Chasing the Back Roads

About this edition: This is the first public preview of a planned book about CRE and founder Eddie Smith. The history will continue to grow as more memories, photographs, original recordings and contributions are documented.

Prologue — The Road Before the Road

There is a version of Country Road Entertainment that can be told in a handful of sentences. A man who loved country music started sharing local show listings around Chandler, Arizona. He picked up a camera, began meeting musicians, expanded into interviews and video production, and built an independent entertainment brand.

Every word of that is true. It also leaves out nearly everything that made the story matter.

It leaves out the family influences that came before the first Facebook post. It leaves out the dream of turning a passion into a profession while earning a living in an entirely different field. It leaves out Carly, the woman Eddie Smith calls his inspiration, and the years when their life together became part of CRE's public identity. It leaves out the musicians, bartenders, venue owners, photographers, organizers, collaborators and audiences who gave the company room to grow.

And it leaves out how much life can happen between one show and the next: a tragedy that brought a community together, the sudden silence of stages during a pandemic, a marriage that ended, a life lived on the open road, years shaped by serious illness, and a return to the work that never entirely went away.

This is not a story about an overnight success. It is a story about a long ambition, an unfinished company and the people who made its history possible.

Chapter One — Long Before the First Camera

Eddie Smith's relationship with country music began long before the name Country Road Entertainment existed. Born in New Jersey, he spent part of his childhood in the rural countryside around Holland Township, close to the Pennsylvania border. It was a different New Jersey from the one many people picture: country roads, open spaces and a family life in which music could travel as easily as conversation.

His father, a Marine veteran and longtime truck driver, was an important early influence. On drives and in everyday life, Eddie absorbed the voices and stories of artists such as George Strait, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, The Oak Ridge Boys and Waylon Jennings. Country music was not a costume or a business niche he discovered later. It was part of the soundtrack of growing up.

The family moved to Arizona in 1992. The Southwest would eventually become the setting for the company, but the musical interests followed him there. Eddie played guitar when he was younger and sang in his twenties, including a period performing as a Johnny Cash impersonator. Long before he started telling artists' stories, he had experienced what it meant to stand on the performing side of music.

His professional life moved in a different direction. Information technology became a career spanning decades, with the responsibilities, long hours and problem-solving that came with it. He learned how systems were built, how businesses operated, how digital platforms worked and how to keep going when something broke. Those skills would later prove useful in running an independent media business with limited resources.

But IT was never the entire picture. Eddie wanted a creative career as well. Photography, live entertainment, the people behind the songs and the communities gathered around them offered more than an occasional weekend escape. He wanted to build something that could one day support him professionally.

That distinction matters. Country Road Entertainment was never merely a distraction that accidentally became a company. It was an attempt to turn something deeply personal into a lasting livelihood.

Chapter Two — Chandler Country: One Question, a Bigger Idea

By 2016, Eddie was living in Chandler, Arizona, and reconnecting with the local country music scene. He kept running into an ordinary frustration: finding out who was playing, at which venue and on which night took more effort than it should have. The information existed, but it was scattered across band pages, bar calendars, individual posts and word of mouth.

He decided to make it easier.

The earliest project, known as Chandler Country, was built around helping fans discover live country music. A Facebook community and regular show listings brought together details that audiences otherwise had to chase down themselves. The posts were practical, but the underlying idea had much larger potential. If fans could find the performers, more people could show up. If more people showed up, the artists and venues had another chance to thrive.

In a 2022 interview with VoyagePhoenix, Eddie remembered moving quickly from daily listings into traveling from venue to venue and filming performances. Viewers began following the content; musicians began recognizing the value of another outlet willing to show up and document their work. Some listings eventually reached beyond Chandler and the Phoenix area, including other parts of Arizona and the Rocky Point music scene in Mexico.

A camera changed the character of the work. What had started as information about an upcoming show became a way to capture the show itself: the performance, the musicians, the room and the people who were there. Instead of simply announcing that something was happening, Eddie could show why it mattered.

By January 2017, Country Road Entertainment had emerged as the more ambitious identity for that project. Photography and video work began opening doors to promotional assignments, artist relationships, event planning and bookings. The company was still small, but its mission was no longer limited by city boundaries.

One early memory remains especially important to the brand's identity. At Bourbon Jacks in Chandler, Eddie recalls hearing Nathan Dean perform “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Something about that moment—the song, the setting and the sense of direction—helped crystallize a name that could travel far beyond Chandler Country. The surviving archive will eventually help establish the exact date of that naming moment. Its significance, however, is already part of CRE's own oral history.

The road was becoming more than a lyric or a location. It was becoming the name of the work Eddie wanted to do.

