The guy’s only human.

Trace Adkins is taping a new TV show while he’s touring, and it’s enough to choke up a tough guy.

So far, for GAC’s upcoming Great American Hero, Trace has talked to a minister running a mission, a woman sending care packages to soldiers overseas and staffers at a program that works with kids with cancer.

“For everybody that’s been working on this project, it’s just been really inspirational,” he tells The Tennessean.

“You can’t help but be moved by the things these people are doing. Everybody ends up crying.”

Wow!

“You get older and you mature a little bit and you start slowing down and you pay a little more attention to what’s going on around you, and maybe you just want to savor all the good that you can find, especially in this world today,” Trace continued. “Everything seems to be so crazy; we need a little bit of kindness to alleviate some of it.”

No launch date yet for the show.

“I married her daughter,” quips Adkins, who in addition to Mother’s Day will also celebrate his wedding anniversary today. “It’s the best Mother’s Day gift of all time. I took her daughter off her hands.”

The singer, who turned 50 in January, says his wife, Rhonda, “really messed up” by choosing Mother’s Day as her wedding day, because it means she gets just one gift — and it’s not even a nice one to compensate for both occasions.

“I don’t really double up on it just because of that,” he says. “Like I say, it’s her fault. She did that. I’ll get her some flowers, and I have to find out what the kids want to do for her. I haven’t heard from them yet. I’ll get my marching orders from them today.”

Adkins is the father of five daughters ranging in age from 7 to late 20s, and the gift-giving conversation is just light-hearted banter from a man who vividly remembers the trauma his family was about to endure this time last year.

The country singer was sitting on a runway in Dallas on June 4 when his 5,000-square-foot home inside the Bonbrook subdivision in Brentwood caught fire with daughters Brianna and Trinity (then 9 and 6) inside with a nanny. The girls put their family’s safety plan into action and ran outside with the nanny, escaping harm’s way, and a neighbor helped rescue their dogs.

Rhonda, who was running errands when the electrical fire erupted, arrived in time to see her home engulfed in flames. Adkins had already turned his cell phone off on the plane, so he made the near seven-hour flight to Alaska, where he was headed for some fishing and to play a few shows, without knowing the peril his family faced without him.

“When they tried to call me, they probably missed me by just a few minutes,” he says. “When I landed, it was 11 o’clock at night back home and the fire had started around 3, so it had pretty much burned completely up by the time I landed in Anchorage. When you turn your phone on when you land and it just starts blowing up with texts and stuff, it’s pretty surreal.”

Lessons from tragedy

At a Red Cross breakfast in Brentwood last week, Rhonda said she remembers little about the fire, calling it all a blur.

However, she said the Red Cross volunteers “appeared out of nowhere” to hand out water to the firefighters who battled the blaze and check on her family to see how they could help.

Adkins remembers his wife, a former publicist, being in shock when they spoke and says she even suggested that he stay in Alaska and go fishing as he had planned, because there was “absolutely nothing” he could do at home.

“I was like, ‘Rhonda,’ ” he says, laughing. “ ‘I’m going to have to ask you to put your publicist hat back on for a second and see the headline — Trace Adkins’ house burns and he goes fishing. I think I better come home.’ ”

Adkins didn’t even leave the airplane. The flight he had just taken to Anchorage was also the red-eye back to Dallas, so he just settled in and made the trip back.

When Adkins landed in Dallas, he spoke to his wife again and says she “prepared me perfectly” for what he was going to find when he made it back to Middle Tennessee.

“She said, ‘Look, there’s nothing left. It’s all gone. There’s nothing here,’ ” he recalls. “It’s a strange ordeal to have to go through. We are very fortunate in that we have means, in that it didn’t completely destroy us.”

One week after the fire, Adkins told a local news station: “I was going to shave a couple of days ago, and I don’t even have a razor; there’s something that always comes up. I got two hats left, a pair of boots, I got a guitar, truck and a great job, and my family is healthy, so I am good.”

