Halloween is Thursday, 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.
AJ (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.
Billy 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: Brothers Osborne’s TJ and John Osborne talk about last year’s Halloween in which TJ scared the crap out of kids.
Brothers Osborne (Halloween) OC: …coming by. :52
JOHN: “Halloween’s awesome. Halloween reminds you of when you were a kid. Every year when it starts getting cold and the leaves start turning, I think there’s just something that we carry from childhood is carrying around that bag of candy and carving pumpkins, and dressing up like whatever in the world you want to dress up as and walking around, I love it. Still to this day, we’ll carve pumpkins. Last year at our house, I dressed up like a werewolf or something or a zombie, and TJ had a chainsaw without the chain on it so people would come up to our house and get candy. As soon as they would grab candy, he would start the chainsaw and jump out and chase them out to the street. It was so much fun.”
TJ: “We had to be careful because we live right off Music Row so we had to make sure no cars were coming, because they would run as fast as they could away from the house and run dead out in front of some cars that were coming by.”
AUDIO: Darius Rucker loves Halloween, especially because it’s his kids’ favorite holiday.
Darius (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.
David 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 talks about Halloween candy.
David 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.
Dierks 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.
Easton 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.
Eric 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.
Jon 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: Kelleigh Bannen and her husband, Jeff, have two pugs – Rugby and Cabell – who they like to dress up for Halloween.
Kelleigh Bannen (Halloween) OC: …to say. :31
“Target is one of the best places to get dog costumes on the cheap. Last year, we had a landshark and a caterpillar [laughs], and they’ve been a bumblebee. And for me, it’s about that moment when the three to four-year-old child who’s walking around the neighborhood too realizes that your dog is also dressed like a pumpkin and so is he, and he loses his mind over it. So, it’s all about the comedic value for us with the dogs and the costumes. But I am that person, I’m embarrassed to say.”
AUDIO: Lady Antebellum’s Dave Haywood recalls one of his most embarrassing Halloween costumes.
Lady 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.
Luke Bryan (Halloween) OC: …your teeth. :21
“We’re looking forward to trick-or-treating, and doing it in our neighborhood. 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: Scotty McCreery talks about his favorite Halloween candy.
Scotty McCreery (Halloween candy) OC: …basket. :05
“My favorite candy is a Tootsie Roll. You cannot go wrong with Tootsie Rolls in the Halloween basket.”