Chapter Three — When the Music Community Needed More Than Promotion

On October 1, 2017, the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas became the scene of a mass shooting that devastated the country music community. For people connected to the Arizona live-music circuit, the tragedy was not distant news. It reached musicians, fans, families and friends who had shared those same songs and spaces.

Within days, a tribute and fundraising event took shape in Chandler. On October 7, musicians and community members gathered at Tom Ryan's Saloon for Arizona's Tribute to the Route 91 Festival Tragedy. Contemporary reporting identified Hayley Boult, Joel Maze and Eddie Smith as organizers and reported that all three had attended Route 91. The event involved local performers, donations, raffles, food and people who wanted to do something useful for those affected.

Mandy Martin, formerly of Pride Group in the Phoenix area, also helped organize the fundraiser. Eddie Smith credits her contribution as part of the event’s organizing effort, alongside the organizers named in contemporary reporting and the many performers, volunteers and community members who made the benefit possible.

That detail about shared credit is important. The event was not the accomplishment of one person or one brand. It belonged to a community that came together after something terrible, and it deserves to be remembered that way. News outlets including KTAR and ABC15 documented the effort; CRE's own account also recalls a related 12 News/KPNX appearance.

For Country Road Entertainment, the benefit marked an early public example of a principle that would continue through later years. The platform was capable of being more than a schedule, an advertising opportunity or a collection of videos. It could be used to bring people together when the community needed one another.

As the brand grew, that same spirit showed up in different forms: helping artists reach unfamiliar audiences, supporting local events, recording performances and offering a little more visibility to musicians who did not have the budget or promotional machinery of a major label.

Not every project carried the gravity of Route 91. Most were smaller and more routine. But the accumulated work mattered. Those were the nights, introductions and relationships out of which the business was actually built.

Chapter Four — Carly, Inspiration, and a Dream Shared in Public

No account of Country Road Entertainment can be complete without Carly.

When Eddie is asked what she meant to the company, his answer is direct: “She was my inspiration.” It is a short sentence, but it changes the center of the story. Carly was not simply a person who appeared in photographs or stood alongside the founder at events. She mattered to Eddie and to the years in which he was trying to turn his passion into the career he imagined.

CRE's early audience watched a public-facing business evolve alongside a personal life. As the platform expanded, travel, events, behind-the-scenes coverage and the relationships surrounding the work became part of what viewers recognized. Eddie described the growing operation in his 2022 interview as becoming a family business. That phrase belongs in the record, just as Carly does.

An honest history should give people their place without inventing details about them. The complete story of Carly's creative work, her individual responsibilities and the memories the two shared still deserves to be documented through photographs, videos, production credits and firsthand recollections. What is already clear is that she was part of a formative chapter of Eddie's life and CRE's development.

The marriage eventually ended. That fact cannot—and should not—be erased to make the history tidier. Nor should it become a license to speculate about private causes, assign blame or treat the years they shared as if they had never happened. A relationship can change, and its importance to a person's past can remain.

For the company, those years are part of the story of making things together, stepping into new opportunities and learning how complicated the boundary between personal life and public creative work can become. The eventual separation was one of several profound changes that affected Eddie's life during CRE's most ambitious period.

This history gives Carly the recognition Eddie has specifically asked for: not as an afterthought and not as a character to be written out, but as the inspiration he remembers when he looks back on what he was trying to build.

Chapter Five — More Than a Facebook Page

The first years of CRE produced more than show listings. They produced the beginnings of a working entertainment company.

By the spring of 2018, Eddie was leaning further into vlogs and behind-the-scenes storytelling. An artist could be introduced through a song, but a longer video could reveal the hours behind a performance, the travel, the humor, the frustrations and the people who kept a band moving. Photography remained important, yet the work increasingly mixed photographs, interviews, live coverage and original reporting.

Arizona's country scene supplied the first cast of characters: bands such as Nathan Dean & The Damn Band and venues including Bourbon Jacks and Tom Ryan's. CRE's historical articles preserve reviews, conversations about the region's best country bars, music releases and the local honky-tonk environment. A 2018 country-bar feature, published later on the website, remains one example of the firsthand coverage that helped distinguish the operation from a simple promotional calendar.

Other opportunities reached into Arizona's broader western and entertainment community. Eddie recalls projects and promotions connected to Horses Help, Cowboy Lifestyle Network, Hollywood Entertainment, Coors Light and NASCAR weekend activities at what was then Phoenix International Raceway. They did not all involve the same kind of work, and their exact production credits belong in the growing archive. Collectively, they show the widening range of a brand that was learning by doing.

Behind every public post were less visible jobs: coordinating with performers, editing footage, learning the limits of available equipment, maintaining websites, handling promotion and figuring out which projects were worth pursuing. Eddie's technology background made some parts familiar, but producing original entertainment content brought a different set of demands.

