One of the biggest hits for Alabama was a Bob McDill song called “Song Of The South.” For newcomer Jacob Lyda----who grew up across the mountains from Fort Payne in extreme northeast Alabama, the lyrics of the song ring very much true---especially the lyrics ‘Daddy got a job with the TVA!”  That’s exactly where his father worked---and his father before him.

“He worked for the TVA,” Lyda recalls, “but that’s the way we all grew up around that area. You don’t have many choices about where to work. He retired from the TVA, my Paw-Paw retired from the TVA, and I never could get a job there or I’d be there today,” he says. “It’s just a small-knit community. The Tennessee River runs through it, and Sand Mountain up there, a lot about that song rings true. I never really thought about it, because it was just everyday life for us.”

Country Music was also a part of life in the Lyda household. You can tell that by the way he talks. “I’m from Alabama,” he says with pride, “and I just happen to talk like I’m from the South. Every time I go up to a McDonalds or somewhere up north, it takes me a while to get an order in because they want to hear me talk. But that’s cool, you know.

I’m in the very tip---almost in Georgia, almost in Tennessee---right across the mountain from Fort Payne. I live at the foot of Sand Mountain.”

Jacob remembers listening to the legends growing up. “My daddy loved George Jones, so I grew up listening to him, Merle Haggard, Don Williams, and we had some local guys in town. Anybody who had talent, and could sing real good, I was a sucker for.”

Though he loved music---and the artists that made it, he admits that there wasn’t the deep burning desire to become an artist---at first. “I didn’t set out with the mindset of ‘Hey, I want to be a singer.’ I tried quitting it. I tried getting good jobs because I thought the music thing was a crazy dream. Real people don’t do this. It just seemed that every time I would try to give it up, something would happen to keep pushing me forward, and I would get back into it. It’s like it was effortless, and I don’t mean that in a bragging way. I just think it chose me.”

Lyda’s current single, “I’m Doin Alright,” (Listen) has been quickly finding favor with fans and programmers alike since its’ release by Davis Music Group. Lyda says that writing the cut is something that he won’t be forgetting anytime soon. “It’s a song that Paul Overstreet and I wrote. He’s helped a lot of careers over the years, and it was a real honor for me to write with him. We just hit it off right off the bat. He’s such a great writer.

Overstreet paid the young performer the highest of compliments later that day. “The first time I wrote with him, I got a phone call that evening. He was on the line, saying, ‘Hey, Jacob! I just enjoyed it so much today. I’d like to make this a regular thing. You’re a great writer.’ I asked him ‘Are you kidding me?’ That was Paul Overstreet saying that to me. It just really fired me up. I respect him so much. I’d ask him for stories on how he’d written this song or the other, and he’d tell me. I was just like a kid in a candy store.”

Jacob says that another place that gives him that feeling is playing the Grand Ole Opry. “I hadn’t got to play there yet, but it means so much to me. I had a friend named Tim Atwood, who was a staff player on the Opry, and when I was doing ‘Lunch With The Legends,’ a show at the Palace, he’d ask me if I wanted to come backstage. I remember when I got really, really down, and start thinking that it was never going to happen. I had to hold my finger up to see if my career was moving----that’s how slow it was going.”

The scenes he would see backstage were mesmerizing.  “I would stand back there, and people like Alan Jackson and Porter Wagoner would walk by me---all these stars. I would just watch them go out, and the crowd would go nuts. That would charge my batteries. That place saved me. I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t.”

Lyda’s debut disc, ANOTHER SONG I JUST HAD TO WRITE, will be in stores this fall, and though his music definitely falls down the traditional line, he admits that he doesn’t want to be categorized. “Basically, think there’s two kinds of music----good and bad!”

For more on Jacob, log on to www.JacobLyda.com