about one of his favorite childhood Halloween costumes.
DownloadBrothers Osborne (Halloween costume) OC: (TJ) …I love it. :37
TJ: “There was a costume I had when I was a kid that my dad made. I was a caterpillar, no, you were a caterpillar and I was a spider. And so I don’t know if you’re familiar with pipe insulation? It’s like these black tubes, and so I had these little black pipe insulators as my legs.” JOHN: “There were strings attached to him that would hold some of the black pipe insulators under his hands, and he’d put working gloves on the end of them and so when he’d raise his arms, all of the little spider legs would raise up with it. [laughs] I’m telling you, our parents were total hippies. They were just…” TJ: “Artsy-fartsy hippies. I love it.”
Audio / Growing up on a working ranch where the nearest neighbor was about five miles away, Clare Dunn says trick-or-treating was hit-or-miss.
DownloadClare Dunn (Halloween) OC: …and stuff. :23
“Halloween was always hit and miss. I mean it’s five miles to my nearest neighbor. So, for us if we wanted to go trick-or-treating or whatever, some of the country kids a couple of years would all band together and we’d drive around in vehicles from house to house to house. So, we’d all pile into a pickup and then we’d go annoy our neighbors for candy and stuff.”
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 / 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 / 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 Langston talks about his most memorable Halloween.
DownloadJon Langston (Halloween show) OC: …memorable Halloween. :59
“So we played a show a few years ago in Baton Rouge and I go off stage and I come back on stage for the encore. I don’t know this until midway through the song, I’m just into the crowd, like I’m engaged. I’m in the zone, and I just see everyone, like everybody else behind me but me and I’m like what’s going on. I turn around and each of them has a different huge mask on, like one of those stuffed animal masks, like my drummer has a dinosaur head on. My guitar players, one of ‘em has monkey head on, the other has a unicorn head on. And my bass player has like a, I think a dog or cat head or something like that. I couldn’t finish the song I was laughing so hard just seeing them playing with these like over-sized huge mask heads on Halloween night. That was funny. It was a good prank, so that was probably the most memorable Halloween.”
Audio / Jon Pardi reveals his favorite Halloween candy.
DownloadJon Pardi (Halloween candy) OC: …during Halloween. :06
“Man! The candy corn is pretty good, and that’s seasonal, so it only kinda pops out during Halloween.”
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 / JORDAN DAVIS TALKS ABOUT HIS FAVORITE HALLOWEEN COSTUMES OVER THE YEARS.
DownloadJordan Davis (Halloween costumes) OC: …jet black. :49
“I can remember being really big into Power Rangers. I always liked the Red Ranger. I remember being Red Ranger one Halloween. I remember me and my brother being big into the Ninja Turtles. I was Donatello one year, which I think was the purple turtle. I think, though, my favorite Halloween was I was in college and I went as Luigi from Mario and Luigi, and I actually grew a legit mustache and dyed it jet black and ran into an e-girlfriend at the costume shop and completely forgot I had the mustache on. So, when Is saw her, she was like, ‘So, you’re going with a mustache nowadays, huh?’ [laughs] I remember being like, ‘I swear this is part of my Halloween costume.’ [laughs] When I dyed my mustache, my top lip was black for a week. Like I really did dye it jet black.”
Audio / JORDAN DAVIS TALKS ABOUT HIS FAVORITE HALLOWEEN CANDY.
DownloadJordan Davis (Halloween candy) OC: …some Starbursts. :21
“My favorite Halloween candy [is] probably Reese’s or M&M’s, although I love the variety of Starburst. It’s one that I feel like I only eat at Halloween, because I feel like at Halloween one of the popular ones is the two-piece Starburst things. So, probably Reese’s, M&Ms and throw in some Starbursts.”
Audio / CANDY CORN IS A PRETTY POLARIZING CANDY THAT ONLY COMES OUT AROUND HALLOWEEN. SOME LOVE IT; SOME HATE IT AND NEITHER OPINION IS WRONG. JORDAN DAVIS SIDES WITH THE HATERS (DON’T BLAME HIM), SINCE HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO CANDY CORN.
DownloadJordan Davis (no candy corn) OC: …they’re awful. :05
“You know what I never got? The candy corns. I’ve never been a candy corn guy. I think they’re awful.”
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. :21
“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 his wife Caroline usually pick out his Halloween costumes.
DownloadLuke Bryan (Halloween costumes) OC: …always has. :20
“Me and Caroline did one year where I dressed up as the old lady, and she dressed up as, she called herself a dirty old man. So, she went around acting like an old man saying snide comments to everybody. That was a fun one. The main thing is Caroline is big, she loves Halloween and always has.”
Audio / Luke Bryan talks about his Halloween traditions.
DownloadLuke Bryan (Halloween) 2 OC: …with all that. :33
“My tradition for Halloween is Caroline picks the outfit. I never know what I’m wearing. So that day, I’ll talk to the neighbors ‘cause I have a tractor back there and I’ll go get my tractor and get a big long trailer, and then I’ll run down to…a couple miles from the farm, we’ve got a big hay farmer that keeps hay and you run in there and pay him for his hay bales. And I’ll load the hay up and get the hayride ready and we’ll take all the kids behind the tractor and have a fun Halloween with all that.”
Audio / Maddie & Tae sit on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to scary movies.
DownloadMaddie & Tae (Halloween) OC: …princesses. :24
TAE: “Oooooh, Halloween [is] my favorite holiday. Anyone who knows me knows I love all things scary and gory, so especially on Halloween all the scary movies that come out in theaters, I am there every single time.” MADDIE: “And I never go with her because I hate scary things.” TAE: “You know what’s funny? As little girls, everyone wants to dress up as princesses, and I think I was a witch like six years in a row. I just wanted to be scary.” MADDIE: “Girl, I was like Jasmine and you know [other] princesses.”
Audio / Travis Denning talks about his favorite – and probably most embarrassing – Halloween costume.
DownloadTravis Denning (Halloween costume) OC: …Busch Light. :21
“Honestly, I think one of my most proud and embarrassed Halloween costumes is I went as Terry from Reno 9-1-1. I had the roller skates, the short-shorts, the tied-up shirt. Looking back, it wasn’t the manliest thing I ever did, but it got a lot of laughs. And I think that year my favorite candy I ever had was Busch Light.”