There was business ambition behind it. Sponsorships, promotional assignments, advertising and commissioned media helped turn attention into revenue. The goal was not to remain a hobby forever; it was to establish enough dependable income to make the creative work his primary profession. The road toward that goal was uneven, and the resources available to a small independent operation could change quickly.

Still, CRE was becoming recognizable as its own media identity: somewhere artists could be photographed, interviewed, reviewed, promoted or simply encountered by a fan who had never heard their name before.

Chapter Six — Inside Studio CRE: Keeping the Conversation Alive

The timing could hardly have been more difficult. As 2020 began, Eddie was preparing a new program called Inside Studio CRE. Then the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted touring, closed stages and made normal live entertainment impossible for months.

Instead of abandoning the concept, he expanded it into an interactive livestream and interview series. Artists could join remotely, tell their stories, discuss the realities of a suddenly interrupted industry and stay connected with the audiences who could no longer see them at a venue. The work shifted from finding the next show to finding ways to keep the conversation going when shows had stopped.

An early livestream featured Bill Bogan of Nathan Dean & The Damn Band after touring plans had been thrown into uncertainty. Over time, the program brought in musicians from beyond Arizona and gave them room for conversations that could not be squeezed into a short promotional clip. CRE's interview and audio archive includes names such as Scott Haggard, Ashley Wineland, Gabe Garcia, Josh Roy, Kaleb Austin, David Adam Byrnes, Dallas Burrow, Shari Rowe, Wyatt Putman, Kassi Linn and many others. A full episode-by-episode archive remains an important future project.

The publicly available audio distribution lists 43 installments, beginning in April 2020. Eddie remembers a much larger body of livestreams, videos and related productions—roughly 100 in all. Those figures describe different parts of the archive, not necessarily conflicting totals. For the moment, the accurate statement is that dozens of episodes are publicly indexed, with more original programming still to be cataloged.

The show was a production undertaking as much as a conversation series. Each broadcast called for preparation, technical troubleshooting, audio and video decisions, guest coordination, and the confidence to conduct interviews while the entire world was improvising new ways to communicate.

May 2020 brought another milestone. CRE announced a partnership with 94.1 KRDE The Ride, an Arizona country radio station with its own connections to local musicians, events and western culture. The partnership reflected a continuing effort to put independent media and established radio audiences in contact with one another.

The pandemic also brought harder business realities. Sponsorship support became less predictable, live work was disrupted and the economics of a small media operation grew more difficult. But Inside Studio CRE demonstrated that the company could adapt its format without abandoning its purpose.

The microphone could travel where the camera could not. The music community remained within reach.

Chapter Seven — The Marriage Ends, the Road Opens

By the time Eddie spoke publicly about CRE in 2022, he was candid that the journey had not been easy. The company had faced criticism, competitive tensions, lost sponsorships and a divorce during a period of significant growth. The account he gave then did not present the enterprise as a fairy tale. It presented it as work he intended to keep doing.

The end of the marriage changed his personal life and inevitably changed the landscape around a business that had grown so closely connected to it. That chapter deserves honesty rather than melodrama. The record does not need invented private conversations or a neat explanation for every decision made afterward.

There was also another idea pulling Eddie forward: life on the open road. In August 2022 he established Texas as his legal home, and later that year he began living and traveling full-time in an RV. It was a sustained way of life, not a weekend escape and not simply a symbol in a story about heartbreak.

The road provided a different kind of working environment. Eddie could maintain remote technical work while traveling, continue filming and find stories in places that were easy to overlook when life was confined to a single city. The country music didn't disappear; it acquired a wider landscape. Bars and stages remained important, but so did roadside towns, festivals, western traditions, everyday travel problems and the people encountered between destinations.

The original identity of Country Road Entertainment proved well suited to the new chapter. The name was now literally part of the job. A brand born in Chandler could follow its founder across state lines and still make sense.

The road was a choice with its own freedom, practical demands and surprises. It also offered a reminder that CRE did not have to look the same in every decade. The idea could evolve while remaining recognizable to people who had followed it from the beginning.

Chapter Eight — The Years That Changed Everything

In 2023, life interrupted the journey more forcefully than any business setback had.

While in Texas, Eddie experienced a severe medical crisis involving kidney failure. After returning to Arizona, he suffered two pulmonary embolisms. These were life-threatening events that shifted his attention away from travel schedules, cameras and production plans toward a more immediate priority: recovery.

It is tempting, when writing a dramatic biography, to connect every medical event into one seamless explanation. That would not be responsible here. The sequence is part of Eddie's account; the precise medical causes and connections between events are not established by the public materials used for this edition. The story does not need exaggerated certainty to communicate the seriousness of what happened.