Following the fire, the family moved into their country home, which they’d had since their youngest daughters were born, for a few months until they found a place to lease while they rebuilt their home.

“It wasn’t as traumatic as it could have been,” Adkins says. “And I think the best thing that came out of the whole thing for me, and it’s an affirmation of something that I already suspected, that I wasn’t that much of a material guy. I’m not a slave to material things. I always kind of thought that, but after that I knew it. I’m not.”

Slow and steady

More than 11 months have passed since the blaze, and the family is ensconced in its rental home. The remains of their destroyed home were demolished last fall, and the singer says his wife “finally” has the blueprints for their new house the way she wants them.

“We’ve been taking our time (rebuilding),” he says. “We’ll start here pretty soon. It’s going to be a long, drawn-out process.”

The reconstruction of their home is one of many projects Adkins is juggling at the moment. In the vein of the realization that he isn’t a materialistic person, and propelled by a stripped-down, intimate performance for a television taping last fall, the country singer is in the midst of his Songs and Stories theater tour.

The tour, which will be at Ryman Auditorium on Friday, marries Adkins’ new songs and favored hits with his life stories, in venues that are typically smaller and allow audiences a closer look at the star and more interaction than the places he tends to play.

“It’s been great,” Adkins says of the tour. “We’ve always been so focused on the up-tempo, high-energy show, and we still do that, but this theater thing, it allows you more to kind of ease into it. It’s just a really cool way of being able to relax a little bit instead of just coming out and hitting the stage and putting your foot in the floorboard and just holding it there for 90 minutes like we usually do.”

‘A little bit of kindness’

While Adkins is in many of the towns on this tour, he’s also working on his new GAC series, Great American Hero. Before he gets to a town, the singer and GAC identify individuals or organizations that work for the betterment of a person or people in the community. Then the series highlights the do-gooders and figures out how to aid them in their endeavors.

Before his date in Salina, Kan., Adkins filmed a show highlighting a minister who runs a mission service, a woman who runs a Hearts of America program that sends care packages to troops and a program called Monkey in My Chair that helps children with cancer.

“Trace is the perfect person for this show,” says Sarah Trahern, senior vice president of programming for GAC. “He’s kind of the everyman, and he’s been a working man like all the people around the country, and so for him to take time out of his day and his tour helping us get some grants and do some good for the people in these communities” is really incredible.

Adkins says the community members aren’t the only people touched by the kindness of the citizens highlighted in the show.

“For everybody that’s been working on this project, it’s just been really inspirational,” he says. “You can’t help but be moved by the things these people are doing. Everybody ends up crying. You get older and you mature a little bit and you start slowing down and you pay a little more attention to what’s going on around you, and maybe you just want to savor all the good that you can find, especially in this world today. Everything seems to be so crazy; we need a little bit of kindness to alleviate some of it.”

Full steam ahead

In addition to the new television show, which is set to debut on GAC this fall, and his Songs and Stories tour, Adkins is completing a new album. His debut single, “Them Lips,” from the upcoming project, which doesn’t have a name or a release date, will be on country radio over the summer.

So, as Adkins points out, turning 50 hasn’t slowed him down.

“I ain’t paying (turning 50) no attention,” he says. “I feel great. I mean, it’s been a pretty busy year, a pretty eventful year. But I’m still enjoying what I’m doing. As long as I’m having a good time doing it, I don’t see any reason to stop.”

As long as he found time to get his wife those happy anniversary/Mother’s Day flowers, the singer should be good to go.

Last summer, country music star Trace Adkins taped an episode of “CMT Invitation Only” that aired in September. The television special featured Adkins performing and talking about his most-loved songs from his 16 years in the music business, as well as participating in a question-and-answer session with the audience.

Adkins had such a good time making the show that he decided to take it on the road with his “Songs & Stories Tour,” which will stop at the Morris Performing Arts Center on Friday.

