Ky. HH: Richard: South Central part of Ky. It’d be around..2 of us live in Glasgow, Ky. And my brother and I, actually, Greg and Anthony live in town, Fred and I live between Edmonton and Glasgow on a farm, was raised out there, and that’s where we have our old music house, practice house. We all went to school, actually in a little place called Edmonton, or if you look on the bass drum it says Metcalf County.

Doug: I’m the only one not from Ky. I’m originally from southeast Missouri, Northeast Arkansas, moved over to Nashville in Oct. 1981, so that area has been home for quite a while now. Hooked up with Greg Martin the same day we both auditioned for Ronnie McDowell’s band, and through Greg is how I met everybody else.

JL: Was it a big adjustment for you guys when you left your small towns and came to Nashville to start your careers?

HH:Doug: Well, Certainly for me, my home town is a little town called Cartwell, Missouri, and it had 800 people in it. We knew everybody and everybody’s business, believe me. Nashville was a big city for me.

Richard: The area’s we’re from are really similar aren’t they Doug? It’s kinda strange, when Doug and them came up and started playing with us in the mid ‘80’s, the things that they would see there would remind them of their area in Missouri. So then when we went down to visit in their area, it was really a ironic how much those two areas were alike. Only two places in the world I ever saw that served slaw burgers, in my life. I can’t think of any other place that does that. Cartwell and Edmonton are a lot alike, they really are. I used to wonder how a bunch of guys from Ky. Played all their life could meet people from Arkansas and Missouri. I felt that odd that we would come together in later years. It was something that was inevitable, to happen, if you saw where we came from, and how we were raised. It was a real narrow path, that we were both probably following, and just met each other or something.

JL: Now for all the folks out there that haven’t been to Cartwell and Edmonton, you want to tell them what a slaw burger is?

HH:Richard: A slaw burger is nothing more than a hamburger with mayonnaise slaw put on it, as opposed to tomatoes and lettuce. When we were growing up there was a little place called the Greasy Spoon Diner in Greensburg, Ky. And we were playing one of the places we did play back then, Club 68 in Lebanon Ky. Which was really a famous club, it’s were Ike and Tina Turner were discovered, and some other major acts, before they had big Interstates. On the way home, it was the only place between our house and Lebanon, that you could actually get something to eat late at night. And there was a fellow in there by the name of Mr. Innis, and he was kinda, like on Bullwinkle, the little guy that would say Go Snow, but he was real tall. The song Dumas Walker, was actually written about Dumas Walker, which was where the marble playing guy was from. But the slaw burger and Ski actually came from Mr. Innis’ restaurant. We used to go in there late at night and play his pinball machines, like 2 o’clock in the morning, on our way home. He’d always say when he saw us coming, I don’t why we were good guys, he’d always say ‘We got law in this town, ya’ know’. So a lot of those lines from the Dumas Walker came from our upbringing around Dumas Walker and Mr. Innis. Two old guys that make sure the Headhunters stay straight, behaved themselves.

JL: Well since you are in Jolene’s Kitchen, what are some of your favorite restaurants that you like to eat at when you’re out on the road touring?

HH:Doug: Well, we like a little bit of everything, and you can probably tell that by looking at all of us. We definitely, we don’t miss many meals. A few us really always try to find a good Mexican restaurant, we like that kind of food.We love Italian food, we certainly love good ol’ country cooking, that’s probably our favorite. We’ll hit the Cracker Barrels, and if we know of a ‘meat & 3’ kind of place we’ll go check that out as well. We’re pretty wide open. When we get up off the bus, we gotta go have our eggs, even if it is 11 or 12 o’clock in the morning. ( Gotta have breakfast..and coffee.

JL: Tell us a little bit more about Dumas Walker, and why you wrote that song.

HH: Richard: Dumas Walker had a little one stop package store, that people could actually sit down on a stool and drink a beer, or whatever, eat a pickle, a pickled egg, whatever they had. Dumas had a trick, he really was the bona-fide marble champion of the world. I really found it ironic, they always called him the ‘Minnesota Fats’ of marbles. Dumas would go out, and because he had this little store, once he stopped being like ‘the marble guy’ so much , and just retired to run this store, he still kept that handy. Cause when the kids would come in there, he would shoot these marbles. He could take two marbles, just one trick for instance, and set them 2 inches apart maybe, at 30 yards away. And I couldn’t even see the marbles, and he could hit another marble, it would go between those marbles, hesitate, and come back to him, and of course nobody knows how he did that, really, I don’t guess, unless it’s a marble champ or something. We started going down there when we were just kids, getting fireworks, cause you couldn’t get fireworks in Ky. Naturally he laid that trick us, and us being kids we were mesmerized by it. That was his trick to get you to come back. As we got older, we used to take my Dad’s truck, he’d send us to the feed mill, and we’d sneak down and buy a case of beer while they were grinding the feed at the feed mill. It was just a part of all of our childhood’s, we all had something we all put into that song. Whether it was the guys raised in Ky. Or, Doug and them. It was…everybody had a Dumas Walker. It wasn’t just about us. What made that song hit with everybody was, is everybody had a hang out. It didn’t have to be called ‘Dumas Walkers’ , it might have been Joe’s Pool Room or whatever, or it could have been a baseball field, could have been a strip in somebody’s town, where everybody hangs out on Friday & Saturday night. Just something that everybody can relate to hanging out.

JL:Well that’s true , we all have our hang outs, and our own Stompin’ Grounds, is that why you named your new album ‘Stompin’ Grounds’?

HH:DOUG: Stompin Grounds became the title cause it was somewhat of a return for us to our familiar Stompin Grounds musically. We kinda wanted to not recreate, you’re never gonna recreate any particular moment in time and history. For us, everybody’s ‘You need another Pickin’ On Nashville, You need another Dumas Walker’, Well of course we do…