Maggie Mae Country, Down Home Country

Maggie Mae’s Songs Come From Rural Roots

Thursday, January 21, 2010 5:44 PM CST



Maggie Mae Hilliard is singing and strumming her way into the hearts of country music lovers throughout the Midwest and beyond. A natural talent, who wouldn’t even sing a solo with her high school choir, this cash-grain producer’s wife was “discovered” by her husband, Roger Hilliard (featured this week on Agri-View’s front page). Roger noticed folks in the country café they own at Oxford would pause in their meals to listen to her singing in the kitchen to the radio.

Maggie Mae (a childhood nickname that’s stuck) was nudged by Roger to sing to their café customers. “I didn’t think I could sing!” says a farm woman/entertainer whose trademark is her cowboy hats and western duds. Then she happened to mention to “the boys at the round table” she was toying with the idea of buying a guitar. Roger affectionately calls the regulars who gather for coffee and opinion sharing at the same table “the BS table.” “For big spenders,” he quips with a grin.

A truck driving customer said he just happened to have one in the truck. He brought it in and strummed some old Hank Williams songs. Maggie Mae went home and purchased a Martin guitar that very same day. She’d teach herself to play. That was in 2002. Today, her guitar carries the signatures of some pretty famous folks in country music, who she’s met in the course of her rapidly accelerating musical career.

“She has a natural ability,” says Roger, a past Wisconsin Corn Growers president who grows corn, soybeans and corn on a farm that straddles the Marquette and Adams county line. It wasn’t long before his wife was wowing customers at Maggie Mae’s Country Café with her songs. She’d go home and learn a new song at night and sit at somebody’s table the next day and sing it to them. People started asking if she had a CD they could buy. In 2003, the Hilliards contacted a Nashville producer and she made her first CD, “Cooking Up Country.” (Today, her songs are being played on multiple country radio stations.)

Understandably, business picked up at their Oxford café. They added on, doubling the capacity, and Roger built a little stage for his wife in one corner where she could sing and strum. In 2004, Maggie Mae came out with a second CD, “Serving Up Seconds.”

What catapulted her career to another level in 2004, however, is landing a spot on the Midwest Country, a show on RFD-TV that airs Saturday nights at 7:30 p.m. and is broadcast literally all over the world by satellite. So popular was her performance that she’s a “regular” on that show once a month. Maggie Mae travels 4 1/2 hours to Sandstone, Minn. to perform on this show that’s taped before a theater audience.

Suddenly, says Roger, people from “across the whole country” are coming to their little local café to meet Maggie Mae. Farmers from Canada, Pennsylvania and other places, who’ve never taken a trip in their life, are deciding to make their first trip off the farm to “find Maggie Mae,” he says.

Now, during the peak vacation season in the summer, when Maggie Mae is singing in the corner of the café, she’ll ask, “Who’s new here?” A dozen hands will go up. Guests tell her, “You invited us,” and indeed she did, on a commercial they air on RFD-TV. People will drive five hours -n from a state away n- just to eat at Maggie Mae’s Country Café, and turn around and head home again. A guestbook in the café entryway had signatures of thousands of fans and customers. (Maggie Mae promotes Marquette County tourism on the RFD station.)

Altogether, Maggie Mae has made five CDs, the last three recorded in Nashville on “music row.” Now she’s also writing original songs on her CDs, like “Old-Time Christmas Barn Dance,” and “Maggie Mae’s Café,” which is about their rural Wisconsin restaurant.

Her three latest are: “Company’s Comin’,” “Maggie Mae’s Country Christmas” and “From the Heart of A Cowgirl.” Roger says his wife’s style “hits home to rural people.” Those old Hank Williams-type songs went deep in their souls. Maggie Mae enjoys performing and “warming the heart of the listener.” Her style is “really rural America,” she adds.

Maggie Mae herself remembers Hank Williams, Eddie Arnold, Ray Price and other artists of that day playing on the barn radio back home on the farm when they were milking. And she grins that she and her nine siblings would change it to rock and roll at the first opportunity. Yet when she heard that truck driver strum Hank Williams years later, she fell in love with country music on the spot. (Maggie Mae’s parents, Hugh and Irene Kenworthy, are retired dairy producers, having milked cows in the Tomah area.)

The Hilliards started staging concerts at their restaurant in the summers that draw 200-some Maggie Mae fans. Then it dawned on Roger they had a big old dairy barn they weren’t using (he used to milk cows way back when). He cleaned out the upstairs and uncovered a “good dance floor.” Handy, Roger fixed up the 8,000-square-foot barn and built a stage for his wife and her six-piece band, Heartland Country. They now hold eight barn dances a year for the public at their farm. At first, the older generation turned out, but it wasn’t long before they were returning with children and grandkids, so they could experience an old-fashioned rollicking barn dance like they used to enjoy as children. One guest, in fact, told Roger that she’s traveled all over the world, but their barn dance was the most fun thing she’d ever done.

In 2007, Chicago farm broadcaster Orion Samuelson, who also has a show on RFD-TV, visited Hilliards’ farm when they hosted the 30-year anniversary of the Juneau, Adams and Marquette Corn Growers (JAM). Over 1,200 people came to that barn dance. Brothers Ken and Dick Huber, farmers from Oxford, brought their antique tractors and Wendall Foote had an antique steam engine on site and they steamed sweet corn.

Two years ago, Maggie Mae decided she was going to learn how to yodel n country-style. “I was out on the combine until 10 at night,” Roger recalls of his wife spending the day teaching herself to “cowboy yodel.” By the time he got into the house, she could do it. There is a couple yodeling songs on her newer CDs. It’s a “big crowd pleaser,” says her proud hubby.

Maggie Mae has “cowboy” in her. She enjoys riding her horses on their farm. Roger, on the other hand, says if horsepower doesn’t come with a key switch and steering wheel, he isn’t interested.

Last year, the Hilliards decided to rent “opry houses” and put on live Christmas shows. They sold out at the Viroqua Temple Theater as well as at the Al Ringling Theater in Baraboo, which seats 800. Maggie Mae also performed at the Performing Arts Center in Fond du Lac and the Mooney Hollow barn theater south of Dubuque, Iowa. This year, after seeing what a “treasure” some of those historical facilities are, Maggie Mae and her band will do an “opry house tour” around the Midwest. She’s also been asked to come to Branson, Mo. in November to the RFD theater that seats over 2,000 (the old Ray Stevens theater, one of the biggest in Branson) for a Christmas show. The Hilliards are very excited about that!

They’re also inviting bus tours for dinner shows, catered by their café, to come out to the farm.

Maggie Mae’s guitar carries signatures like: Gretchen Wilson, Phil Vasse, Doug Stone (with whom she’s sung a duet), Stonewall Jackson, Jan Howard, Charlie Louvin, David Church and the Riders in the Sky. Maggie Mae sang Silver Bells with “Ranger Doug” during the Riders in the Sky Christmas show at Stoughton. She has, in fact, got to sing with those yodeling cowboys several times. Her guitar is also signed by Orion Samuelson and her dad, Hugh Kenworthy, of whom she says with all sincerity, “Both of whom would have made great presidents.”

Learn more about Maggie Mae on her website at maggiemaecountry.com, or visit her café on Highway 82 west of Oxford. If you’re planning a trip, call the week before to see when she’ll be at the café (608-586-4881).