Ain't No Place I'd Rather Be Than Seeing Shenandoah at the County Fair

by Julian Spivey

Julian Spivey Photo

There’s something so right about country music at a county fair. Like the smell of the livestock and fair food wafting over on the wind, the rings and buzzers from the carnival rides and the rural, blue-collar ambiance of it all enhance the sound.

That’s how it felt at the Pope County Fair in Russellville, Ark. on Saturday, Sept. 16 when ‘90s country music hitmakers Shenandoah came to town.

The band, hailing from Muscle Shoals, Ala., released six studio albums from 1987-1994 and had 10 top-10 hits, including five No. 1 hits during their run. Vocalist Marty Raybon left the band in 1997 to record as both a solo artist and with his brother Tim as the Raybon Brothers. Neither act had much success.

Shenandoah regrouped in 2000 sans Raybon and toured over the years with a revolving door of singers until Raybon rejoined the group in 2014. The band today includes two original members, Raybon and drummer Mike McGuire, with fiddle player and guitarist Donnie Allen having joined the group in 1990 (with a hiatus in between). The rest of the group consists of guitarist Nicky Hines, bassist Paul Sanders and keyboardist Andrew Ishee.

Shenandoah excited the Pope County Fair attendees by opening the show on Saturday night with one of its biggest hits, 1990’s No. 1 hit “Next to You, Next to Me,” an up-tempo love song with the narrator confessing “they ain’t no place I’d rather be, next to you, next to me” in the Robert Ellis Orrall and Curtis Wright-penned tune that was nominated for Single of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards (where it would lose to Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places”).

The group would continue with its biggest hits over the next 90 minutes or so, including more up-tempo classics like “Darned If I Don’t (Danged If I Do),” their last top-five hit from 1995, and the beautiful “Somewhere in the Vicinity of the Heart,” which they had done as a duet with Alison Krauss in 1994 and won a Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals.

One of the highlights of the show was when the group did its 1994 No. 1 hit “If Bubba Can Dance (I Can Too),” which included a spur-of-the-moment dance routine from crowd members who all looked like their name could easily be Bubba breaking it down county fair style.

Another highlight was the back-to-back performances of “Sunday in the South,” a No. 1 from 1989’s The Road Not Taken, a sweet reflection of sacred memories of growing up in the South, and “I Wanna be Loved Like That,” a touching ballad that was No. 3 hit in 1993 which includes a “Rebel without a Cause” movie reference with James Dean and Natalie Wood that I’ve always loved.

Hailing from Muscle Shoals, Ala., one of the biggest musical landmarks in this country, the band, of course, paid tribute to some of the legendary music that came out of that region – even if Raybon erroneously said no place had more hits at the time (seemingly forgetting Motown of Detroit and country music’s capitol of Nashville and others). This portion of the show included a medley of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” Hank Williams Jr.’s “Family Tradition,” Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” and culminated with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” which mentions Muscle Shoals and its legendary Swampers session players in its lyrics.

My favorite part of the concert was the two-song ender of the show that consisted of my two favorite Shenandoah songs and two of the group’s biggest hits – which were both No. 1s in 1989 – “Two Dozen Roses” and “The Church on Cumberland Road.”

While Shenandoah released its self-titled debut in 1987, the group truly broke through in 1989 with The Road Not Taken, which included “Two Dozen Roses, “The Church on Cumberland Road” and “Sunday in the South” and is truly a modern classic in what would become known as ‘90s country – a heyday, if not still somewhat underrated era for the genre.