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From the Country Music Hall of Fame on Fifth Avenue to hundreds of country artists and celebrities that gather each week at the CMA Music Festival, there is no doubt that Nashville is the capital of country music.

The region is also home to many country music musicians, who conveniently live near the recording studios, music clubs and honky tonk bars. But despite the city serving as the new home for these musicians, they all have their roots - many which still remain close at heart.

While living in the Nashville area, Diamond Rio member Gene Johnson is hundreds of miles from his hometown of Sugar Grove, Pa., but that doesn't mean he has forgotten where he came from.

"If you spend any amount of time where you are born, it always is going to be home to you," he says. "It doesn't make much difference where you go or what you do afterward. I live in Nashville, I have for many years now, but Sugar Grove is still my home as far as how I feel about it. People talk about home to me, and that's where I think of."

Sugar Grove, which is located about 10 miles south of downtown Jamestown, is a small rural community just across the Pennsylvania state line. On a small farm on Big Tree Road during the 1950s, the region is where Johnson's life - and music career - began.

THE YOUNG MUSICIAN

Like many classic country musicians, Johnson was born into a family who loved music; bluegrass music and square dancing in particular. His father was a square dance fiddler and caller, and Johnson's brothers and sister also joined in to create an entire musical family. Not too long after he learned how to walk, Johnson began playing music.

"It was just a natural thing to do," he says. "I fell into it because they left instruments laying around where I could get my hands on them. I was allowed to play the mandolin. It was a really small instrument, and obviously at four-years-old I wasn't very big."

He would join the family at local square dances, and recalls an old schoolhouse on Wellman Road just off from Kortwright Road that would host square dances on Friday or Saturday night.

When they weren't there, they were have square dances at Johnson's uncle's house.

"Different venues like that we played in," says Johnson. "None of which were what we would consider much of a venue today. We were just looking for a place big enough where you could actually square dance in it."

That was growing up in the Johnson household, and playing music didn't end for Gene or his siblings when they left the home.

THE FIRST GIGS

Gene's older brothers, Dick and Fred, left for higher education at Ithaca College when Gene was still at home. They became fascinated with bluegrass music, and when Gene visited his brothers in the late 50s, he would be introduced to three people who would change his life - a pair of bluegrass brothers named Bill and Dick Smith and Bill's daughter, June, who he would marry about 13 years later.

Within a few years, Bill and Dick moved to Sugar Grove and put Gene to work, despite being only 13-years-old, at local clubs in the area. He still played mandolin, but also played bass when needed and was learning he was a quality tenor singer as well. During the next few years, he would find himself playing at clubs around the region and at various bluegrass festivals. Then came the opportunity to take his music career to the next level.

"In late '70 or early '71, I received an offer from a professional bluegrass band in the D.C. area," explains Johnson. "I had friends in bluegrass from going to all the festivals and stuff. Back in the late-60's the festivals weren't nearly the size they are now. I got to know a lot of the professional musicians just from being a picker and going to these things and having the opportunity to meet and talk with them."

During the next 15 years, Johnson would play the role in the story of a musician trying to be at the right place at the right time, with the right people. He stayed in D.C. while visiting family in Sugar Grove as often as possible. He proposed to June in Sugar Grove and visited her as often as he could. But in the late '70s, his music career was just keeping the family above water, so he moved back to where he was from.

"I had a house on Sanbury Road just in Busti that I rented," says Johnson. "I had a day job working for a guy who remodeled housing. He bought old housing in Jamestown and we would go remodel - update electric and plumbing and that kind of stuff. I worked for him during the day and played music at night."

MOVING TO NASHVILLE

Johnson learned that the best path toward making a career out of music was to be where the music was. For a bluegrass musician, that place was Tennessee. During the '80s, he would receive calls from friends from a former band mate named Keith Whitley, who had moved to Nashville and found success.

"He would continue to call me on the phone every month or so to see what I was doing," says Johnson. "He would call me and always encourage me to move to Nashville. He kept telling me I could make it there and all that stuff, which I had a little trouble believing."

To check out the city, Gene and June went down to Nashville and stayed with some friends. June was offered a job, making it even more possible that they could move there. Not dependent on Gene's music career immediately taking off, the family moved to Nashville.

"When I had moved to Nashville several people told me just settle in and hang on, it usually takes about five years once you move to town before things really break for you," says Johnson. Sometime in 1987, that break came.

While Gene was out playing on the road, Jimmy Olander, who is now the lead guitarist for Diamond Rio, called the house and expressed interest in Gene joining the band, which was then called the Tennessee River Boys. Gene explains that he thought it was another bluegrass band - the name certainly sounded like one - so he didn't hurry to call him back. Then, June took another message from Olander when he called again.

"After the second time, I called him back and I went over and met with the guys," says Johnson. "We sat and played for a little bit and so, in 1987, I became a member of the Tennessee River Boys, which would later on - with one more member - become Diamond Rio."

SMALL TOWN ROOTS

Diamond Rio has created an impressive resume for the band's six members, which started with becoming the first country music group in history to reach number one the Billboard country chart with a debut single. The song "Meet in the Middle," was the first of 32 more charted singles for the band, including four more chart-toppers.

Diamond Rio also received the award for Top Vocal Group in 1991 and 1992 from the Academy of Country Music, and was named Vocal Group of the Year by the Country Music Association four times in the mid-90s. The band has also received 13 Grammy Award nominations.

Despite the success in Nashville, Johnson still remembers his roots in Sugar Grove. His sister, who was the last family member to live in the area, moved to Titusville last year, but that doesn't mean Johnson doesn't still call the region his home.

"It's always wonderful just to come back," he says, adding that he owns 52-acres of woodland on Big Tree Road and a five-acre orchard he planted with his father when he was a boy. "If it all possible I try and spend a little time when I am up there and personally get around and try and visit some of my old neighbors and stuff that you just don't have the opportunity to see."

Now, he remembers the time when everybody knew everybody when he grew up. He remembers being "one of them Johnson boys" when he was a kid, and remembering how tight-knit of a community the Sugar Grove area was.

"You could literally walk on in their screen door in the kitchen and holler, 'is anybody home?'" Johnson remembers. "We didn't have a lock on our house. It isn't that we didn't lock it, there was no lock to lock. Obviously that was a different time, it's not the same now.

"All the neighbors used to come to ths square dance as kids," he continues. "Some of that is a product of the time and some of it is the product of bring raised in the Sugar Grove area."

From playing the mandolin in front of square dancers at the age of four to playing in front of thousands of people at a concert 50 years later, it doesn't look like Gene Johnson will be forgetting his roots anytime soon.