Crew · p.72
Raylene Driskill — twenty-one years and a printing press.
Founder. On-call dispatcher. ETCP Entertainment Electrician (EE-15022). The one who answers the line at 03:00 and the one who actually wrote the daily-log book template the shop still uses. Twenty-one years in the trade — eight at a Birmingham touring shop, four as a remote engineer at NEP Group, nine on Cowan Street.
Raylene Driskill grew up in Madison, just north of the Cumberland River, in a house with a touring electrician for a father — Gerald Driskill, who worked the deck at the Ryman from 1979 until he retired in 2017, the same year his daughter signed the lease at 815 Cowan Street. (The dates are not coincidence. We don’t ask about it directly; we know what the file says.) Raylene’s first paid call was in 1999, helping her dad on a weekend at the Grand Ole Opry as a runner; her first ETCP card came in 2009, when the program was three years old and a card was still mostly a curiosity.
Birmingham, NEP, and the founding
She left Nashville in 2005 for a touring electrician position at Hightower Stage Productions in Birmingham — eight years, mostly arena country and southern-gospel circuit work, with a brief detour to Athens, Georgia, for an Athfest production-electrical contract that no longer exists. She came back to Nashville in 2013 to take a remote-engineer position at NEP Group, working broadcast OB vans for college football and one season of the NHL. Four years there gave her the ground-loop audit discipline that she still uses on every P-05 broadcast remote we ship.
2017 was the year. Gerald retired, the Ryman house electrician’s seat changed hands, and Raylene took the lease at Cowan Street with $12,000 of saved tour-per-diems and a U-Haul of cable. Marcus joined her in 2018; Etta in 2020; Hadley and Tobias in 2021 and 2023. The shop has not grown past six.
What she actually does, week to week
Dispatch is the official title; in practice the role is closer to person who knows where the binder is. Raylene works the advance queue Monday through Wednesday — reading rider documents from incoming tours, walking new venues with the AHJ, drafting cable manifests, scheduling the truck. Thursdays and Fridays she’s on the deck when the shows we have on the schedule run; Saturday mornings she walks Cowan Street with her dog (a Catahoula named Boots) and checks the rack and the printing press.
The printing press is from the previous owner of the bay — a Heidelberg Windmill platen press, 1953, in working condition though slowly losing its grip on the impression cylinder. Raylene runs it badly. The bound issues you read off the shelf at the bay door are printed on it; the press takes longer to operate than the issue takes to write. She has been muttering about replacing it with a Vandercook proof press for two years and never has.
The on-call line, at three in the morning
The 615 · 555 · 0418 number is her cell. It is forwarded to Etta on alternating weeks and to Marcus on the others; on the rest of the days, Raylene picks up. The longest call she has ever taken was at 02:47 CDT on 12 March 2023 — a touring opera company at TPAC whose pyrotechnic-effects rig had tripped a 40 A circuit during a load-in run-through, with the AHJ on site asking questions she could not answer without her binder. Raylene drove in, opened the binder, and the show went up at 19:30 the next day with the pyro re-circuited to a dedicated feed.
She has fielded over 4,000 dispatch calls since 2017. The book that records them is open to anyone in the trade who wants to read it. The last entry on the day this is filed reads: 22 May 2026, 22:14 CDT, J. Allen (production manager, Old Crow Medicine Show), audio iso reading from Ryman, 6 mA at the truck, advised to read at the iso XO instead; corrected, 0.2 mA, show power clean.
Reading shelf
Three books live in the truck cab. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949) — the conservation classic, particularly the “Land Ethic” essay, which Raylene reads while waiting for a generator to cool down. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (Knopf, 1974) — the Robert Moses biography, particularly the chapter on the Triborough Bridge’s electrical service installation. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — the maintenance-as-philosophy book, marked-up and underlined.
How to reach her
The dispatch line is the way for tour advances. For trade conversations — apprentice questions, a beer at Eastside Bowl, a long-form interview, a request to read Volume 7 of the daily-log book — email raylene@briley-stage.example. She reads it most weekday afternoons; her reply latency is typically twenty-four hours.