State Band Statues: Feels So Right, or Take Me Down?

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State Band Statues: Feels So Right, or Take Me Down?

May 24, 2008

The country music supergroup Alabama will soon be honored with a statue in City Park in its hometown of Fort Payne, AL. Three of the members grew up there, and all four have lived in the vicinity. Local news accounts cite the band’s pedigree and civic-mindedness as justification for the statue, which depicts them as bearded balladeers of the 1980s.

It’s beside the point whether a statue to a still-living, successful musical group is a testament to local pride, or a marketing ploy for concert and back catalog sales. As our Alabama relatives like to say, “The cork is out of the pig’s butt,” and that’s certainly true when it comes to statues saluting live and dead musicians, real and fictitious TV personalities, and cartoon characters.

Do other groups named for states deserve their own statues?

Kansas could have its own music legend monument on the plains, a place of windswept solitude, where aging fans recall that they are “Dust in the Wind.”

After Kansas, the case for state band statuehood gets weaker.

The band Delaware actually hails from Norway, so there’s not much chance of a monument to them in the Blue Hen State. Oregon already has a crater on the moon named after one of its songs, so it doesn’t really need a statue. But who knows, maybe someone will want to immortalize the still-hitless Missouri, Idaho, and even bubbly Alaska!

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