According to jail records, Teddy Gentry, a founding member of the Grammy-winning country band Alabama, was arrested on Monday and charged with a misdemeanor narcotics offense in the state that bears the band’s name.
According to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama, Gentry, 70, was detained on charges of unlawful possession of marijuana in the second degree and illegal possession of drug paraphernalia. He was arrested and taken to the county jail.
According to records, he was brought into custody at the Cherokee County Detention Center at 10:38 a.m. on Monday and released at 11:06 a.m.
On Tuesday, phone lines affiliated with Gentry’s home in Fort Payne, which is in the neighboring county of DeKalb, could not reach him for comment.
A spokeswoman for Gentry and the band declined to comment on the arrest on Tuesday, but they did indicate that it will not affect the band’s upcoming tour.
The band’s next gig will be on September 23 at Denver’s Ball Arena. Colorado is well-known for being one of the first states to decriminalize marijuana use for recreational purposes.
Alabama has been around for a long time, but they were at its peak in the early to mid-1980s, when it won the vocal group of the year award at the Country Music Awards five years in a row (from 1981 to 1983).
The Country Music Association named “The Closer You Get” “Album of the Year” in 1983. In addition, for their efforts on this song, the three received a Grammy in 1984 for “best country performance by a duo or group.” Alabama won the Mountain Music category the previous year and won the prize.
The band was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.
This item was initially published in its entirety on NBCNews.com.
If you don’t know Teddy Gentry yet, you may be interested to learn more about him. Then don’t worry, we have a brief biography of him.
Who is Teddy Gentry?
Teddy Wayne Gentry was born in Fort Payne, Alabama, on January 22, 1952. Teddy and his mother relocated to nearby Lookout Mountain when he was young to live with his grandfather, Paw Paw. Paw lived on a 60-acre cotton farm in a wooden frame house.
Teddy took many additional jobs early in his music career after graduating high school to pay the rent. Teddy recalls doing “almost anything,” including “running a theatre, laying carpet, bagging groceries, and working on a farm.”
Teddy enjoys spending time with his family and supervising operations at his Bent Tree Farms when he is not playing for Alabama. After getting his first RCA Records cheque for $61,000 in 1980, he asked his wife Linda what he should do with the money.
“What is most important to you?” she replied. “Why don’t you buy your grandfather’s farm, where you grew up, because I know you adore the old place?”
That is precisely what he did. His grandfather agreed to sell the 60-acre cotton plantation, which he had lived on since the late 1920s, for $1000 per acre.