By Tom Maxwell
By late afternoon, Farmville had become a walking community. Parked cars lined the streets of the Greenville suburb as swarms of people — old, young, Black and white — walked steadily toward the middle of town where the 71st Dogwood Bash was already in progress. It was a sunny late April day, but the rain was going to roll in around sundown.
Victor Hudson, playing the second stage, mentioned the headliners: Parmalee. “I’ve known these boys since they were teenagers,” he said with pride. This wasn’t typical backstage banter. It didn’t take long to understand that this event didn’t feel like any old music festival. It felt like it had purpose.
Behind the main stage, an RV parked parallel to a long black tour bus created a kind of patio space, with a tent and lawn chairs. Sharon Thomas Corey was there to see her sons perform as she had done since their very first gig. She doesn’t typically do interviews and admitted to being nervous. Turns out she’s a natural.
“They were easy to raise,” she says. “If you want any bad stories, there’s not any.”
Inside the RV, the four members of Parmalee — brothers Matt and Scott Thomas, cousin Barry Knox, and Josh McSwain — assembled in the front lounge. If you didn’t know their status as a country music juggernaut (1.6 billion streams, six No. 1 country hits, a string of platinum singles), you’d be excused for thinking they were just a bunch of nice boys who’d done all right.
The band was happy to be back in their stomping grounds. “As soon as it starts getting flat land, you can feel it when you’re home,” Matt says. “A lot of these people that you see here are ones that backed us all the way from the very beginning. Whether it be people that have sold merch for us out there, helped give us jobs, let us sleep on their floor, or set up stages for us. So, when we get home and we see everybody . . . I mean, it’s like a family reunion, honestly.”
What was it like coming up in a band Down East? “Tough,” Matt says without hesitation.
Thomas Wolfe’s final novel, published posthumously, is titled You Can’t Go Home Again. The famous Asheville author made a powerful case. But there’s at least one exception — Parmele, North Carolina, population 274 souls.
That’s where a fledgling band (named after the town, with an “a” and an extra “e” to help people say it right) rented a tin-roofed barn on Tuesdays and Thursdays to make a racket, always stopping by 11 so as not to bother the neighbors. On those nights, Sharon would make food and carry it to the practice space.
Matt and Scott’s father is the late Jerry Thomas. He played the blues. According to Sharon, Jerry sang just like Gregg Allman. “If you didn’t look, you wouldn’t know the difference,” she says. “He could have been as big as anyone in the ’70s, but his thing was, he loved music. He didn’t care if he was sitting on somebody’s back porch or in somebody’s backyard.”
As kids, Matt and Scott rode around in Jerry’s truck, listening to the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Travis Tritt. Soon, they were members of Jerry Thomas and the Thomas Brothers Band, slipping underage into clubs like Wrong Way Corrigan’s because they were in the band. “Dad played in the bars, downtown Greenville, when it was a cool place,” Matt remembers. “They supported music as hard as anywhere. Then it seemed like that kind of fizzled out.”
The boys’ music came much earlier than that. Sharon remembers Scott at 3 or 4, having been given baby’s first drum kit, keeping time like a metronome. Neighborhood kids in the trailer park in Robertsville where they lived would come over to hear him play drums. She recalls Matt at 14, in his bedroom with a guitar and a Stevie Ray Vaughan tape teaching himself how to play. “I’d walk by and he would just be playing that tape, and then he’d stop and I’d see him finding that music,” she says.
Even though it feels like fame and fortune are a foregone conclusion, anyone who pays attention knows that it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. “About fifteen,” corrects Scott.
“I never — not one time — told them that they could not make it in the music business,” Sharon says. “All I said to them was, ‘Get a good education.’ I said, ‘If that is your dream, I want you to dream it big, and I want you to do everything you can to succeed at it, and I will do everything I can to help you.’ This is the honest truth. I never thought that they wouldn’t do it. It never entered my mind.”
So, Parmalee, small town boys from Down East, got diplomas (Matt graduated from ECU and Scott graduated from Wayne Community College), and then jobs. Then the real grind began.
“It was just tough,” Matt says. “We didn’t know anybody in the real music business industry. But there were enough places where we could play, so we figured it out. I mean, there were always menu-venues that would have you in.”
Being ‘in’ and staying ‘in’ were not necessarily the same thing. “We had day jobs and credit card debt out the ass,” Scott says. “We would do Wilmington, Greenville, Greensboro, and Greenville and Spartanburg, in South Carolina. We worked our day jobs and put all our money in recordings. We would work with studios and try to write songs and put out CDs. And one thing would happen and then nothing would happen. We put out three independent CDs.”
They also had a powerful sales force. “Any little CD they came out with, if it didn’t have but one song on it, I went around town,” Sharon said. “I sold the CDs to all my friends. I worked at Greenville Utilities when they first were headed out to Nashville. In two days, I sold 100 CDs. Well, you’re talking back then $10 a CD. That was a lot of money for them to get what they needed — to travel or whatever. I put out fliers at the post office and called all my friends.”
Things began to break. “We played a place called Pantana Bob’s,” Scott says. “When we put about 400 people in there, we knew we were ready.”
Ready for what? The nationwide grind.
“We went to New York and recorded an album with David Bendeth, the rock producer, who did Riot! by Paramore,” Matt says. “This was on our own dime. Then we went to California on our own dime and did some recording. Then we went to Atlanta on our own dime and did some recording. This person would say, ‘Work with this guy,’ because we couldn’t get a record deal in New York. OK. So, New York passed. We went to L.A. L.A. passed. Somebody said, ‘You need to be in Nashville.’ In Nashville they said, ‘Work in Atlanta.’”
