Cross Country set to play for Fall Concert Series
By Sherry Lucas
Cross Country will play at Lions Club Park the evening of Saturday, October 10. Pictured are band members David Cummings, Adam Miles and Jeff Brown.
Cross Country makes its Lions Club Park debut Saturday, October 10, 6:30-8:30 p.m., bringing the sweet sounds of ‘90s country to the crowd.
The concert, part of the Main Street Clinton Fall Concert Series, is free. Attendees should bring chairs or blankets for seating and can enjoy a night of music under the stars. Copeland’s BBQ food truck and The Big Sip beverage truck will be onsite to take care of dinner and refreshment needs.
The band began as a duo of David Cummings of Brandon and Jeff Brown of Madisonville, Louisiana. The percussionist and guitarist, both singers, built on their history in the full-time country band they’d been in, back in 1993-95, and revived as a band with monthly gigs back in 2022. But after they lost the band’s guitar player to brain cancer, and they tried but came up short on a replacement, they decided to strike out as a duo under a new name.
“Jeff and I got together the first time in February, to just say, hey, let’s just try this without a bass guitar, without a lead guitar, without, you know, keyboard, steel guitar, fiddle, whatever. Let’s just try and see if it works,” said Cummings, who grew up in Clinton. “We got together a couple of times at his house and said, yeah, this is absolutely going to work.”
Cummings and Brown split singing duties between them, and they’re doing the same music their band did thirty years back.
“It’s ‘90s country — Brooks and Dunn, Toby Keith, Kenny Chesney — and every once in a blue moon we may, if somebody requests a George Strait song, we’ll do one or two from the ‘80s,” Cummings said.
They perform without effects, processors, foot pedals or boxes.
“Every song that we do, and, for that matter that anyone does, was written by a songwriter with a guitar or a piano,” Cummings said, noting the tradition of songwriter nights, when one after another plays solo with just a guitar. It’s stripped down, and not overly produced.
“That’s kind of how we decided to approach these songs. … Let’s rein it in, dial it back, strip it down and play these songs, basically the way we think they were written. And, it’s with the emphasis on our vocals, and that’s always been the case. We’ve always tried to emphasize our vocals — lead vocals and harmony vocals.”
They recently added guitarist/singer Adam Miles of Pensacola to Cross Country, but their approach to the songs remains the same.
“We don’t add on a bunch of fluff. … It’s just a completely different approach.”
