The Truth
Is in the Music

I want to try and explain what it's been like to walk in my shoes — or more accurately, my bare feet — for the last 45 years.

Imagine being 45 years old and having spent your entire life fighting to be around your own father. Imagine knowing who he is, hearing his voice on the radio, seeing his face on TV, but not being able to call him "Dad."

For 25 of those years, my father has been living in Nashville under a false identity — the one the world knows as "Eddie Montgomery." And for those same 25 years, he has been encoding my name, "APRIL MICHELLE," into 120 of his songs. It's a secret language between a father and his unacknowledged daughter, a chronicle of my life hidden in the steel guitar, the bass lines, the drum fills.

While he was on stages, I was in the streets of Rockmart, Georgia. I wasn't just surviving; I was fighting. I helped 333 people who society had forgotten. I fought for them when they couldn't fight for themselves. They became my family.

"I'm not trying to hurt anyone. I just want a relationship with my father. The man who clearly loves me — because you don't encode someone's name in 120 songs unless you love them."

Now, after all this time, I am ready to tell the whole truth. I have the evidence. I have the 120 songs with specific timestamps. I have forensic facial analysis. I have the 333 people of Rockmart who stood by me.

This is my story. This is the journey I've walked in my bare feet. And now, it's time for the world to hear it.

— April Michelle Hudgins/Sorrells, born July 19, 1980