Before the Spotlight: Three Country Stars Who Had Truly Awful Jobs

Every country star has a story about paying dues. Most of those stories involve bad gigs, empty venues, and living off gas station food on a tour van that smells like boot leather. But these three took the pre-fame struggle to a whole other level. Here are three country stars whose jobs before music were genuinely, memorably, impressively terrible.

Cody Johnson: Prison Guard by Day, Bar Singer by Night

Cody Johnson grew up in Huntsville, Texas, and at eighteen began work as a prison guard at the John Wynne Unit, a maximum-security men's prison. This was not random. "When you grow up in a small town like Huntsville, you do what Daddy did," Johnson said. "My dad worked for the prison system for 32 years. It was a steady paycheck and there was always a job there. You grow up quickly when you're eighteen and working in the prison system."

Johnson worked in intake first, then moved to a sexual offender treatment program unit, and eventually worked in maximum security, even serving as a field boss on horseback. He was playing bar gigs the whole time, trying to balance two very different worlds. Eventually, the person who pushed him out the door was the last one anyone expected. "The warden that I was working for actually encouraged me to go quit. He said, 'You know, you can always come back. There's never going to be a shortage of people going to prison, and there's never going to be a shortage of the need for people to guard them. So go chase your dream.'"

His wife Brandi quit college and took two jobs so he could go out on the road, and they did not make money for the first five years. Today, he still occasionally meets up with former inmates for a beer. "Generally we'll just have a beer and be like, 'Man, this is awkward,'" he said with a laugh. Read Cody's full bio.

Reba McEntire: The Queen of Country Used to Hold the Tail

Reba McEntire grew up on an 8,000-acre cattle ranch in Chockie, Oklahoma, where her father was a three-time world champion steer roper and ranch work was simply what the family did. Every family member contributed to running the cattle operation, and the McEntire children helped with ranch chores before and after school. This included castrating bulls and giving them worm medicine. In interviews, Reba has been clear about her role in that particular operation. She held the tail while her father handled the rest. It is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds.

She began riding horses at age three, and by seven she was gathering cattle from before daylight until after dark. In college at Southeastern Oklahoma State, she loaded thirty 50-pound sacks of feed into a truck every other day and drove out to the ranch to feed her daddy's steers to help pay her tuition. She never lost a steer in three and a half years. The woman is relentless. Eventually, country music got the best of her, and the rest is history with three Grammys and a Kennedy Center Honor to show for it. Get all the details on Reba here.

Dierks Bentley: What Goes In Must Come Out

This one wins. It is not close. During a summer working at Arizona's Lake Powell, Dierks Bentley had to clean 250-gallon portable toilets from returning rental houseboats. "It usually had a week's worth of stuff in there from the 10 to 12 houseboat guests," Bentley said. Those houseboats had been out on the lake for a week in the Arizona desert heat. You can imagine what was waiting when they came back to the dock.

The machinery used to empty these tanks was old and unreliable, which brings us to the moment that has lived in country music infamy ever since. The machine had a tendency to backfire, which would cause the hose and all its contents to shoot straight into the air. "I tried to outrun the rain," Bentley said. "Got nailed."

He got nailed. In the Arizona sun. On a houseboat dock. By a machine full of week-old waste from twelve tourists. And then he moved to Nashville, landed a job doing research at The Nashville Network, started gigging at night, and eventually became one of country music's most beloved artists with fourteen number one hits to his name. The arc from that Lake Powell dock to headlining arenas is genuinely one of the great stories in the genre.

Every single one of these three deserved to make it. They earned it in more ways than one.