Huff with Lady Antebellum's Charles Kelley.
Courtesy of Rita Huff
If you have ever attended any of country music’s major events, you have no doubt noticed the cluster of fans camped out in the corners of hotel lobbies — or behind rope lines, at valet stands or outside of stage doors — all just hoping for a photo and a moment of one-on-one interaction with the stars. Attend enough such events and their faces start to look familiar, particularly a perpetually enthusiastic fan named Rita Huff.
In recent years, Huff and her friends have been spotted in places you might expect, like CMA Music Festival, the Country Music Assn. Awards and the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards (where Huff has worked regularly as a seat filler), but also at the ASCAP, BMI and SESAC Country Awards and even at more radio-specific events like Country Radio Seminar in Nashville, the Country Cares for St. Jude Kids Seminar in Memphis and the radio remotes that are held prior to the two major awards shows. She has become such a familiar face at industry gatherings that she claims radio broadcasters often just assume she’s one of their own.
“Everybody calls me ‘alley cat,’ because we’re always hanging out in the alley [behind venues] where [stars] park waiting on them to arrive so we can just say hi and get a hug and a picture,” she says. “My friends say I have a golden horseshoe up my you-know-what because I’m always at the right place at the right time.”
Huff, now 53, attended her first CMA Festival (then Fan Fair) back in 1999 all by herself. “I didn’t know what to do, so that year I just walked around and took pictures of everybody in their booth and went out to the concerts,” she recalls. “I didn’t know about the meet-and-greet part of it because I was new.” She estimates that she has now met all but a handful of the country stars of the last quarter century. “I’ve become a master at it,” she admits proudly. “I get more yeses than I get nos.
“My friends and I, we don’t do drugs, we don’t smoke, we don’t have any of those bad habits,” says Huff. “We don’t drink. Our natural high is just getting photos with the stars.” Those friends live all over the country and in Canada, and Huff first met many of them while pursuing their shared interest. “It’s just a hobby, like [how] some people party at football games,” she explains.
“We see these people on TV on awards shows, and we hear their music on the radio,” says Huff, “[so] we just like to see them in person to see what kind of personalities they have, if they’re different than they are when you see them on TV … Mostly the artists are nice. It’s the [handlers] with them that can be butts.”
Rita and Luke BryanDespite the obstacles, Huff and her friends have become pros at the art of stalking stars. They choose a more low-key approach than other fans and work connections to always be in the right place at the right time, and she has met many of Nashville’s top stars multiple times.
Huff also has a hobby of flying out to daytime soap opera fan events, and is equally passionate about the stars from that world. She has become quite frugal, working airline discounts, hotels and friends’ guest rooms like a champ to keep the travel costs of her star-seeking under control. Huff and her friends often stay four to a room to keep costs down.
She also buys plenty of concert tickets, as well as country music CDs when they’re on sale. And as you might expect, she works the contests on her local radio stations and in newspapers in the Memphis area hard to win as many of those items as she can. “My motto is if it’s somebody I really want to see, I buy tickets,” she says. And while she never splurges for the best seats, Huff says, “Just get me in the door and I’m going to make my way down to a closer seat, because there’s always empty seats.”
At music events, she’s as excited to meet developing acts as superstars. “We passed up Blake Shelton the first year at Fan Fair because my friend was tired,” she says, still sounding a little annoyed about it. “Well, look at him now! So our motto is get them from the beginning because you never know who’s going to be the next George Strait or the next Alan Jackson. They’ve all got to start somewhere.” (Jackson, incidentally, is the star who first sparked Huff’s interest in country music. Her email address is a tribute to him, and she even once dated a man who won a Jackson look-alike contest.)
She has a trick for identifying the baby acts that tend to populate the St. Jude seminar. “We just go to [Nash] Country Weekly magazine and write down all the ‘who to look for in the next year’ [acts] and all the newcomers, and that’s how we kind of figure out who’s coming,” she says. Then they stake out a comfy spot in the Peabody Hotel lobby and commence the search.
Rita and “husband” Charles EstenHer current favorite stars include Brad Paisley, Keith Urban and ABC’s Nashville TV star Charles Esten, who she refers to as her “fantasy husband” to his face, something that elicits a chuckle from the actor, who — like many stars — has met Huff so many times he knows her by name. She has even worked as an extra on Nashville, which pays enough for her to afford gas and food to travel from her Memphis-area home to the Nashville set.
She’s never afraid to get an early start at events, explaining, “The ones who are up against the barricade are the ones to get their pictures.” So she has stood in line from 4:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. in Las Vegas to meet Lionel Richie at an ACM event and once slept on a sidewalk to meet Reba McEntire at CMA Fest. But those long lines are where the talkative fan makes friends.
A 26-year employee of FedEx’s accounts receivable department, Huff is currently on the job hunt after taking a buyout package from the company, and aspires to one day land a position in the country music business, where she hopes her tenacity and multitasking skills would be an asset.
At FedEx, Huff says she was entitled to have a TV on her desk because she was a high producer, and would juggle watching soaps via an earpiece in one ear and trying to win country radio station contests while listening through an earpiece in the other, all while still “working circles around everybody else.”
This article first appeared in Billboard’s Country Update — sign up here.