Serious illness affects far more than the days spent receiving treatment. There is the work postponed, the equipment left unused, the travel made impossible and the uncertainty of what the body will be able to do next. For someone who had tried to build a creative life alongside an established technical career, those interruptions carried professional consequences as well as personal ones.

On July 3, 2025, Eddie underwent total hip replacement surgery. Recovery continued during a period when he was living in Prescott Valley, Arizona. Northern Arizona became another setting in the long story of CRE: quieter in some respects, but not disconnected from the music, the website or the audience he had spent years cultivating.

Some projects slowed. The original interview program did not simply resume at its former pace. The demands of producing ambitious video and livestream content remained real, especially without the financial and technical support of a larger media company. Still, the brand endured in the forms that were possible.

The important fact about those years is not that Eddie was invincible. He wasn't. It is that his history with CRE did not end when his health changed, even when carrying the original vision forward required patience and a different plan.

Chapter Nine — Back to the Valley, Back to the Dream

In late September 2026, Eddie returned to the greater Phoenix area, near the region where Chandler Country first took shape a decade earlier. The return did not recreate the exact circumstances of 2017. The industry had changed, social platforms had changed, and so had the person running the company.

The renewed operation increasingly centered on editorial work and the digital reach of Country Road Entertainment: current country music news, original commentary and features, historic coverage, artist profiles, social conversations and the gradual restoration of material from earlier years. CRE's Facebook audience was growing again, sometimes rapidly, while older posts continued to find new readers and viewers.

One of the clearest expressions of the company's original mission arrived with the CRE Rising 25, a weekly editorial ranking launched publicly in August 2026 to follow emerging country artists across the United States. The chart evaluates music, audience growth, live performances and other career signals. It is built around a principle Eddie wants to preserve: artists do not buy their way onto the list.

Alongside the chart came renewed attention to independent artist profiles and to the old recordings, interviews and stories that risked disappearing under years of newer posts. Artists such as Ashley Wineland, Nathan Dean & The Damn Band, Matt Farris and others connect multiple periods of CRE's story. Newer names point toward where the next chapter may lead.

A business that began with a simple question—Who's playing tonight?—was once again trying to help audiences answer a larger one: Who should we be paying attention to next?

There are limits to what a one-person independent media operation can do at once. Returning the full Inside Studio CRE production format, expanding original video, financing travel and building a sustainable business model are meaningful ambitions, but ambition alone does not pay production costs or create extra hours in a day. For now, the editorial side of CRE is part of the foundation for what may come next.

It would be misleading to call this a brand-new venture. It would be equally misleading to pretend nothing has changed. Country Road Entertainment is a long-running creative project in another period of rebuilding, equipped with years of history, an existing audience and ideas that still reach beyond the resources currently available.

Most of all, the professional dream is still there. Eddie never set out simply to accumulate social-media posts. He wanted to spend his working life around music, storytelling and the people who make the songs. The path has been longer and less predictable than he anticipated, but the ambition that brought him into the local venues of Chandler remains recognizable.

Epilogue — The Story Isn't Finished

A complete history of Country Road Entertainment will take more than one article. It will need the original photographs and footage; flyers saved from old shows; full credits for producers, guests and event organizers; accounts from people who remember those years differently; and the details that return when a familiar song or an old image brings a forgotten evening back into focus.

It will need Carly's proper place in the story, not only as a name in a chapter but as the inspiration Eddie says she was. It will need the artists who took a chance on an emerging outlet, the collaborators who made an event possible and the people who showed up before anyone could know what CRE might become.

It will also need room for the difficult material. The broken plans, relationships that changed, financial uncertainty and physical setbacks are not interruptions to an otherwise perfect success story. They are part of the true account of an independent company attempting to survive long enough to become what its founder imagined.

This published edition is therefore an invitation, not a closing statement. It is the first public version of a living history and a glimpse of a book Eddie hopes one day to write in full. As more evidence, memories and original media are gathered, the chapters can grow and the record can become richer and more precise.

The road hasn't reached its final page. Neither has Country Road Entertainment.

From the historical record

• Eddie Smith's May 5, 2022 VoyagePhoenix interview — a first-person account of CRE's origins, career ambition, changes and early operations.
• KTAR's October 6, 2017 Route 91 benefit coverage — contemporary reporting on the Chandler benefit and its organizers.
• ABC15's report on the Chandler Route 91 benefit — additional coverage and participant testimony.
• CRE's May 14, 2020 KRDE partnership announcement — the original company announcement.
• Inside Studio CRE — Original Podcast Archive — the original podcast hosting archive.
• About Country Road Entertainment — the current public overview of the company.

Country Road Entertainment is independently owned and operated and is not affiliated with Country Road TV. This is a historical feature, not a final or exhaustive account. Last editorial update: October 2026.