“After we finished it, the guys in the band were talking to me, talking about how much fun they had,” Adkins says. “They enjoyed doing that and wished that we could do some more of it. I said, ‘Well, we can do that.’ So, we just decided we would do this theater thing this year.”

The tour takes Adkins and his band to smaller, more intimate theaters — such as the Morris, where he last performed in February 2006 — than the larger arenas and amphitheaters that he typically plays.

Fans are given the opportunity to tell their own stories or make requests on Adkins’ website, traceadkins.com, and other social media sites and become part of the concert.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” he says. “It’s much more interactive. The fans get to tweet and request songs. I get to talk a little more.”

Adkins says the “Songs & Stories Tour” features more songs than stories, but still gives him a nice change of pace from his customary high-energy stage shows.

“I don’t want people to think that they are coming to a show just to hear me rambling on,” he says. “I feel like I can talk a little more than the normal concert setting.”

Adkins says the concert will showcase songs from his latest album, “Proud to Be Here” — such as the hits “Just Fishin’” and “Million Dollar View” — as well as fan favorites, including “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” and “You’re Gonna Miss This,” as well as a few surprises.

“There are a few more ballads, a few more album cuts, and a few songs that you haven’t heard on the radio,” he says. “But we make sure that we do the songs that they have heard on the radio, too. I’m a country music fan myself and if I went to hear somebody and they didn’t do any of the songs that caused me to be a fan in the first place, I’d be pretty disappointed.”

Adkins will tell stories of what certain songs mean to him at the show. Although the majority of his songs were written by somebody else, he says they are still personal and autobiographical to him.

“I have been in Nashville so long now, I know all of those songwriters,” he says. “They know when I’m getting ready to go into the studio to make a new record. They write songs and point them straight at me. I’ve written a few more things on these last couple of albums. But those guys know me well enough. They know who I am and what I’m about. They tailor those songs.”

Adkins has endured many well-publicized tribulations in his life and came through a stronger man — hence the title of his latest album — so there certainly is not a shortage of tales for him to tell.

Besides his considerable career as a country music performer, Adkins has made his mark with other multimedia endeavors.

He has made several appearances on television, as the voice for recurring character Elvin on “King of the Hill,” in voice-over commercial work for the KFC restaurant chain and as a finalist on NBC’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Adkins has been outspoken on political and social issues on numerous TV talk shows and in his 2007 autobiography, “A Personal Stand: Observations and Opinions from a Freethinking Roughneck,” but he doesn’t think that celebrities should publicly share their political beliefs.

With his 6-foot-6 muscular frame, Adkins was a natural choice to become a comic book superhero. He was the inspiration for the four-part series, “McBain.”

Adkins also effectively used his imposing appearance as a motorcycle gang leader in the 2011 film “The Lincoln Lawyer.”

Although he likes acting and all of his other projects, Adkins says music is and always will be his first priority.

“I haven’t done so much of the acting stuff that it has really gotten in the way of anything else that I’m doing,” he says, adding that he is at work on his next album. “The acting thing, when those opportunities come along, is something that I enjoy doing. But, so far, it has really not got in the way.”

While a photograph of his charred Brentwood home appeared on a screen behind him, country music star Trace Adkins thanked the volunteers who came out to help his family after a devastating fire last summer.

As the keynote speaker for the fundraising Lifesaver Breakfast this morning at Brentwood Baptist Church, Adkins had first-hand experience in how the Red Cross of Williamson County assists residents who experience emergency situations.

“There is no more noble effort to be a part of,” said the country singer. “Thank you, Red Cross, for being there when I couldn’t be there.”

On June 4, 2011, Adkins was sitting on an airplane in Dallas and was 10 minutes from getting into the air to fly to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a fishing trip before a series of concerts in the state when he received word that his house on Millsford Court was on fire.

