Editor’s Note: The full story appears in the Sept./Oct. issue of South Carolina Wildlife.
I went to Georgia’s geographic center, Dry Branch, Georgia, to visit rock legend Chuck Leavell and his wife, Rose Lane.
They live on a beautiful plantation nestled among pines and hardwoods—when they’re not touring with the Rolling Stones.
The Stones’ “band mother,” Rose Lane helps with wardrobe, makeup, and negotiating the enormous stages they play.
She worked at legendary Capricorn Records, a studio synonymous with Southern rock, and met Chuck there.
He came to fame playing the rollicking piano feature in “Jessica,” an Allman Brothers classic.
His keyboard work would go on to grace the works of Eric Clapton, the Black Crowes, George Harrison, David Gilmour, Lee Ann Womack and others.
While I was with Chuck and Rose Lane, he sat down at his Grand Piano.
“Chuck,” I said, “You know I love ‘Jessica.’”
“Ok, here we go,” he said, launching into the song that brought him fame. Live and in person as they say.
For 38 years Chuck has played keyboards and served as musical director for the Rolling Stones. Back home he plays with his German shorthair pointer, Babe.
“My passion for hunting,” said Chuck, “is upland game.”
Rose Lane is a tough, independent Southern woman. “Daddy taught me to hammer a nail in a tree and to shoot straight,” she said.
Their farmhouse, The Home Place, circa 1870. Rose Lane and Chuck, stewards of those 4,000 acres, manage their plantation as a hunting preserve and sustainable forestland.
You’ll find native grasses, weeds, and legumes here, and you’ll find a piano-playing, tree farmer conservationist. Said Mick Jagger, “Chuck loves trees.” Consider Chuck Leavell the world’s most recognizable tree farmer.
“We have a good wild quail population,” said Chuck. “I love whistling them up and hearing them answer. We’ve been grooming this place for 35 years now.
“It takes a long time to get the habitat correct with the right diversity and density of wild grasses, legumes, and weeds. You have to keep an eye on predation. Everything is out to get that little bird.”
Chuck studied forestry by correspondence while riding a tour bus with the Fabulous Thunderbirds in the mid 1980s. He and Rose Lane turned their plantation into a textbook tree farm.
Not long ago, Chuck and Rose Lane visited Moncks Corner to film an episode of “America’s Forests With Chuck Leavell.” While in Moncks Corner, Chuck accompanied the choir on piano at a local church.
Chuck wrote Forever Green: The History and Hope of the American Forest because he wanted to help people better understand forestry.
“I also wanted folks to know about the Cradle of Forestry in America in Asheville. Young people are the future, so, I did The Tree Farmer, about a grandson who visits his grandfather’s tree farm for the first time. The grandfather shows him what he does as a steward of the forest.”
Chuck’s recent book, Growing a Better America, “arose from the concern that we have, what, 327 million people in our country now.
How do we go forward and continue to see the growth in the population and not do too much damage to the land?” Something to think about.
Part 2 covers Chuck’s conservation efforts and music.