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As with most Christians, Wendell Birdsong has found that it hasn't been easy to put self-will aside and live for God's will.

After a hedonistic lifestyle playing in a San Francisco rock group, he swore off playing music in a band setting — and yet he's now the patriarch of his family's band.

He put off sending in a demo tape to Dollywood, despite the insistence of one of the band's fans, thinking The Birdsong Family wasn't good enough to perform there —but when he did, the theme park called and led the Birdsongs to East Tennessee.

These days, The Birdsong Family has become one of the most diverse Christian groups on the local circuit, performing everything from gospel-tinged bluegrass to full-on electric guitar-driven Christian rock.

On Sunday, The Birdsong Family will perform at the Foothills Fall Festival in downtown Maryville, and this week, Wendell Birdsong reflected on what a long, strange trip it's been.

"Before we started doing music, we gave ourselves away to God to do anything in ministry -- but I thought it would be a foreign mission trip to Papau, New Guinea or South Africa," he told The Daily Times. "Now, here we are doing this."

"This" started when the oldest Birdsong child, son Matthew, was in second grade. The family lived in the Seattle area at the time, and the family went to a weekend bluegrass festival, where Matthew became enamored with the banjo.

He asked his father to buy him one, and within a week, the other children were clamoring for their own instruments. Something told Birdsong that this wouldn't be a phase, a few days of making racket before the instruments wound up broken or gathering dust.

'Just took off'

"One they got these instruments, they just took off," he said. "I never asked them to play or to practice; even to this day, I don't have to tell them. "I just saw such an urgency in the way they were asking that we missed our house payment that month to buy them instruments, thinking we'd just make it up later. It just seemed like something God was doing, and because of their obvious passion to do it, I never had any second thoughts about doing it."

At first, the kids wanted the same bluegrass instruments they'd seen being played at the aforementioned festival. Within a few months, the clan was performing together in church.

One thing led to another, and The Birdsong Family started getting requests to perform in nursing homes and community gatherings around the Seattle area; before they knew it, word began to spread, and they found themselves as a band.

Over the next five years, the band started performing outside of Washington, eventually passing through East Tennessee in 2000.

"When we came through Tennessee, people thought we should be playing at Dollywood," Birdsong said. "I just thought they were being kind, that we didn't have what it takes to do anything like that at a theme park. There was one old man, though, who came to see us every time we played in Chicago, and he was constantly asking if I'd sent a demo to Dollywood.

Dollywood called

"Well, I never did, because I didn't think we were good enough. But I knew we were going to see him again, so I sent one just to get him off my back. And I got a call in late January 2000, and they hired us."

At the time, The Birdsong Family was primarily a bluegrass band. East Tennesseans embraced their music, and the Birdsongs found themselves with new friends, new fans and new venues at which to play.

Five years ago, a Florida church asked the family to perform there, and because of that house of worship's contemporary approach to music -- as well as the emergence of the Birdsong children into their teens -- the band began to slowly integrate Christian rock and Christian contemporary music into its repertoire.

"We were enjoying sounds like Switchfoot, and the kids were growing into teenagers, so from that, we began writing music of that genre," he said.

Because of the growing inclusion of rock influences (the Birdsongs do their own version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," for example, retitled "Sweet Home Up in Heaven"), the group's fanbase has grown as well. Fans of all ages and musical preferences, especially teens and young people, have befriended the Birdsongs on the social networking site Myspace, and the Birdsong children have watched their family's ministry grow from the ground up.

"We've already reached what we want to reach," he said. "We don't need a giant stage or a huge audience to do what we want to do -- our whole point is helping people, not fame or fortune, and we get to use music as a tool to do that. So for us, we do exactly what we want to do every day. No matter what happens, there is no failure."