Back in Tennessee, Adkins’ two children, houseguests and family pets escaped a fire that engulfed the 5,000-square-foot mansion in the Bonbrook subdivision the family had called home for almost 11 years. Everyone was unharmed, but the house was deemed a total loss.

Adkins’ wife, Rhonda, remembers the Red Cross volunteers who “appeared out of nowhere” to hand out water to the firefighters who battled the blaze and check on her family to see if there was anything that they needed.

“Most people out there today are probably thinking, ‘My house isn’t going to burn down. I won’t need the Red Cross. It won’t happen to me,’” she said. “But it happened to us. And it might happen to you, too. That’s why it’s so important for all of us to support the Red Cross because you never know when you’re going to need them.”

When more details started coming across to the country star, he heard that the Red Cross was there at his house.

“I’m ashamed of myself that I didn’t know you all are there when someone’s house burns. I thought you all just dealt with the big menu items – hurricanes and tornadoes and floods,” he said.

Calling Red Cross volunteers “selfless” individuals, Adkins sung their praises.

“These people are working all the time just to be ready to help somebody. That’s not what I do. That’s not what most of you do. We go to our jobs and try to benefit ourselves. These people spend their time trying to better learn and prepare to help somebody else,” he said.

The cause of the fire was later traced to an overloaded or faulty wiring in a power strip under a workbench in the garage.

The Williamson County chapter of the American Red Cross has responded to 65 local disasters, trained 4,000 people in first-aid response and collected 8,377 units of blood for emergency transfusions. More than 150 people are active volunteers in the local organization.

That morning, Adkins will perform the national anthem at a public sendoff celebration held at a Brookshire’s Food and Pharmacy in Tyler, TX. Veterans will then fly to DC to visit the WWII Memorial, the U.S. Capitol, see the changing of the guard at Arlington National Cemetery, and more through June 2.

There is no personal cost to the 32 male and 1 female veteran, who hail from communities across Texas.

“This will be our fourth trip to Washington with World War II veterans,” said Rick Ellis, vice president/marketing for Brookshire Grocery Company, “The response from the veterans has been overwhelming. Even after taking three previous groups, we have more than 100 veterans on our waiting list.”

Brookshire Grocery Company is sponsoring the trip and they are also the exclusive retailer of Trace Adkins’ Hightower’s Country Smoked Sausage.

Airtimes:
April 26, 2012 9:00 PM ET
April 27, 2012 1:00 AM ET
April 27, 2012 2:00 PM ET
April 27, 2012 7:30 PM ET
April 28, 2012 10:30 AM ET

Trace Adkins, whose family was one of 64 to receive disaster relief assistance from the American Red Cross Williamson County Chapter, is the keynote speaker at the 4th Annual Lifesaver Breakfast on Tuesday, May 8.

The Adkins home, in the Bonbrook stubdivision off Concord Road in Brentwood, burned this past June after an overheated or loose electrical connection in a power strip sparked a fire. Many of his music awards and most of his family’s posessions were lost.

Red Cross volunteers were immediately on the scene to provide disaster relief assistance.

“The Red Cross is at work every day of the year, providing valuable services to people in need,” says Vicki Smith, chapter board chair. “The Lifesaver Breakfast offers a great opportunity for us to thank our volunteers and invite everyone to support the mission of the Red Cross in our community.”

The event will begin at 7 a.m. May 8 in Wilson Hall at Brentwood Baptist Church, 777 Concord Road.

This year, the Red Cross is expecting more than 250 Williamson County business and community leaders at the event. Each year the Lifesaver Breakfast ensures the financial funding necessary to provide the core humanitarian services of the American Red Cross, including lifesaving services, local disaster response and service to the Armed Forces. The breakfast is being chaired by Spencer Patton of Steel Vine Investments with sponsors including Nissan, Mapco/Delek US Holdings, and BancorpSouth.

For more information, to join as a sponsor, or to reserve a table, please contact Greg King or Celeste Schmidt at 615-790-5785.