The country supergroup Alabama had just played the Fowlersville, Mich., Fair on a Monday in July and was scheduled to appear at the Great Jones County Fair 350 miles away, in Monticello, Iowa, on Thursday. That gave the band - but not the trucks - two full days off. Hurry up and wait applies in showbiz hauling, too. "I'm sitting in my truck watching the corn grow," drawls the pretending-anger-but-laughing voice on the phone. "The band flew home to Fort Payne. Randy wanted to spend some time with his son, who is home from school. I decided the drivers didn't need to go all the way to Fort Payne just for two days, so we're camped out here - I'm Reba Patterson."

What Reba says goes. She is in charge of the four Kenworths and their drivers who transport the sound equipment, the lights, the band gear and the souvenir merchandise. "How'd I get the job?" she repeats our question. "Randy Owen is my brother."

Alabama - rhythm guitarist and songwriter Randy Owen; cousin, songwriter, bass player and harmony vocalist Teddy Gentry; distant cousin, songwriter and instrumentalist Jeff Cook; and drummer Mark Herndon - roared out of Ft. Payne, Ala., onto the country music highway in 1980 with their debut album, My Home's in Alabama.

Since then, the group has won so many awards, it takes a fleet of trucks to haul them home. So many Alabama albums have sold platinum, and the group has won so many Grammys and so many best this or that of the year, that the Academy of Country Music named them "Artists of the Decade" after the 1980s. They're the only country group ever to have an album go quintuple platinum - Greatest Hits sold 5 million albums in 1986.

The group has sold more than 58 million albums worldwide, putting them ninth in the top-selling groups of all time, ahead of rockers like The Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin. Only Conway Twitty outranks Alabama in the most No. 1 records in all styles of music.

It's no wonder their tour schedule is jam-packed. They've done150 shows in some years, playing as many as six concerts a week. (See www.alabamaband.com for tour info.)

It's appropriate that one of their hits was Roll On (18-Wheeler). It takes a small village - of truckers and others - working considerably more than a 40-Hour Week to deliver the band to all their live performances.

Little sister to the rescue

The group's success and frantic tour schedule helped put Reba Patterson on the road with brother Randy. Verlon Patterson was in the Marines when he and Reba Owen met, fell in love and got married. "Then he did three years in Vietnam, so you can see what I had to put up with," she says.

Then one day, Reba's big brother got famous, needed drivers for his trucks and hired his ex-Marine brother-in-law. When Verlon drove, Reba often went, too. "That was 10 or 12 years ago, when the band was doing 150 or more shows a year," says Reba. "Verlon was doing security at the shows, then driving all night to the next show, so he was getting like maybe two or three hours sleep a day. A few things happened to Verlon and he tried to quit a couple of times." Randy flew home in the band's private plane, called his sister over to his house and asked how quickly she could pack. Confused, Reba awkwardly said, "Pretty quick, I guess."

"Well, get a plane ticket," said Randy, "fly out and meet Verlon. He's got more than he can do." That's when Reba started driving full-time for her brother. With Verlon getting so little sleep, he let Reba drive the truck some. It didn't always work out well, she recalls. Verlon was a poor passenger and had trouble sleeping when Reba was driving. She said he'd get out of the sleeper and point out flaws in her ability.

"'Can't you get this truck in gear?' " Reba recalls Verlon asking. She'd answered in a faux-sweet sing-song tone of voice, " 'Well no, honey, because I've never driven one before.' "

Although it didn't take her long to get the hang of it, she still says, "That's the kind of teacher I had. Verlon, he can make me nervous when nobody else can."

The truck itself didn't make her nervous. Randy and Reba, and later their little sister, grew up on a farm in northeast Alabama. "The first thing I ever drove," says Reba, "was a Ford tractor. I was about nine. Daddy was gathering corn. He told me I was big enough to move the tractor. We were on a terraced row, and I was scared of it.

"That was the first thing I ever drove. After that, Daddy never could stop me. We had some farm trucks, and I knocked down mailboxes all over the community." Randy is 22 months older than Reba; their sister is 13 years younger. Reba says she and Randy were inseparable as kids. Randy was in the fifth grade when he and three of his cousins started a band. His parents, Gladstone and Martha, encouraged the kids' effort.

Gladstone Owen died in 1980 of a heart attack at age 59. "Daddy had always been the band's biggest supporter. He'd been trying to get them a record deal for 10 years," Reba says. "Daddy died a month before the band signed its contract with RCA. The biggest disappointment in Randy's life was that Daddy was not there. "Momma's still kicking, though. She lives about a mile down the road from Randy. She's got her cows and her garden," she said.

The price of success

En route to the shows, Reba tries to keep the four Kenworths together, "just in case somebody has a breakdown. We have had breakdowns. One tractor would have to go ahead to the venue, drop his trailer, come back and pick up the stranded trailer. Since we got our deal with Kenworth, we don't normally have those problems."

After the show, the trucks leave as soon as they get loaded. On the Alabama tour, some of the dates are fairly close, while some may be as much as 500 miles apart. They try to schedule the overnight travel to allow them to be at the next venue and start unloading around 7 a.m.

"At the venue, Verlon and I sleep in the truck. We've got our own little home away from home," she says. "The only time we get a room is when we have a day off. Then I get all the drivers a room. I've got a great bunch. Anything I ask them to do, they try their best. I don't have one out here that I wouldn't trust with my life."

There's another husband and wife team, "Crazy Eddii" and Lucy Wilborn. "E-D-D-I-I, that's how you spell his name. Whoever the heck came up with that, I don't know. His momma needs slapping. I don't know where she went to school," Reba says.

A faint voice in the distance yells something. "Oh, now, Lucy says Eddii is not his real name. That's the only name we know him by, Crazy Eddii. Lucy, though, is a normal person. Our drivers, if they don't live right in Fort Payne, at least they all live in DeKalb County. We're close."

Reba drives a W900 Kenworth pulling the 48-foot Great Dane merchandise trailer. She also restocks and sells the souvenirs. Although band merchandise generates a lot of revenue, it also generates problems, she says.

"Counterfeit T-shirts, oh gosh, that's been going on for years. They're bootlegging them everywhere. The way the law is written, there's really not a whole lot you can do. But then they bring me back a counterfeit shirt. 'I got the wrong size, can I trade it?' I say 'Lady, that's not my shirt.'

"Then, the crowd out on the street finds out what hotel the band is in," Reba adds. "They'll go up and ask the guys to autograph their shirts. The band is good about spotting the counterfeits, and they won't sign one."

When the band takes time off, Reba tends to the Web site and fills orders for band merchandise. "And, I spend a lot of time answering e-mail. Verlon and I have some trucks of our own, too. We've got everything from a flatbed to reefers. We haul whatever we can get. The other drivers do pretty much the same thing," she says.

"When we get home, it takes me about four days to start feeling like a human being again. Randy can help mother look after her garden. I'm going to pick some blackberries and make a pie."