Amongst the many artists that graced the free stages of the Iowa State Fair in 2023 was the vocal-driven band Rockland Road.
Named after a street just outside of Nashville, this family of six singers with 23 instrument talents all together represent four generations of music.
Mom Jamie Martin’s parents are Duane Allen, a member of The Oak Ridge Boys, and Grand Ole Opry background singer Norah Lee Allen, dad Paul Martin is a Grammy-winning artist, lead singer and guitarist of country-pop group Exile, and former member of Marty Stuart’s band.
“It’s kind of like when you have families that are a farming family, or maybe they are teachers and it seems like the kids will come along and become teachers as well,” Jamie said. “With musicians, it just seems like you’re passionate about music, and then you have kids, and they all love music. And it becomes something that we all love to do. And we’re like, hey, why not do this together?”
The four kids, split into two girls and two boys, March, Kell, Texas and Tallant all share the same love for music as their parents, growing up with a rich musical experience in Nashville and showing a knack for harmonies at a young age.
“We started doing this as a family in 2015,” Paul said. “I left Marty Stuart’s band to do this full time and we were pretty busy until the pandemic happened [in 2020]. And in the last probably 18 months, it just seems like there’s momentum we’re feeling because it just seems like people are constantly calling.”
It has helped that since the pandemic, the band has hit some big numbers on social media. Boasting 19 thousand followers on Facebook, eight thousand on TikTok and three thousand on Instagram. Their most popular post on TikTok is their cover of “Any Man of Mine” by Shania Twain that has over 42 thousand likes and 424 thousand views.
“It’s interesting, because with artists nowadays, self promotion is a really big thing,” Texas, the eldest of the two daughters, said. “Nowadays, you have to grow things yourself a lot with social media and in your music, because you used to just walk into a record label and you go and say ‘hey, I want to be a musician,’ and they would have to choose whether they want to have you. I think now, a lot of times, you could do so many things on your own.”
“It’s just really interesting for me, because 30 years ago, I was with the group Exile, and we were on arista records. And we were from the traditional side of things,” Paul said. “You got a record deal, you got a certain amount of money to go in and cut a record and then get somebody to do videos and book a tour to support the new record and promote it. And that’s obviously changed around now where you do music, and it [social media] is a big part of it.
“There’s a lot of artists out there right now, they may not even have a hit record on the radio, per se, but they get this massive amount of following where they can go and play arenas and sell them out,” Paul said.
And why not throw your hat in the ring?
“We were like, ‘well, we might as well try it.’ Just post random stuff like what we do on the road or all of our humor and just show people who we are as people,” Texas said. “I think it’s really impacted people and in a positive way. Because I think our number one thing is we don’t want to seem like we’re crazy, and we only care about the music. We want people to relate to us and we love talking and growing relationships with people. And it’s a lot of fun to record videos and post them for people and interact with people on social media.”
The band has posted covers from a wide range of artists, from Little Big Town to Elton John and beyond, singing whatever strikes a chord for them.
“We are all music lovers at heart, and students of music. We all love learning the backgrounds of all these artists that we grew up listening to,” Jamie said. “And I think when Paul and I grew up, you had AM radio and then FM radio came along and you would have such a wide variety, especially on AM radio, of genres all played on one station. You would hear so many different things. I think that probably fostered a love of lots of different styles of music for us.”
“It’s funny because most of my friends really resonate a lot with country music,” Texas said. “And probably just because there’s a lot of country artists here [in Nashville]. And I do love country music, but me growing up with my siblings, our parents raised us to really appreciate a good song as a good song. And there is no specific genre that has better songs than the other and I think when you appreciate music, and you grew up really listening to all different types, it’s fascinating how, now that all of us kids have gotten older, all of us like so many different genres of music.”
But don’t be mistaken, they’re not a cover band. The band currently has four original songs to their name; Caroline, Feels Like This, Mountains Up Ahead and, most recently, L.O.A (Love on Arrival).
