The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show - Prater's Creek Gazette

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Arts and Music

The Prater's Creek Gazette

14th Issue Summer 2007 Page #9

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cello

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Local Band Celebrates 20 Years Of Pickin’ and Grinnin’ (Continued)

drovers photo

That next week “Uncle Carl” became a Drover. Rob and Ed had moved from Clemson to the Prater's Creek area between Six Mile and Pickens and were listening to nothing else but old time and bluegrass. With Carl joining the band at that time, they started playing nothin' but bluegrass. Hard driving bluegrass. They soon got a radio show on the former metal station, which was now an all talk formatted station. They bought their weekly time and Ed had to go sell ads to pay for the airtime. “Let me tell ya, I’m no salesman” Ed laughs and says. “I had my little spiel down though and I’d walk into a place of business and try to sell ‘em an ad. We kept the show afloat. Didn't make any profit but we were living a dream having our own show.” The show was on Saturday afternoons at 5:30 PM, right after some nationally syndicated gardening show. Matter of fact, WCCP would cut the gardening show short to run the show. Being AM, the show was the last broadcast of the day. They'd do a couple of numbers, read the ads, do another song, more ads, then a skit Ed would write. Some of these "radio dramas" appear on the band’s first two CDs. They had a pretty good audience. One Christmas Eve they kept rerunning the band’s Christmas show that had aired the week before. One of the greatest Christmas gifts I'll ever have is hearing that episode, interspersed with the Christmas episodes of the Burns and Allen Show, all day on Chirstmas Eve. Then they got lucky and the station went FM. The show was moved to Sundays at 5pm and was heard from Toccoa, GA to Flat Rock, NC. They had a huge audience, but still didn't turn a profit, then the station went “all sports”. The first Sunday that the show didn't air the station had nearly 200 phone calls asking “Where are The Drovers?!”

Around that time Ray Harper, a good friend of Carl's and an incredible fiddle player who had just left Carl Story and The Rambling Mountaineers, started Drovin'.

“Cecil”, the bass player and tenor singer, and Ed were also in another band, an "alt-country" band, named Six String Drag. The leader of that band had relocated to Raleigh, NC and the band had Sony and other major labels sniffing around. Cecil, Rob Keller in real life, moved up to Raleigh, and Ed met Lindsey Cole at a bluegrass jam. He had seen him the summer before at Shoal Creek Music Park and he was the life of the party. “Uncle Carl” said, "He's a real good picker". The first show he played with us, he was really into the entertainment part. He gave Ed a list of potential Drover stage names for himself to choose from. Well Ed liked the name “Dalvin” on his list. Lindsey threw back his head and cackled "That's my real middle name!”. Ed knew he'd be a true Drover. Then they played the first song and “Dalvin” started singing tenor to “Grandpa’s" lead. It was as good as “Cecil”'s! “Grandpa” didn't know how he'd replace “Cecil”, and here the new bass player sings tenor and they didn't even know he sang at all!

The band had put out a self- titled cassette in March 1991. Then Fundamental Records signed them and released their first CD, “It’s Sunday in Prater’s Creek” in Oct 1995. They recorded their second CD, "Melissa's Waltz" with “Dalvin” in the band. About that time they were lucky enough to be on "Diamond Cuts" a CD with all baseball songs by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Sam Bush. Their song "Baseball 94 (Major Greed Baseball)" off of the first CD was included. The song was about the strike in 1994 when there was no World Series for the first time since 1903. And it was about the love of the game that was passed down from Ed’s father to him. Well the band rode that publicity horse until it couldn't go no more. There were articles in the New York Times about "Diamond Cuts" and NPR's Morning News did a feature on it one morning. A national audience heard Dylan's song, and the only other song they played was “Baseball ’94. “I got us in every newspaper and on the local NBC news” Ed recalls.

Around this time “Clovis” got too busy raising a family to hardly ever play. But with his John Deere computer he started the band’s first website, which, according to Grandpa “the current one owes a thanks that could never be truly repaid”.

We asked Grandpa to give his Top Ten favorite moments in The Drovers. Here they are:

1. “Sitting around in the living room practicing with the band in the earliest days. Learning all of these great songs by our heroes.
2. “Playing a smokin’ set, that included the Dylan song, in Greenwich Village.”
3. “When we were without a bass player, and one Saturday afternoon somebody knocked on the door and all I could see against the sun was the outline of doghouse bass. Rob (Cecil) had bought it to rejoin the band!”
4. “When we played Freedom Weekend Aloft on the big stage and the governor, who was running for reelection, was supposed to give a speech before our set. We was running late and halfway through our set he, and his bodyguards, shows. I was afraid we would get cut short during the biggest gig of our lives. I told the crowd this and asked ‘Who do you wanna hear? The Drovers or the governor?!’ The crowd went crazy yelling "Drovers! Drovers!" When I asked "Do you wanna hear the governor give a speech, 40,000 people started booing. The next day in the paper, Gov. Campbell said he didn't give a speech because he "read the crowd's mood and knew they just wanted to party". Yeah, they wanted to Drove! At the end of the set, Clovis ran out into the audience during “The Ballad of Clovis” and almost knocked the governor over! Clovis didn’t even know he did it!”
5. “Playing the children’s hospital. One boy would get up out of his wheelchair and shake a leg during our fast numbers. The slow or medium tempo songs didn’t interest him at all. The nurses brought him to us as we played and he went right down the line looking us in the eye. Later the nurses told us that they could never get him out of his wheelchair to exercise, and that day they couldn’t keep him in it! The power of music”
6. “When we went hardcore bluegrass with the arrival of Uncle Carl and Cousin Ray
Then, when I thought the band's sound would never recover from Cecil’s departure, Dalvin shows up and we became better than ever!”
7. “The weekly radio show. Especially when we went FM. I always imagined some family from up north traveling down the interstate and hearing our show.”
8. “Opening for Ralph Stanley’s show and Ricky Skaggs’ show. A real bluegrass audience and both crowds loved us. After the Skaggs’ show, a woman came up to me and said ‘I like your singing. I’m gonna take you home’. The power of music”
9. “Playing in Saluda, NC, for the town’s big Pigout, four days after 9/11. The whole town was decked out in red, white, and blue and we played, and got the crowd to sing along with, ‘God Bless America’. I still get a basketball sized lump in my throat thinking about it.”
10. “Every fan we have ever earned, whether it be a child in a hospital that we were able to bring a smile to, soldiers overseas that write and say our music gets them through, some person who can barely afford to eat, but must buy our new CD, friends that we always see at Delaney’s in Columbia or other places we play alot, people who tell us ‘I got your autographed picture up on the wall in my garage, bedroom, hunting lodge, etc.’, or the cute little coed who wants to turn our show into ‘Girls Gone Wild’. We love ‘em all!”

“It’s too hard narrowing it down to 10, even 10 clean ones. Why I didn’t even mention playing the parties in the mountains in Auraria, GA (the black and white photo), playing the greatest bar ever, Jackson Station (the photo where I'm playing accordion), playing Hatiola every November, or the autographed picture Brooks Robinson sent me when he heard my song. Heck, I didn’t even list the Diamond Cuts CDs! Nor did I mention what it felt like the first time, and every time sense, that Cousin Ray plays "Big Mon"! Or the thrill of putting out an new album! Too hard to list just 10. Dang impossible!”

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