Ryder Lee and his bandmates were a little shocked the first time someone hauled off their trailer filled with instruments and equipment.
They were stunned when it happened again three years later in Boston. And they were downright flabbergasted when it happened a third time, two years later, from the front of Lee's Atlanta home.
"After that one, that was it. That was everything," Lee said.
If not for stubbornness and an unwavering faith that they were onto something with the band they started in high school, they might have called it a day. Instead, they laid out their options over some Atlanta soul food and decided they would borrow until they were broke and give it one more shot.
"We went back to Nashville and recorded the demos and the songs that got us the deal with BNA Nashville," Lee recalled.
People are also reading…
And they changed the band's name from Ryder Stokes — after Lee and the band's co-founder Stokes Nielson — to The Lost Trailers. The band — Nelson, Lee, Jeff Potter, Nielson's brother Andrew and Manny Medina — makes its Country Thunder mainstage debut next weekend.
They played the side stage at the Florence festival two years ago, around the time they were making their debut BNA album and radio was coming around to their first single, the rollicking "Holler Back."
The band got together at a religious high school in Virginia.
"It was a really strict place. You couldn't have a car and you couldn't go off campus," the 29-year-old Lee said. "It was a very structured day, but what they did give you was free time every night after study. We would run to the chapel and play the instruments. That's kind of how we started this whole thing.
"We had a lot of support. I remember our music teacher telling us the whole time, 'You guys can do this. You guys can do this.' I remember our headmaster was this really old guy. He had the horn-rimmed glasses, the stereotypical Virginia disciplinarian. And he came up after we played in a chapel service and said, 'You guys could really do this.' That was really, really powerful from someone who was from the old guard encouraging us."
After graduation, the guys moved to Nashville, where they hooked up with Medina and began playing "anywhere they would have us," Lee said. Willie Nelson's annual Fourth of July Picnic in Texas in 2000 was their first big break.
Over the years, they've developed an assured sound that's respectful of country's traditions while steeped in the here and now.
"We get a lot of folks who say. 'Hey, I really don't like country, but I loved your guys' show,'" Lee said. "To me, that's really powerful when you can reach across genre boundaries and bring more people into country music."
