Home Sweet Home: Yarger Performs at Grange Fair

When Adam Yarger was a young boy, he told his family he wanted to perform at the Grange Fair. On Aug. 20, that longtime dream came true.

“It was the best show of my life,” Yarger said. “It was extremely fun and the energy was insane. I was really blown away by how many people were there. It was great.”

The road to the grandstand at the Grange Fair did not come easy for Yarger. For the past couple of years, he’s been working non-stop in Nashville, trying to make a name for himself as a country artist.

And while performing at various venues in Nashville is a fun, coming home and performing was a bucket list item that Yarger got to scratch off at a relatively young age.

“It was a really sentimental night. I was really trying to hold back the tears. I’ve been going to the fair since I was a month old. I definitely had a lot of emotions flowing.”

It would be easy to say that Yarger always wanted to be a musician, but that’s not necessarily the case. In elementary school, he began wrestling. His passion for the sport grew as he got older, but he didn’t wrestle at the collegiate level. Instead, he went to Penn State and majored in kinesiology, but decided that wasn’t the career path he wanted to travel.

He worked in the family business — Yarger Precision Machining — before packing his bags and heading to Nashville.

There, the dream of being a performer truly began to take shape.

“It’s been an interesting road, to say the least. I definitely had some obstacles … but they led me to this path.

“But, this was something I always felt passionate about. I’ve always loved music. I’ve always been so attached to music and always felt a connection to it,” he said.

At the Grange Fair, Yarger said he hit a “home run.” With a pack grandstand — it holds approximately 5,000 people — he said he fed off the energy of the crowd.

“I thought we killed it,” Yarger said. “It was, without a doubt, my best performance: vocally, my stage presence, talking about stuff like that. I talked to the crowd and tried to keep everyone glued to me and entertained, even when I took a break.”

How did Yarger prepare for the show? A good, solid week of rehearsal, right?

Think again.

“We didn’t really have much time to rehearse, me and the band. We did about four songs during sound check and that was it. We did one song that I had never performed live. But the vocals were really on and I felt like the people were glued to me during the acoustic songs that I did, which was great,”

The Grange Fair crowd was Yarger’s largest show in his young career. He’d also never played a fair before, so that was a first.

“It will be tough to top. We know that we can top it, it’s just a matter of, how do we top it?

“It was such an amazing show.”

Besides the show, Yarger said that coming home has been great. In addition to performing, he’s spent time at the fair catching up with old friends and neighbors.

Before the Aug. 20 show, he simply walked around the fairgrounds and soaked it all in.

“It’s been a very humbling experience. I’ve seen a lot of people I know and a lot of people I didn’t know. Just getting a chance to talk to my friends and fans; it’s been one of the greatest experiences I’ve had,” Yarger said.

Now, it’s back to Nashville, where Yarger will try to use some of the Grange Fair energy to take the next step in his career.

“We have pictures, videos, interviews with fans. The next order of business is to take that ammunition and get it in front of the right people,” he said. “I’ve been doing everything on my own. We just need to find the right people to help propel me to the next step.”