The Most Interesting Man In Walker County

Words and Images by Terrell Manasco

He once parallel parked a train. If opportunity knocks and he's not at home, opportunity waits. He can lead a horse to water and it will always drink. Mosquitos refuse to bite him, purely out of respect. The name stenciled on his shirt reads Wayne, and he may be The Most Interesting Man In Walker County.

You’ve seen him tooling around downtown Jasper in a Gator four-wheeler. Big straw hat, sky blue shirt, curly blonde hair and beard. That’s him. Wayne Sears is the kind of guy that within five minutes of listening to him, you know he has some great stories to tell. He’s the guy you love to sit across from in a Waffle House or coffee shop, trading jokes and stories for hours, and he never runs out of good stories.

Wayne arrived in Cullman, Alabama on June 8, 1945, the oldest of four children. As a boy growing up in Tarrant City, he fell in love with music at an early age.

“See, I was always into music,” Wayne shrugs. It’s his day off and he’s dressed in a blue checked shirt and jeans, sans straw hat, reading glasses case clipped inside a breast pocket. “Mother sang with her sister on the radio up in Cullman when she was a little bitty girl, so music was always around me. My dad could sing a harmony part and he played the guitar. He wasn’t a picker but he’d strum the chords. Him and Mama would sing old country songs, like Hank Williams and Webb Pierce, and old church songs. I would sneak in the dining room where they were sitting at the table singing. You had to go by there to go to the bathroom. I’d sneak back in under the table and hide, and if I’d be real quiet, they weren’t aware I was there, so I’d sit under there and listen, and I loved it. I was exposed to that, I wanted to do that.”

His parents divorced when Wayne was 12, leaving behind a cloud as black as the devil’s basement. One day Wayne discovered a silver lining. “I found an old guitar that he had left there,” he explains. “The back of it was busted and it didn’t have the four strings on the bottom, which was okay with me. When I started learning to play, I was up on the top strings playing bass. I know the major, minor and seventh chords, so I can accompany myself on old-timey church songs.”

Following his ninth grade year at Tarrant High School, Wayne’s family moved to Birmingham. He attended one year at Phillips, which he admits was an eye-opening experience. “Phillips was a huge school,” Wayne says. “You knew who everybody was in Tarrant. It was a culture shock when I got to Phillips,” he chuckles.

By the time Wayne turned 18, his family was living in St. Clair County. Not satisfied with the status quo, Wayne made a fateful decision. “I snuck out one night and left home,” he says. “I wanted to get out of that little town and do something. You know, when you think you’re grown?”

The next day he made it to Warner-Robbins, Georgia, where a buddy worked for a structural steel company. “Everybody calls them Butler buildings. I worked with them a little while. I didn’t like it a whole lot. I just had to have a job,” he says.

After that job, Wayne “bummed around” for a bit, but soon returned to Birmingham. “There was a place where I had been hanging out on the weekends with friends when I lived there, and we would end up at their house, sitting around playing guitars and singing, and people would call the cops and they’d come make us shut up, that kind of stuff.”

Being unable to afford more than his dad’s old beat-up guitar had Wayne singing the blues. “I was feeling sorry for myself and a good buddy of mine gave me a hollow body Harmony bass,” Wayne says. “Name was Orville Harrison. Monster bass player. Great guy. He had taken it apart and sanded it down until it looked like plywood. He put it back together and said, ‘You take this thing and go with it.’ I still have it.”

In 1967, with only a few gigs under his belt, Wayne began playing clubs on weekends with a group called The Robertson Brothers. “They were from Nashville and they were good. I was the baby,” Wayne says, stressing the first “b.” “I was just a green pea, you know, so all I would do was utilize my sense of rhythm. I learned how to play stuff that I didn’t know.” His method of learning new songs was quite unique. “I learned how to... just ‘jump’, ” Wayne says. “If I hit the wrong chord, I’d jump off it real quick to something else. That helped me immensely.”

For several years, Wayne played in various bands to packed clubs all over the Magic City. “But all the time, see, I wasn’t a heathern,” he says in a self-deprecating tone. “I was playing in bars, I drank too much for a little while, but I wasn’t a heathen. I was raised right, I just wasn’t living right. I never would stay in a band where they were heathens. I just wasn’t comfortable with that. I was playing six nights a week, and that went on for 20 years.”

By the late seventies it was becoming harder to book live gigs, due in part to the increasing price of alcohol and the popularity of disco music. Then came the coup de grace: karaoke. “You could get one guy doing karaoke for a hundred and ten bucks,” Wayne says.

The year 1979 could be called When Wayne Met ‘Baby’. At that time he was working three jobs, rarely sleeping, and imbibing often. “I was as crazy as anybody you’ve ever known, at that time,” Wayne admits. “I was drinking way too much.”

One night Wayne walked into a Shoney’s near the VFW he was playing in West End. There he met a young waitress named Robbin, who was trying to get back home to Miami. “We started talking and I took her out a time or two,” he says. “Me and ‘Baby’ (his pet name for Robbin) have been together since ‘79.”

But his fast living began to take its toll on Wayne. He wrecked his 1970 Mercury Comet twice, both times escaping serious injury, but he wasn’t ready to give up that lifestyle. Robbin, however, knew there was something much better out there. “We’d sit and watch them ol’ Bill Gaither shows,” Wayne says. “Baby would say, (pretends to cry) ‘Wayne, you see that? I want what they got.’ I was very resistant in the beginning because I knew what that would call for. You can’t serve two masters. I didn’t want to talk about it so I’d put it off. I wasn’t a heathen. I had went to church when I was little boy. I knew what I was supposed to have been. I was just out there making moneeeeeey and having fun, you know?”

Then Robbin lost her grandmother in 1998. A month later her father passed away. Both funerals were held at a church in Carbon Hill. Wayne was especially impressed by the minister, John Billy Butler. “I told her, ‘I really like that preacher. If we lived closer, I’d go to a church like that.’”

A few months later they purchased an affordable home in Jasper. Wayne kept his promise and they attended that church for 17 years. “Don’t make a bargain with God. He’ll call your bluff,” Wayne chuckles.
Robbin (“Baby”), his wife of 33 years is now manager of Warehouse 319. Wayne has worked for the City of Jasper for the past five years, driving the Gator around town, watering the plants. Now he keeps the streets clear of trash. “My business is picking up,” he says, ever the jokester.

On Sundays you can find them both at the Church of God of Prophecy on Airport Road, where Wayne plays bass on the Praise Team. “I feel so blessed,” he says. He prefers the old hymns, what he calls “blue book songs.” “The bottom line is, we need to be preaching the cross and Jesus,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve been, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, where you come from; Jesus Christ is the answer to all of it.”

After all, he’s not a heathern. 78