Things were hard, and about to get worse. Late one night, on Sept. 21, 2010, after Parmalee finished its gig at The Money in downtown Rock Hill, South Carolina, Matt and Scott were in the RV. Two men burst in and demanded money. One had a handgun.
What happened next is a matter of court record: Scott, who held a concealed carry permit, fired back. Demario Burris, 22, was pronounced dead at the scene. Dytavis Hinton, 22, was found wounded on the ground a hundred yards away. He would later plead guilty to attempted murder, armed robbery, burglary and criminal conspiracy, and be sentenced to 20 years without parole.
Scott was shot three times, in the leg, stomach and chest. He was airlifted to Carolina Medical Center in Charlotte. Sharon’s phone rang.
“That’s the worst phone call a mother or any parent could ever receive,” she said. “I got the phone call and they said Scott had been shot and you need to get to Charlotte ASAP. We get to the hospital and the doctor just looks at me and he said, ‘I don’t have any good news for you. He’s got less than a 5 percent chance of living. His femoral artery is severed, and it’s a miracle that he even made it to the hospital.’ People do not survive that type of injury.”
Scott had multiple surgeries. He was in a coma for 10 days. “I started calling people and saying, ‘We need to pray. Scott’s getting a fever; we need to pray for the fever to go down.’ He was on dialysis. He was at his last day. ‘If he doesn’t come off dialysis, he may be on it the rest of his life.’ What we prayed for happened.”
Scott pulled through.
He was in the hospital for over a month. Friends and family held a fundraiser to help pay for his healing and recovery. At a gig in February five months later, Barry and Matt each took one of Scott’s arms and walked him to the drum kit. He played six songs as hard as he could. Broken Bow Records founder Benny Brown was in the room. The band was together again, and this time with a record deal.
“It was a long ride,” Matt says. “But to be honest with you, it was all about the song.”
“It all starts with a song,” Scott adds.
Parmalee — the band that named itself after the town it was born in — named its breakout song after the state they grew up in.
“We had ‘Carolina’ kind of written, but not finished,” Matt said, “and we took that to Rick Beato. We wanted to work with him. We asked him, ‘You want to finish it?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ So we finished it in the studio. When he sent that demo back, that’s when we knew. We were like, ‘OK, this is what we’ve been looking for the past five or six years.’ It was 2007 when we wrote it. We’d been working since 2001 as Parmalee.”
There was a small — well, not so small — snag. “I guess you’ve heard the story,” Sharon says. “They would go to all these auditions and I know they were getting frustrated, but I would always say, ‘Just keep on going, keep on going,’ and they never gave up. They met up with a songwriter and he helped them finish ‘Carolina.’ And they had to pay him for it. It was like $11,000. A friend gave him a check. Long story short, the check bounced.”
So, who do you call? Mom, of course. “Matt calls he said, ‘Mama, we’re in a bind and we really need some help.’ And I said, ‘What do you need?’ And he said, ‘A check bounced. We need $11,000.’ Well, I had just started a new job. I had two more children at home. I went and took out a second mortgage. They said, ‘We’re gonna pay you back,’ and I just said, ‘Pay me back when you can.’”
‘Carolina’ was released on Feb. 4, 2013. It begins, “Home is where my heart’s still beating.”
I don’t know when I’ll see her again
I hate to see her cry when I’m leaving
But now I’m a thousand miles away again
And she feels like Carolina
Looks like California
Shining like those New York lights on Broadway
And when she looks back, I’m behind her
I’ll always be there for her
She makes me feel like home’s not so far away
She feels like Carolina
Critical reception was uneven (“They sound as if they’re holding back,” one writer said, “which holds the song back.”) but that didn’t matter: By December, ‘Carolina’ had topped the Country singles chart.
“I was just driving local around here — maybe in Pitt County or Greenville or something,” Sharon says, “and I hear a song on the radio and think, ‘Wait a minute, that sounds like Parmalee’s ‘Carolina’ a little bit!’ I stopped and literally squeezed the steering wheel. I was by myself and I screamed, ‘That’s my boys! That’s Parmalee! That is Carolina!’ They were on the radio and I was screaming and the tears were just rolling down my face. That was around Christmas. It was the best Christmas present.”
Parmalee paid Sharon back, and more. They paid off her mortgage “and bought their momma a car,” says Sharon. “A prayer had been answered. I had prayed, ‘Just one hit,’ and — I will say this — every time they release a song, my prayer is, ‘I know it’s in your time, God,’ because it might take six or eight months before it hits Number One, but it eventually hits Number One.”
After ‘Carolina’ topped the chart, Parmalee flew Sharon to Memphis for a gig. Matt told the band’s story from the stage — the trailer park, the second mortgage, the dream. “I had one parent come up to me afterward,” Sharon says, “and he said, ‘My daughter wants to try music, and I’ve been 100 percent against her. When I go home, we’re going to talk, and I’m going to do things a little different.’ The thing is, you have to know your children. Music was not a whim with them. It was in their soul and in their blood. They stayed focused. They didn’t get off track. They did it the right way.”
Back in Farmville in April, the wind was picking up. On the mainstage, the tarp covering a green vintage Ludwig drum kit rustled. Parmalee leaves the RV to go to a “friends and family” meet and greet, which for them consists of 130 people — the ones who let the young band sleep on their floor, or open for them, or set up the stage, or donate their hard-earned money for Scott’s recovery.
In so many ways, it’s true that you can’t go home again — you’ll be different, and home will be too. But there’s nothing stopping you from taking home with you. EB
Tom Maxwell is an author and musician. A member of Squirrel Nut Zippers in the late 1990s, he wrote their Top 20 hit “Hell.” His most recent book, A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene 1989-1999, was published in 2024.