The greater Philadelphia area has produced countless musicians that have gone on to become huge success stories.  The list goes on forever, but includes Hall & Oates, Jim Croce and Chubby Checker.  It isn’t necessarily thought of as a hot bed for country music, but don’t be fooled.  There are people in that part of the country that not only love the genre, but there are artists creating music in it as well, writes Patti McClintic for thinkcountry.com. 

I met one of those people this week.  He now lives in Nashville, but he’s been writing country songs long before he made the move south.  His name is Lenny Martelli and if you’re willing to hang out with me for a few, I think you’re not only going to become a fan of his, but you’ll probably even feel better about your day in general.  His story is all about tenacity.

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Martelli was born and raised in Norristown, Pennsylvania.  He had a very stable upbringing.  His parents are still together and he has two younger sisters.  As a young boy, he was very into sports, mostly football.  He said he was kind of on the aggressive side, so “rather than push my sisters around, I could go push other kids around instead”, even though he said he never really pushed his sisters around anyway.

I also was a recreational snowboarder.  One day I went snowboarding with friends and there was a jump that was not constructed all the way, but it was open to the public.  There were a lot of things missing, like, you know, the blue lines that are painted on the snow for different reasons.  The first line tells you that you’re starting the jump.  The second blue line tells you that you’re leaving the jump, so when you look at it, it’s all white.  This one didn’t have any blue lines, didn’t have a lot of stuff.  So, without harping too much on that, it just wasn’t designed too well.  On this day, it was a little warmer, a little more compact.  I went off this jump.  We checked it out a couple of times and everyone was going off of it.  I happened to go off of it and I must have hit a spot, when looking at it afterward, it peeled back a little bit, so it almost came into a crescent moon rather than a jump.  So, when I hit that part of the jump, my board went up over my head and shot me almost into a back flip, and I wasn’t trying to do a back flip.  I’ve always been a bigger guy, at the time I was about 220 and a football player, and I didn’t have the weight distribution to flip myself back over, so I just hung in the air upside down, for what felt like forever because all I saw was white, and I came down after 50 feet in the air, and 50 feet in distance, right on the back of my shoulders.  I hit there, bounced forward, slid across the ice on my stomach, and my friend came down and he said, “Hey, are you alright?”  I was kind of like, “Yeah.  I’m fine.”  I didn’t lose consciousness and I was just thinking it was weird.  So, my friend was like, “Alright, hop up.”  I went to stand up and I couldn’t move anything.

To read the complete story click here.

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