Backroad Anthem keeps driving after singer's death
About two weeks before Christmas, Backroad Anthem singers Toby Freeman and Craig Strickland made their final songwriting trip of the year to Nashville. Their Arkansas-based country band typically spent a week or more each month working in Music City, inching closer to the dream of a record deal.
On this trip, the men wrote songs with their producer Jody Stevens and hit songwriter Bart Butler. They were supposed to meet with fellow country singer/songwriter Jaren Johnston, but the appointment fell through and they started the eight-hour drive back to Fayetteville, Ark., near the Oklahoma border.
The trip was the last work engagement the band had for the year — and the last drive the men would make to Nashville. The day after Christmas, Strickland, 29, went duck hunting with 22-year-old friend Chase Morland on Kaw Lake in Oklahoma. Morland tweeted before the trip: “In case we don’t come back, @BackroadCRAIG and I are going right through Winter Storm Goliath to kill ducks in Oklahoma.”
They didn’t come back. Their simple flat-bottomed John boat capsized sometime on Dec. 26 or 27 in the lake that was pummeled with strong wind gusts and high water levels. Morland’s body was found Dec. 28, and Strickland's remains were located Jan. 4 after a week of intense searching. Strickland was buried Tuesday in Arkansas.
Moving forward
The members of Backroad Anthem plan to continue the band in the wake of Strickland’s death — but first they have to figure out how to move forward personally.
“I’ve met a lot of singers and a lot of songwriters over the years, and I’m not sure that I’ve met very many people that were as driven and exciting and had as vibrant personality as Craig,” said Stevens, who also helped produce Luke Bryan’s last album. “But the band is so good that they’re going to be OK going into the future. Obviously, none of us will ever be able to forget that Craig had a very large part in getting them to this point.”
The group — which includes Freeman, Eric Dysart (fiddle), Josh Bryant (lead guitar), Brandon Robold (bass guitar) and Isaac Senty (drums) — recalled Strickland’s effervescent personality, his dedication to God, his love of his wife, Helen, and his passion for their band. They got an inkling something was amiss with the duck-hunting trip when Strickland's father, Randy, sent them a late-night text on Dec. 26 and asked them to start praying for their friend. Strickland’s family hadn’t been able to contact him for several hours, and Morland’s family hadn’t heard from him, either.
“At that point, we kind of thought this was normal behavior for Craig,” Senty said. “His phone would die a lot. We thought he probably didn’t charge his phone or he dropped it in the water. It’s not out of the ordinary. It got weird for all of us when we heard that Chase hadn’t responded to any texts, either.”
Morland and Strickland were reported missing on Dec. 27, and the next day, Senty and his wife drove Strickland’s wife through the winter storm to Tulsa, Okla., to be closer to the search area.
“The roads were icy, there was sleet coming down, people couldn’t drive anywhere,” he recalled. “The winds were really strong. It was part of the realization process for me, that it was serious.”
Dysart described the next few days as “really tough” and “crazy.”
“You don’t think that anything like this could happen, so you’re still holding onto hope,” the fiddle player said. “But there’s something that’s telling you that everything is different.”
Due in part to Morland’s foreboding tweet before the trip, national media took interest in the men’s disappearance. Regular updates on the search rallied support and prayer from thousands of strangers.
With the attention, came criticism. Members watched as Morland’s tweet — which they’re convinced was meant to be funny — was dubbed ominous and made headlines. They stayed quiet as their friend was criticized for hunting in extreme conditions. Bryant — also an avid hunter — said such weather was the best time to kill ducks.
“That’s the kind of stuff you like to hunt in,” he said. “A lot of people are making it like they shouldn’t have gone in that weather. The reality is an accident happened and the water was really high. Going hunting in that kind of weather isn’t unheard of. There were other people that were hunting.”
When his friends heard how Strickland was found — that he had pulled himself out of the water and was lying on a hill in the position of a cross and staring at the sky — they said they knew how Strickland’s life ended. Given Strickland’s knowledge of hunting and the outdoors, Freeman is convinced that his friend knew he was battling hypothermia and was “in his final moments.”
“He was getting his mind right and his heart right,” Freeman said. “I can see Craig talking to his wife, to his family. I can see Craig talking to us. Most importantly, Craig was talking to God. Craig was making sure everything was good in his life and everything was good with God. For them to find him like that, it only shows more how passionate he was about the biggest things in his life.”
What's next
Saturday, four days after Strickland’s funeralin the church where they all met — the men will play their first show without him. The concert in his honor will be at George’s Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville. They’re convinced it’s what Strickland would have wanted.
“Not one moment was there ever a thought to any of us. Knowing the person Craig was, that’s what he lived and breathed was the band, and his passion was something that none of us had seen before when we met him,” Dysart said. “We’ll forever be changed by that and pushing forward is the only way to do it.
“He would want us to move on more than anything,” Freeman said. “Once we get past this stage, we’re going to dig down really deep as a band in writing and musically, and we’re going to make this happen.”
Before Strickland’s death, Backroad Anthem was growing their careers. Members recently upgraded their touring vehicle from an SUV to a sprinter van, and their manager was talking to major record labels about signing the group. CMT added the group’s video for “Torn," and the group is gearing up to release “Torn” — that Strickland, Freeman, Stevens and others co-wrote — independently to country radio.
“Craig was just so fired up,” said the band’s manager, Peter Hartung of Nashville-based L3 Entertainment. “We just feel like he’s steering this. It’s one of those bittersweet situations where you try and make something good out of a tragedy. We want to do some good things for Craig’s memory.”
Reach Cindy Watts at 615-664-2227 or ciwatts@tennessean.com.
About the band
Backroad Anthem formed three years ago after meeting through playing music in church. While the group’s roots are Christian, its music is contemporary country with each of its five remaining members bringing influences ranging from hard rock to bluegrass and '90s country.
“We’re trying to build this huge catalog of songs and we’re meeting with (record) labels,” said singer Toby Freeman. “The more you’re in Nashville, the more opportunity you have for stuff to happen.”
The group, best known in the Arkansas area, has opened for country artists including Dustin Lynch and Eli Young Band.
Music tragedies
Backroad Anthem is far from the first group to rebound after the loss of a key band member.
Queen still plays shows together despite singer Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991 of AIDS-related pneumonia.
Metallica’s Cliff Burton was killed in a tour bus accident in 1986 in Sweden.
The Who lost drummer Keith Moon to a drug overdose in 1978 and bass player John Entwistle died at 57 in his Las Vegas hotel room just as the group was about to launch a U.S. tour in 2002.
AC/DC lead singer Bon Scott died in 1980 after a night of partying.
Lynyrd Skynyrd lost three members — Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines — in a 1977 plane crash at the peak of the band’s success.
The Allman Brothers Band lost leader Duane Allman when he was killed in a motorcycle crash in 1971.
Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died in 1995 in a rehabilitation clinic of a heart attack.