• June 12, 2000
• Vol. 53
• No. 23

Show Fizz

Richie McDonald Goes from Selling Soda Pop to Singing Country Pop as Lonestar's Front Man

Recently, a group of teenage fans went looking for Lonestar lead singer Richie McDonald's home in Lebanon, Tenn., 40 miles east of Nashville. They wanted to ask if he'd sing the country band's hit "Amazed" at their senior prom. McDonald, 38, says that a protective neighbor steered them away from the southern colonial that he shares with his wife, Lorie, 34, a former paralegal, son Rhett, 4, and daughter Molly, 19 months. But had the teens found him, he says, they would have at least come away with his autograph. "These are the people who put me where I am," says the Dallas-born McDonald, a onetime Coca-Cola salesman who sang ad jingles for Miller Lite and fast-food chains before cofounding Lonestar in 1992. "You can approach us. We remain good old boys from Texas, and that will never change."

He and bandmates Dean Sams, 34, Michael Britt, 34, and Keech Rainwater, 37, are often on the road promoting their double-piatinum-selling album Lonely Grill (with McDonald's divorced dad, Bobby, 61, driving the band's sound truck). "Richie doesn't come home and put his feet up and want dinner," says Lorie. "If the house needs cleaning, he helps me. If the kids need bathing, he bathes them." Serenades 'em too. In 1998, after his son phoned to ask, "Daddy, when are you coming home?" McDonald wrote "I'm Already There" and a week later sang it to Rhett at the living room piano. "He knows that song is for him," says his father. "That's what it's all about: my family."