This Time Last Year - Julie Farrar

Summer is the best time of year for a country music fan. That’s when the artists climb on their custom-outfitted buses and log 100,000 miles or more hitting every county and state fair, casino, shed amphitheater, and college arena in the country. And their hardcore fans are with them every mile of the way. They’ll take vacation days to see six shows in seven days at every sweltering river town in the Plains states or drive a thousand miles one way to see The Big Show – Fan Fair (CMAFest), held every June in Nashville.

I’ve traveled from St. Louis via Chicago to pick up a friend then on to Syracuse in one shot, windows rolled down and singing at the top of our lungs at 2 a.m. to keep ourselves shooting down Interstate 90 until we could roll into our hotel at 4 a.m. to meet up with other music friends at the Erie County Fair to see Keith Urban knock our socks off, just to be told by a gas station attendant “You’re just like Dead Heads, only you smell better.” I’ve crowded into a Nashville hotel room with three friends from Germany and one native New Yorker transplanted to the Midwest for a week in the Mecca city for all music lovers. We heard “the next big thing” on parking lot stages with our shirts soaked from sweat, were rained on along with 50,000 other fans at the nighttime stadium show, and had the ultimate fan experience when modern legend Alan Jackson showed up unannounced to meet people and give autographs at the downtown convention center. It was Greta’s only trip to America and probably would be her only trip for at least the next decade, but her idol made her country music dreams come true with a hastily scribbled name and a his arm around her for a picture.

I’ve sat on hay bales on a July 4th in Warrenton, MO to watch fireworks and hear the twanging tenor of John Anderson squeezing out the unnatural dipthongs of “blames her broken heart on every man in saaa-yt” in the heartbreak anthem “Straight Tequila Night.” And I’ve felt the chills as Martina McBride’s power vocals filled a football stadium with the no-nonsense chorus of the take-no-prisoner anthem against domestic violence, “Independence Day” – “Let freedom ring/Let the white dove sing/Let the whole world know that today is the day of reckoning.”

For many summer is baseball and barbeque, swimming and the smell of freshly mowed grass. For me, though, it’s knowing that somewhere out there a bus full of music is rolling down the highway, enticing me to follow it straight to where the blacktop ends.