Maggie Mae Country, Down Home Country

Cooking Up Country: Maggie Mae's serving up a music career with a side of eggs Maggie Mae Hilliard sings during breakfast at her Maggie Mae's Cafe in Oxford Thursday morning. Hilliard said she performs about five times a week for the customers.

-- Craig Spychalla/Capital Newspapers

Maggie Mae Hilliard sings during breakfast at her Maggie Mae's Cafe in Oxford Thursday morning. Hilliard said she performs about five times a week for the customers.

By Craig Spychalla

Customers scraped the last of breakfast onto their forks while country music played in the background.
The wait staff was in a hurry, trying to get to everyone in a packed room decorated with chicken statues and horse pictures.
The cafe, in a town of only 536, was lively with the day's chatter.
And im an instant everyone stopped, and applause broke out.
It was more than the meal that made customers put down their breakfast weapons long enough to put their hands together.
Maggie Mae had just finished a song, and this crowd was grateful to hear live music at 9 in the morning.
"A little yodel song to scramble your eggs with this morning," Maggie said from a small stage in the corner of the restaurant she owns with her husband Roger Hilliard.
Requests are often shouted out at Maggie Mae's Cafe, and even the cooks and wait staff get in on the fun, wanting their boss to play "Take This Job and Shove It."
"In fact, they have been requesting that daily, lately," Maggie said with a smile.
"But she still won't play it," said manager Vicky Meister.
Maggie Mae is the breakfast star here, but her country music life has spread far from this small town in Marquette County. There are the local customers — the coffee guys and the boys at the BS table — as Maggie jokingly puts it. But many here come from faraway cities and states each morning to hear Maggie Mae.
"Sometimes we'll get the whole place singing 'Ring of Fire,' " she said.
Her selections range from Johnny Cash to Patsy Cline, but she will also slip in a yodel and a tune she wrote about former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who recently served time in the Federal Correctional Institution just down the road.
Home shopping
An old ice cream shop that had a laundromat attached to it was going to be Maggie's next venture in life.
Six years ago, she was going to turn part of the building into a restaurant.
"We had big plans of me waitressing and a cook, and we were going to wash dishes between customers," she said, taking a break from her morning concert.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner, along with daily specials and pies, was, and still is, the plan.
"I thought we'd last a year and then we would make it into a house," she said. "I was planning my bedroom over there."
Music, however, was never in the plans. Maggie's singing was limited to the kitchen, and she had never picked up a guitar.
But her music career would soon be born.
"I take credit for that," said her husband, Roger, who encouraged her to try singing in the restaurant.
Six months after the restaurant opened, Maggie found herself watching the Home Shopping Network late one night. Guitars were up for sale.
"I came into work the next day and I told the coffee guys at the table that I was thinking about buying a guitar," she said. "One of them, he was a truck driver, said, 'I got one in my truck right now.' "
The trucker brought in his guitar and played a couple of Hank Williams songs. After that, Maggie was hooked and purchased a guitar that day.
The only problem was, she couldn't play a lick.
In line at the bathroom
Maggie will be the first to tell you she is not a great guitar player, but she can strum.
Through a self-teaching book, she found the chords she was looking for and worked on her singing each night.
"I had such a passion for it I would stay up four hours a night learning how to strum a guitar."
In the first year of the restaurant, the building could only seat 30 and had no stage.
"When I started to sing — I was really shy, too — I would go to someone's table and say, 'Hey Joe, listen to this. I learned this Patsy Cline song,' " she said.
Soon, Maggie found a more permanent spot in the small cafe near the bathrooms.
"We knew we had to add an addition on, and we didn't want to get too big because we like the hometown atmosphere of a little restaurant," she said.
The seating area more than doubled, and Roger built a 6-foot stage in the corner. Maggie learned songs as she went along and her audience was growing.
"Entertaining is the last thing I thought we would be doing," Roger said.
The barn dance
About five miles down the road from the restaurant, Maggie and Roger live on a farm where he cash crops and also plays the role of soundman.
The couple married in 2004 and combined her four kids and his three into a large family.
But the Hilliard farm soon became a new stage for Maggie. She put on her first barn dance at the restaurant in a tent, and now they have six scheduled for this summer at a barn on their farm, with the first one of the season taking place this afternoon.
Crowds of about 500 to 600 people come to see Maggie Mae and Heartland Country, a group she created a few years back.
