Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 7:33 am
But their kids can be worse. A little background history here...It's 1950 and my uncle Wayne's got a wife and 8 kids and working as a mechanic while writing songs at night in a little shack in the back of where he lives. Every time my grandmother(his sister) goes over there, she's stepping over kids and trying to help out any way she can. This usually meant buying shoes for the kids or giving her brother a ten spot to buy food. So Wayne comes to my grandma one day asking her to borrow $500.00 to cut a demo of a couple of his songs. My grandfather says no but my grandma talks him into it 'cause Wayne's gonna cut her in for 2% of the royalties for life. Well he got signed almost immediately and things started happening for Wayne from then till the mid 60's when he started becoming an eccentric recluse. Every time one of his songs would come on the radio, my grandma would go "cha-ching". So now it's 1981, my grandma's been getting royalty checks for thirty years, and she gets legal papers from Wayne's remaining children suing my grandmother for her cut of the royalties. Not wanting to fight with the family, she signed over her royalties and never received another penny.