“Our son [March] wrote it with a couple of great songwriting friends. Greg Barnhill, Grammy Award winning songwriter, and another great writing friend,” Jamie said. “But the song itself marked his own story about when you see someone for the first time and you know it’s the one and the feeling that goes along with it. It’s all about his own experience, so it’s pretty fun to sing.”
Everyone in the band writes material, but they aren’t afraid to look for songs outside the family.
“Here in Nashville there is such a huge community of songwriters that have just written some of the greatest material over the last 40 and 50 and 60 years,” Jamie said. “It’s just a songwriting town. So while we all write, we also appreciate great writers. We’re always looking for something that moves us, that gets your heart pumping. A great song with anthemic great big choruses and things that tell stories about real life.”
“Somebody like Willie Nelson, some of his biggest hits he didn’t write,” Paul said. “But Willie wrote Nightlife by Ray Pratchett, he wrote Crazy that Patsy Cline did. It was funny, some of the songs he wrote that he didn’t necessarily cut he had big hits on. But he recognized [that] to be a songwriter, it’s good, because it makes you appreciate a great song that somebody else writes.”
Their performance at the fair was before the new single was officially released, but that didn’t stop them from rocking the stage anyway.
“The Iowa State Fair has a great reputation. It’s like one of those fair’s that everybody in Nashville that has ever been on the road says ‘it’s a great fair!’” Paul said.
Since their creation, the band has performed at many high-profile venues such as the U.S. Library of Congress, the White House, the Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Cruise, but that doesn’t mean more lowkey shows at festivals, fairs and performing arts centers aren’t just as special.
“A lot of artists talk about this, and I completely agree, but there is a major difference with performing in front of a smaller crowd that you can see every single person that’s sitting in the audience, compared to a big crowd that you can’t really see their faces,” Texas said. “Personally, I’ve always been a little more nervous to play those types of shows because you are so close and personal. You are making eye contact with every single person in that room, you can see them, they can see you and it is very personal.”
This year was the group’s first time at the Iowa State Fair as a band, but Paul has graced the stage before.
“This is kind of a full circle moment,” he said. “When I was with the group Exile we played the Iowa State Fair years ago, I went back and did a little stint with the Oak Ridge Boys and their band and played there again about oh, gosh, 20 some years ago. And now coming back to it with my family, that’s what I didn’t see happening.”
And it truly is a family affair. The group has been and will continue to travel around the country to perform, which is a lot of time to spend together.
“It’s funny, because, with our family, I noticed that, yes, we are siblings and we most definitely have off days where we tend to argue and stuff, because we’re siblings, but I think also with that, and being with each other all the time, it actually has really made all of us close, and in ways that most families just aren’t,” Texas said. “And I think that being cooped up on a bus with each other for a while can get pretty boring and long. But after a while, you find ways to just communicate with each other and laugh and have fun in it.”
– Courtesy of Rockland Road on Instagram
So, how do you cope with the boredom?
“A lot of times, we’ll just sit, we’ll listen to music,” Texas said. “We actually have a deck of cards on the bus and we tend to play Gin Rummy or solitaire, just any card games. And we’ll watch movies, we’ll watch TikTok, all the stuff that you can really do to cure your boredom.”
And it helps that they make time for all the usual family road trip stuff, too.
“Sometimes we are traveling from one city to another, and we might end up with a day off in between or something,” Jamie said. “And whenever we can do that, on long trips, I always look around ahead of time and try to find something that’s maybe historical, maybe there’s a fun store to go into, there’s a museum, you know, just something kind of cool that we can go to that we might not otherwise get to see. We’ve gotten to see a lot of the country that way. The countryside and different monuments, like Mount Rushmore, things like that, where we could take a few minutes and or half a day, and go see something new.”
The band will be touring around the country for the remainder of August into September. You can find their new song L.O.A (Love on Arrival) on all music streaming platforms or via rocklandroad.com
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