After 15 years of slavery to a disease called alcoholism, Scott Garrison tried the only thing that he hadn’t tried before….a relationship with Jesus Christ. As a child, Scott lived next door to what was then called “the town drunk”, an old man who would stagger daily to the local liquor store and crawl back home…sometimes stopping in his front yard to vomit once or twice before making it to the door. Scott, only four years old at the time, remembers vividly telling his mother that he would never become like that. Little did he know, at the age of 21, he would take his first drink of alcohol and spend the next fifteen years trying to quit.

But back at the semi-innocent age of four, Scott was beginning to show quite an interest for music which would usually be demonstrated by standing on the kitchen table strumming the broom like a guitar and singing along with Johnny Cash, “I went down, down, down to a burning ring of fire”. Thinking that it would be cute, his parents bought him a toy guitar with plastic strings which Scott actually learned how to play several melody lines on rather quickly. Seeing Scott’s true interest in music, his dad bought him his first guitar, a 1958 Gibson Les Paul Junior. It was just the right size for Scott’s little fingers. “Daddy taught me the four chords that he knew at the time, and I took it from there.” Playing sometimes until his fingers would actually bleed, Scott began the journey of what would later become his destiny.

When Scott was around ten years old, he had become quite good on the guitar and began showing an interest in keyboards. When his mom would go shopping at the Kress’ 5 and 10 store, Scott would go downstairs to the toy department and play on a little toy organ where he was able to learn several songs from a color chart. (The keys had colored dots on them, and the chart would show the dots in the order that they were to be played to create the melody line of a song). He learned to play “Jingle Bells” by playing: blue, blue, blue…..blue, blue, blue... blue, green, yellow, red, blue. There was definitely a draw back to learning how to play this way, as it would take him over twenty years to make sense of a simple chord chart! However, his ears were becoming remarkably in tune to the many nuances that create music.