"In my music career, the biggest thing for me are these barn dances. If I never do anything else in my lifetime, this is the ultimate to me because all these people that come and have a genuinely good time and leave with smiles on their faces. So to me that's the highlight of my life," she said.
Customers also inquired whether Maggie had a CD they could buy, to which she would reply, "No, I have hats and T-shirts that no one's buying."
In a small studio in New Lisbon, Maggie Mae recorded her first CD, "Cooking Up Country," with the help of a Nashville producer she hired. Two more albums followed, and Maggie also tried taking another avenue with her voice — yodeling.
After listening to a song a hundred times and writing down the lyrics, she tried her new sound out on Roger.
"However, when I was learning, the kids kicked me out of the house because I was annoying," she said.
"I've been yodeling ever since."
The TV star
A book in the front of the cafe is filled with each day's customers. Minnesota, Michigan, South Dakota, the list reads with names attached to each — and that was just Wednesday's group.
Fans from as far away as Brazil have found this small cafe for a bite and a few songs. But it's far more than word of mouth that's bringing them in.
A fan who owned a few CDs of Maggie's was in the audience for the Midwest Country program in Sandstone, Minn., a year and a half ago. The TV show airs on satellite stations across the country, and Maggie's fan had forgotten her purse when she left. The theater found it, and listened to the CDs inside.
"The next thing I know I got on the TV show, and so (now) I'm a regular performer on there and I appear on television once a month." She will next be making the four-hour drive for a May 17 performance.
Maggie also airs a commercial during the program inviting people to come to Oxford.
"Every single day I have people from different cities and states that come to Oxford and meet Maggie Mae and see where our cafe is," she said. "The next thing you know they are coming to our barn dances."
But it's the locals and her staff Maggie credits for keeping it going.
"The only way we really can keep it going is the good help and friends at the restaurant here," she said.
"There's a lot of local support as far as my daily customers. I always call them the boys at the BS table. They show up rain or snow, or snow, or snow, or snow."
Nancy and Felix Gomez of Oxford said they've been coming to the cafe for about five years and like the hospitality and singing.
"And the food's delicious," he said.
The cafe is half diner, half social gathering where everyone is a friend. It's one of the few places you may enter in the morning where people are lively, talkative and have no problem giving a shout out to Maggie on stage.
The customers also like to play practical jokes. Maggie said a few days ago someone put a Roy Rogers life-size cutout in the restaurant which she discovered at 5:30 in the morning. There were reports of a shady character hanging around the place and she was going to catch him.
As she put coffee on and opened the front door, light hit the figure that portrays Rogers with guns out.
"It looked like someone was standing there robbing me. I screamed out loud," she said.
Welcome, governor
When former Illinois Gov. George Ryan was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for corruption, to be served in Oxford, the town drew media attention from Chicago.
Reporters from the Chicago Tribune stopped to eat at the cafe, waiting for the ex-governor's arrival. They informed Maggie who the governor was and why he was coming to Oxford.
"Maybe I'll have to write a song about him and make him famous in these parts," she told them.
While she thought it was tongue-in-cheek, her song idea appeared in their story and quickly spread around to other Chicago media.
A radio station called and invited Maggie to come to Chicago and sing it on their show. But in reality, there was no song. So she spent the weekend crafting "The George Ryan Song" and preformed it that Monday.
"It was kind of a comical song that pokes fun at wrongdoings in politics," she said.
"It was a good one."
Maggie doesn't use a set list when she sings each morning. Instead, she opts for suggestions and what she feels like singing that day. Many of the songs are covers, but a few are original tunes.
"She keeps saying she has to do jail time before she (writes) a good country western song," Roger said.
Maggie recently finished a Christmas album in Nashville that's due out this week. And she will open for Bucky Covington and Billy Ray Cyrus at the Poterfield Country Music Festival near Marinette on June 21.
But if she had never picked up a guitar, Maggie believes the cafe would still be a success because she enjoys people.
"I'm just going along on this ride for as long as it lasts, and I truly enjoy what I'm doing," she said. "It seems like the more we just keep going on, positive things happen. If it all ended tomorrow, I just wanted to do these barn dances."
If you go
Who: Maggie Mae
Where: Maggie Mae's Cafe, W8464 State Road 82, Oxford.
When: Sunday through Wednesday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., Thursday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Friday fish until 8 p.m.) Maggie plays about five times a week, call ahead to see if she will be performing.
Call: (608) 586-4881.