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Aspiring country singer Kate Hasting grew up showing horses at the Clark County Fair. Now she's back from Nashville to close the 2011 fair.
Kate Hasting brings country home to Clark County
Local musician returns from pursuing a career in Nashville to close out the Clark County Fair on Friday
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By Andrew McGinn,
Staff Writer
3:10 PM Thursday, July 28, 2011
NEW CARLISLE — For many of the aspiring singers and songwriters who move to Nashville every week, the inner circles of Music City must initially seem like they’re hidden behind some impenetrable wall.
Come to find out, though, it’s a lot like running into Trace Adkins in a pig barn at the Clark County Fair.
That’s not just a poor analogy, either.
“I just ran into him,” Kate Hasting recalled. “He’s this huge man. A brick wall.”
Hasting was a 9-year-old country music fan and local 4-H’er with a horse.
Adkins was a 6-foot-6-inch country singer with a No. 1 hit, “(This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing.”
On Friday, Hasting will close the 2011 Clark County Fair by playing the exact same stage Adkins did back in 1997.
Fourteen years ago, the seemingly imposing country star turned out to be a down-to-earth guy who was trying to build a fan base one livestock barn at a time.
“He spent an hour just learning about my horse,” Hasting, now 23, marveled. “That memory is burned into me eternally. I thought, ‘That’s how it’s supposed to be.’ ”
A 2006 graduate of Northwestern High School, she’s now the young singer and songwriter who has everything to prove.
But thanks to that chance encounter — and a realization that everybody in Nashville puts on their jeans one leg at a time, too — Hasting has a sense of how best to get it done.
Moving there, as she did barely a month ago, hasn’t been scary at all, she confessed.
But our gal ain’t exactly naive, either.
“I once heard that Jason Aldean did 15 showcases and heard 15 no’s. Finally, it was like, ‘Here’s the record deal,’” Hasting said. “There are going to be hard times, but good music has a way of surviving.”
Her move to Nashville isn’t just a shot in the dark, though.
Hasting practically spent every weekend for the past year and a half in Nashville, making connections and building partnerships.
“I’ve tread some serious water in the past year,” she said.
For example, she can already claim to have written songs with a Grammy-winning songwriter.
Two songs on her new album, “Playing With Fire,” were written with Don Rollins, one-half of the songwriting duo who wrote “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” for Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett in 2003.
Hasting’s new album will be available Friday at her fair show.
Had she not started spending so much time in Nashville, Hasting might have earned her biology degree by now from Wright State University.
“This isn’t what I wanted to do with my life at all,” she said.
Hasting has, at best, 15 credits left, which she calls “a normal person’s quarter.”
She still wants to finish school, and maybe one day she’ll become the reconstructive surgeon she once intended.
But the honest truth is this — writing songs came a lot easier than dissecting frogs.
“That was a love, but this was a passion,” she said. “This was a reason to get up in the morning.”
And while she now has all the fans in the world to win, Hasting is perfectly willing to offend at least one.
“What’s more fun,” she wondered, “than burning an ex at the Clark County Fair with a song you wrote?”
Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.
How to go
Who: Kate Hasting
When: 7 p.m. Friday
Where: The Big Tent at the 2011 Clark County Fair
Admission: Free with $5 gate admission (plus $3 for parking)
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