SET LIST begins in 1970, when Blanchard Shankles and John Covey come together and start making music in a rock and roll band named Skyye. They were two young men from Sequoyah, Georgia, with limited prospects and big dreams, who were joined in their quest for fame and fortune by their friends Ford Man Cooper, Chicken Raines, Jimbo Tant, Tucker McFry, and Simpson Taggart. These fledgling musicians set out upon a musical voyage that spanned four decades, fifty states, and uncounted miles as they pursued the elusive success that was always just one song ahead of them.
Along the way the band played bars and clubs, carnivals and dances, dives and festivals, and together through good times and bad, sickness and health, romance, marriage, divorce, birth, and death, they each built two lives: the one out under the lights that they were drawn to like moths to a flame, and the one they came back to when the music stopped and the crowds went home.
The story alternates between present-day North Georgia and the 1970s and is the story of a bar band as told primarily through the eyes of its lead guitar player, Blanchard Shankles, and its bass player, John Covey. Each chapter is built around an original song in the band's repertoire plus an iconic song from the archives of rock and roll, and together these songs and these chapters form the set list of the band members' lives.
