King of Country

Bobby Lee Butler has the gift of country music. Given an old guitar, his fingers soon learn to summon forth the music, sweet and lonely. Bobby Lee's talent carries him from Montgomery (where he lands a singing job on a local radion station) to Nashville (where the Grand Ole Opry is just a stepping stone to a career on national radio, television, and stunning record sales). He is loved by women wherever they can find him, while his wife and children would love just to see him. Fast-lane living becomes the challenge to Bobby Lee's intrinsic, simple gifts, the source of his power. Greenhaw captures the grit and glamour of country music - with its roots in the rural churches and on the porches of simple frame houses to the glitzy extreme of Lear jets and limousines belonging to the pampered stars. Imagine Robert Altman's film Nashville boiled down to the essence of a single character arc, and you have the treatment Wayne Greenhaw gives Bobby Lee Butler's crowded, crazy thirty-four year life - a classic, triumphant tale of success behind the bright lights, a shocking look at show business and celebrityhood, love ambition, and survival in tabloid-saturated America.