Faith guides Horizon West musician

ANNABELLE SIKES

NEWS EDITOR

If you’ve seen a stranger on a park bench playing music in downtown Winter Garden and the surrounding areas, chances are it was Alan Ogletree.

Ogletree, a Horizon West resident, is using his passion for music to spread love in God’s name.

Every day when he has breaks in his work schedule, Ogletree travels to some of his favorite places to share his acoustic guitar notes and soulful country voice with whoever chooses to listen.

Ogletree’s one ask of God is this: “Put the words that will change anyone’s life and let me share a song that people will be impacted with.”

“If I can impact one life and help you see that Jesus and God did something amazing for you … it’s just forever,” he said. “Any time that I’m anywhere, all I’m looking for is God in it. Faith plays as big a role as anything. … I just look for the smiles and the pain that are in people’s faces and I’m like. ‘Man, I wonder how God’s going to move that person.’”

PURE PASSION

Ogletree, now 44, was born with a pure passion for music.

“My parents’ record collections … I mean they had everything from Elvis to Michael Jackson,” he said. “Those vinyls were playing all the time. I just always loved music.”

However, the 1990s country era drove Ogletree to new heights in his passion where he idolized artists such as Garth Brooks and Jimmy Buffett.

Although he loved music, he felt he didn’t have the time to commit to it because of his heavy athletic activities.

Growing up in Atlanta, Ogletree played a wide variety of sports, but football took him to Western Kentucky University.

After graduation, Ogletree said he had decided he was done with the south — everyone was settling down and he wasn’t ready to do so. Instead, he moved to California and took a job in sales.

Two years into his new life in California, Ogletree met his future wife, Melissa.

As his athletic career slowed down, Ogletree attempted to invest himself into picking up the guitar and learning multiple times, but the breaking of a string always led him to setting the instrument aside.

Before his son was born in 2014, Ogletree finally committed to learning and playing guitar. He decided he would learn to play two songs: “Plush”