Statler (and Staunton) Made: The Fair's Grandstand Brings a Family Legacy Home
The Statler Brothers were Staunton to the bone — a gospel-schooled country quartet that sold millions and never left home, throwing an annual Fourth of July "Happy Birthday U.S.A." bash in their hometown for decades. So there's a particular rightness to this: the next generation is playing the Rockingham County Fair grandstand next month, an easy drive up the interstate from where it all started.
On Sunday, August 9, the fair's Pepsi Grandstand hosts "The Statler Experience," featuring Wilson Fairchild alongside Jack and Davis Reid. Wilson Fairchild is Wil Reid and Langdon Reid — sons of Statler Brothers Harold and Don Reid — a Staunton-based duo who've spent years walking the tightrope every legacy act knows: honor the catalog, but make your own footprints. Their recent "Statler Made" project leaned all the way into the inheritance, and reporting has noted it cracking the Billboard charts, proof that the harmonies didn't skip a generation.
It's the sweet spot of a strong grandstand week. The following night, Monday, August 10, brings red-dirt breakout Flatland Cavalry with Virginia's own Jack Wharff Band. And Tuesday, August 11 — press day, as it happens, for this very archive — puts '90s hitmaker Clay Walker on the grandstand with Spencer Hatcher, 7 p.m. Three nights, three flavors of country, one county fairground.
Why does the Fairchild night matter more than a nostalgia package has any right to? Because the Valley's country lineage is not a museum exhibit — it's a working, local, still-touring thing, and it lives about forty minutes down I-81 from the grandstand. When Wil and Langdon sing their fathers' parts, they're not covering a legend; they're doing the family business in the family's backyard. Staunton doesn't have to import its heritage. It raised it.
The fair grandstand is also, frankly, one of the biggest rooms the Valley offers all year — a reminder that between the club shows and the church-hall festivals, we host genuine arena-sized country nights without leaving Rockingham County. The corn dogs are a bonus. And the booking is smarter than a fairground has to be: pairing the Statler legacy with a red-dirt breakout like Flatland Cavalry and a '90s radio staple like Clay Walker across three nights is a fair-sized survey of where mainstream country has traveled in a generation — bought at a single gate price if you planned ahead.
Bring the whole family; that's the entire idea. The Statlers built a career on the notion that hometown, harmony, and a little gospel uplift travel together. Two generations later, on a Sunday night under the grandstand lights, the Valley gets to hear the proof — and then do it two more nights running.
Sources: Rockingham County Fair announces musical guests (Rocktown Now); Clay Walker, Aug 11 at Rockingham County Fair (SeatGeek); Wilson Fairchild returns to share Statler Brothers heritage (Augusta Free Press)