Growing up in the rural working class community of Tillamook, Oregon, with Merle Haggard fans for parents, perhaps it was inevitable that Jerry Kilgore would hear the call of country music early on. Kilgore’s grandmother gave him his first guitar when he was just twelve years old, but it was an experience when he was eighteen that changed the course of his life. “Back in 1986, I went to see George Strait at a huge honky tonk called the Flower Drum,” Jerry recalls.