VIDEO: Alan Gives Zac Brown a Cadillac

Zac Brown Band gathers its flock, and feeds them, too

By Brian Mansfield Special for USA TODAY

NASHVILLE — For the Zac Brown Band's Chris Fryar, the magnitude of winning a new-artist Grammy last year came during the acceptance speech, when he looked into the Staples Center audience in Los Angeles and saw one of the category's previous winners.

"We were standing up there, thanking everybody that we had to thank, and I looked down at Ringo Starr sitting in the front row," says the drummer for the Georgia-based band. "He's won a best-new-artist Grammy, and there we were accepting one. It was a trip."

Since winning that award last January Brown, 32; Fryar, 40; and the band's four other musicians — guitarist Coy Bowles, 31; multi-instrumentalist Clay Cook, 32; fiddle player Jimmy De Martini, 34; and bassist John Driskell Hopkins, 39 — have gone about showing just how much they deserved the accolade.