LAKE BUENA VISTA, FLORIDA | He certainly doesn’t strike you as a guy with an alias. When you first meet Jason Brown, aka Colt Ford, you can’t imagine why he has two names. Nor do you know without a Google search which name his mama gave him and which one he chose. In the age of the internet, aliases are for off-the-grid outlaws. Actors still do it occasionally but not to hide Jewish heritage or immigrant roots anymore. Eric Banadinović became Eric Bana for pronunciation reasons and Olivia Jane Cockburn became Olivia Wilde to give her some writer cred. But even author pseudonyms have become passé. Brown/Ford is about as far from Hollywood as you can get. With a cap and a couple days’ worth of beard, he wouldn’t draw a second look in every Flying J and Waffle House in the country. And there’s certainly nothing about chatting with him – he’s quick with a smile and a handshake – that gives a hint about a dual life.
The only people who recognize both Jason Farris Brown and Colt Ford as the same guy are deep-in-the-weeds golf fans who also have “country rap” on their Spotify playlists.
“It’s weird for everybody else but it doesn’t feel weird because it’s always been normal for me,” Ford said of a career in golf that took him around the world playing professionally for the better part of a decade, followed by a second act as a country star who has written chart-topping hits for Jason Aldean and been featured in major sports leagues.
“My mom always said, ‘God doesn’t give you anything he doesn’t intend for you to use,’ ” Ford said. “I happen to be a good athlete and I happen to be good at music. I chose golf because I knew that music depended so much on luck. If I’m good at golf, I can make a living. And I did that for almost 10 years. Then I became a club pro and a teaching pro, but I could never make music go away. I was always writing music, always playing music, always had songs running through my head.”
He grew up in Athens, Ga., near the University of Georgia, but closer to the country life than the country club. According to former LPGA player Vicki Goetze-Ackerman, who is three years younger than the 50-year-old Ford and grew up playing a lot of golf with him: “It’s always so weird for me to see him like this (in the Colt Ford persona) because I know him as Jason and grew up playing golf with Jason. We saw each other all the time, played in a lot of the same (American Junior Golf Association) events. So, to see him like this, as Colt, it’s different. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I’m thrilled for him, but it’s just different.”
Ford was an AJGA All-American and played collegiately. Then he traveled the mini-tour circuit.
“When I turned pro, (the Korn Ferry Tour) was the Hogan Tour,” he said. “I played everywhere, the Hooters Tour, played in South Africa and Asia. I played some with (Golf Channel commentator) Jerry Foltz. My caddie ended up caddying for Foltzie for a while. Dickie Pride, Charlie Rymer; Jim Furyk and I are still good friends. But then I had some injuries. And it’s expensive.
“So, I taught for a long time. I was at Harbor Club on Lake Oconee (in Georgia) and then at River Club in Atlanta, a Greg Norman-designed course, great club. I taught quite a few tour players. (Kevin) Kisner and all those guys, I helped them when they were at Georgia. John Tillery, who is one of the top teachers in the world now, I taught him when he was in college. I taught Blake Adams and got him to the tour.
“I always wrote songs, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I wrote them for me and all I wanted to do was write the best songs I could.” – Colt Ford
“I’ve always fooled with music. And it used to drive me crazy because I’d be playing golf and every guy I played with would want me to do a song. I’d be like, ‘We’re trying to make a living out here. I can’t be rapping on the golf course.’ But athletes want to be musicians and musicians want to be athletes.
“I always wrote songs, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I wrote them for me and all I wanted to do was write the best songs I could. So, I tried to do both (golf and music) for a while but the schedules don’t match up. When it’s time to get to bed in golf is when it’s time to go to work in music. When the 5:45 alarm goes off for an early tee time, that’s closer to bedtime for musicians.”
Plenty of musicians play golf. Alice Cooper (another chosen name for the former Vince Furnier) said he’s the luckiest man in the world because he plays 36 holes of golf in daylight and plays music at night. But while Cooper can manage a score in the mid-70s and might be close to shooting his age, his golf expectations lean toward the good time, hit-and-giggle scale. Not so with guys like Ford.
“I still love playing (golf),” he said. “But I haven’t figured out how to lower my expectations. There are times when I hit great shots and then there are times when I hit shots and think I should quit.”
As disparate as Ford’s golf and country music careers might seem, one certainly led to the other.
“Music is such a strange thing,” Ford said. “You’ve been to bars when you’ve heard guys and thought, that guy is great. Go back in three years and he’ll still be at that same bar doing the same thing. Whether he couldn’t chase it, wouldn’t chase it, or just wasn’t in the right place at the right time, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. I have guys who open (in concert) for me and I’m like, ‘Dude, you should be a star.’ You see them a few years from now and they’ll still be knocking around.”
But through golf, Ford met a man named Randy Bernard, sports executive and not-very-good golfer who was the CEO of the Professional Bull Riders. Ford met Bernard through the game and gave him a song called Buck ‘Em.
“I did it just messing around,” Ford said. “Randy called and said, ‘This is great. Who did this?’ And I told him I did, he said, ‘You play golf.’ I said, ‘Yeah, well, I do this, too.’ That resonated with him and he made it the theme song for the PBR broadcasts.
“That’s when Colt Ford started coming out. I wrote the first album in probably 10 days. It was there and I just let it come out.”
Another golf contact helped him break through. Ford put music out on social-media sites and tried to sell it online. “Nobody wanted to sign me,” he said. “I went to Nashville and they were terrified. They’d never heard anything like what I was doing. Plus, I was 36 years old at the time and weighed 300 pounds. That’s not what they were looking for. Multiple labels I met with were like, ‘God, we love this, but we have no idea what to do with it.’ ”
But through golf, he knew Zach McLeroy, CEO of the Zaxby’s restaurant chain, who helped fund Average Joes Entertainment, a record label Ford founded with producer Shannon Houchins.
“It’s literally been the most successful truly independent record label in Nashville’s history,” Ford said.
In addition to putting out Ford’s music, Average Joes signed Montgomery Gentry (recording the group’s last album before Troy Gentry’s death in a helicopter crash) as well as Brantley Gilbert and Corey Smith.
One of Ford’s fellow Georgians, Aldean, covered a song called Dirt Road Anthem that Ford wrote and recorded on his first album. “That’s one of Jason’s biggest hits,” Ford said.
After Aldean was mentioned, a friend came over and asked Ford how he’d played that day. “Terrible,” he said. “It’s my third round in four months and the other three were charity scrambles.”
Then the person asking said, “See you Jason … oops, sorry, Colt.”
“That’s OK,” he said. “When my dad calls, I can always tell if he’s alone or with a bunch of people. If he says, ‘Jason,’ I know he’s hanging out. If he says, ‘Hey, Colt,’ I know there’s people listening.”