Doug Supernaw

Though he has not spoken to Supernaw in about five years, Justin White had more than a front-row seat for the singer's glory days. White was still a student at Robert E. Lee High School when he met the honky-tonker at a golf tournament in 1988. By that time, the 27-year-old Supernaw already had served as a staff writer with a Nashville music publishing house. At the time, White was impressed, with good reason. “That was the way you became a star back then,” says White, citing the examples of staff writers-turned-hitmakers such as Garth Brooks, Clint Black and John Michael Montgomery.

Supernaw was being groomed for that same level of success when he met White, who had whiled away his high school years writing songs and dreaming of a country music career. At the golf tourney, White told Supernaw he was a musician, and Supernaw asked him to send him a tape of his stuff. “He called me back and said, ‘I think your stuff is great, and I wanna write with you,'” White recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, hell, this is great.'”

By 1990, Supernaw was spending more time in Texas, and he and White cowrote together whenever possible. Supernaw also started assembling Texas Steel, an early version of the road band that would back him through his glory days. Meanwhile, White enrolled at the University of Texas, and in early 1991, Supernaw would again intervene in fairy-tale fashion. Texas Steel had a spate of road gigs coming up, and Supernaw asked White to become his sound man and songwriting partner between gigs. “I said, ‘Man, you're gonna pay me money to do this?'” White remembers. “So I called my dad and told him I wasn't gonna waste my time or his money anymore, so I dropped out of school, moved back to Houston and went to work for Doug.”

Soon enough, Supernaw was opening for Willie Nelson, playing the parking lot stages at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo Chili Cook-Off, and headlining the Party on the Plaza concert series. He was drawing interest from several major Nashville labels, but Supernaw resisted when they insisted that he needed to move back to Music City. “He decided that the way for him to do it was to come back here, put together the best band he could, hit the road and play three-four-five nights a week at every roadhouse, outhouse and dance hall we could find, which is what we did,” White remembers. “We did it in my Blazer, two vans and a trailer.”

And it really paid off. Coors Light signed on as a sponsor, and Supernaw was able to retire the little caravan of trucks in favor of a proper tour bus purchased with the brewery's money. The band hit the road and hit it hard, and eventually became one of the top draws in places like Tyler's Oil Palace, and if they know good country music anywhere, they know it in Tyler.

It was all enough to persuade many observers that Supernaw was bound for superstardom. One such was Houston Chronicle music critic Rick Mitchell, who touted him as a next big thing in June of 1992. Mitchell wasn't blowing smoke. After a bidding war, Nashville label BNA, an offshoot of industry behemoth BMG, emerged as the winner in the Supernaw stakes. This was Nashville's “hat act” era, when male stars had to look good in cowboy duds, and Supernaw definitely fit that bill. BNA vice president of artists and repertoire Richard Landis was enthused about the tall, lantern-jawed, cleft-chinned baritone, to put it mildly. “I think he's got unlimited potential,” he told Mitchell in a Chronicle article. “He's got a look that I think will appeal to women and men. I see him as blue-collar country.”

“By the face you could never tell / That inside I'm hurtin' / I'm always on the move / But never gainin' groundÉ”

— “Carousel”

Douglas Anderson Supernaw's upbringing was anything but blue-collar, though at least one of his parents definitely qualifies. His father Irwin, an Oklahoma native, was a research scientist for Texaco, an excellent golfer and an opera buff. His mother Rosanne Tyner's background was more hardscrabble — she was the daughter of a southern Illinois coal miner and a country music fanatic from birth, a love she instilled in her son. (As he put it in one song, “Daddy Made the Dollars, Mama Made the Sense.”)

Perhaps because of his mother, Supernaw always liked his country straight with no chaser. While most kids his age were into the rowdy sounds of country-rock fusionists like Charlie Daniels and Hank Williams Jr., he thrilled to the plaintive, cry-in-your-beer strains of pure honky-tonkers like Gene Watson, Vern Gosdin and George Jones.

Supernaw was born in Bryan and raised in the Inwood Forest section of northwest Houston. He attended Eisenhower High School and excelled in sports, particularly baseball and golf. In fact, his skills on the links were formidable enough to win him a golf scholarship to the University of St. Thomas in 1978.

Soon enough, he realized that his troublesome short game was barely up to the rigors of competitive college golf, much less the PGA tour he dreamed of joining. And in the classroom, the business major tuned out the droning professor in his economics class — instead, he found himself furiously filling his notebooks with song lyrics instead of lecture notes.