Introduction
The most moving part of The Statler Experience may be what happens before anyone sings a note. At Staunton’s Happy Birthday America celebration, the sight of Wilson Fairchild alongside Jack and Davis Reid connects three generations of one musical family to a Fourth of July tradition the Statler Brothers began more than half a century ago. It invites a question familiar to anyone who has loved a song for decades: what happens to its meaning when the next generation makes it their own?
Wilson Fairchild is the duo of cousins Wil and Langdon Reid, sons of Statler Brothers members Harold and Don Reid. Jack and Davis are their sons. Together, the four perform as The Statler Experience, a show built around the songs, harmonies, stories, and humor associated with the original group. The family connection is unmistakable, but it is the music that gives that connection its force.
The Statler Brothers had a gift for making carefully arranged harmony sound like an easy conversation among friends. Their records could be playful one moment and deeply reflective the next. A song such as “Flowers on the Wall” still catches the ear through its wit and unusual perspective; “Elizabeth” asks for a gentler kind of attention. In either case, each voice has a place. Listeners remember the blend because they also remember the personalities within it.
That is why The Statler Experience carries a particular challenge. An audience arrives knowing how those old records sound. Wil, Langdon, Jack, and Davis can honor that memory through close harmony and familiar songs, while bringing their own voices and family stories to the stage. The pleasure lies in hearing something recognizable remain alive in the hands of people who grew up close to it. Their performance of “I’ll Go to My Grave Loving You” on Wilson Fairchild’s American Songbook project offers one recorded example of all four singing together.
Staunton gives the performance another layer of meaning. The Statler Brothers launched their hometown Independence Day celebration in 1970. After their final Happy Birthday U.S.A. concert in 1994, the community kept the celebration going; Wil and Langdon later helped carry it forward under the name Happy Birthday America. When the Reid family sings there, the setting recalls a long relationship between the group and the town that first gathered to hear them.
For longtime fans, that can make a familiar chorus feel newly affecting. The original voices belong to their records and to memory. The voices onstage belong to another generation, with its own years of singing still ahead. Wilson Fairchild and Jack and Davis Reid offer listeners a chance to hear both truths at once: the Statler Brothers’ songs have a history worth cherishing, and people are still finding their way into them together.