In 1981 a piano player with no band stood in a middle Georgia cow pasture and decided to plant trees on it. Eighteen years later, the American Tree Farm System named him and his wife the best tree farmers in the country. In between, he became the musical director of the Rolling Stones.

The Piano Player With Nothing To Do

Chuck Leavell had joined the Allman Brothers Band at 20 and played on Brothers and Sisters. By the end of the 1970s the band was gone, Capricorn Records had collapsed, and his own group Sea Level was caught in the wreckage.

He was out of work, minding a young daughter in Macon.

Then his wife's grandmother died in 1981 and left her land in Twiggs County, where her family had farmed for generations. Rose Lane White Leavell moved the family out to the country.

"My brother told him to take some of that pasture land, about 40 acres, and put pines on it," she wrote in her own account of the place. "We did it."

Then came a line that is easy to miss. "Not long after that he mentioned to me he was thinking about selling his pianos," she wrote.

Not long after, the phone rang at the house. A man was asking whether Chuck was available to audition for the Rolling Stones. He left for four months in Europe, and he has toured with them ever since.

Homework On The Tour Bus

Rose Lane could feel him drifting away from the land, so she challenged him to make the Leavell name mean forestry.

He signed up for a forestry course by correspondence and did the homework riding a tour bus with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. His own site dates it to the mid-1980s; Rose Lane puts it at 1988.

One assignment was to write a management plan for the property. It needed a name, so they made one out of theirs: Charles and Rose Lane became Charlane, today Charlane Woodlands and Preserve.

The Award Nobody Gives To A Celebrity

The forestry world noticed the young couple in Twiggs County before the rest of the world did. The head of the Georgia Forestry Association nominated them, and in 1990 they won Georgia Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year.

They won Georgia again in 1998. His own site calls him the only two-time winner of that state award.

Then in 1999 the American Forest Foundation and the American Tree Farm System named Chuck and Rose Lane Leavell the National Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year, after they had taken the Southern Region title.

It is not a celebrity honour. It is judged on how the land is managed, by the people who manage land for a living. "That American Tree Farm # 1062 was # 1," Rose Lane wrote. In her family, she added, only the women have ever held a Tree Farm number: her grandmother Julia, her aunt Mary, then her.

Chuck Leavell accepts a Forest Service ranger hat from Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell at a ceremony in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 2012 — In 2012 the US Forest Service made Leavell an honorary forest ranger. Chief Tom Tidwell handed over the hat in Atlanta. USDA photo, CC BY 2.0.

Still In The Rows

Leavell still records and tours with the Stones as their keyboardist and musical director, more than forty years after that phone call.

A writer from Gun Dog magazine visited Charlane and watched him finish a morning on the porch, then pull on a pair of leather work gloves and climb into a utility vehicle loaded with a chemical sprayer and forest management tools, his cocker spaniel taking her usual seat.

"When I come back here, the energy I get is from the land and the wildlife," he said. "It helps keep my head screwed on straight."

The property has grown from the acreage Rose Lane inherited to around 4,000 acres, about 70 percent of it forest, according to that 2026 profile. The Leavells also sponsor a forestry scholarship at the University of Georgia.

"This is my church," he said, before starting the engine. "I'm in church every day that I'm here."

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