Country music is flooded with blonde starlets and hunky heartthrobs. There's the occasional duo, trio or guitar hero.

So, the popularity that the everyman Georgia-based outfit Zac Brown Band has attained is a bit refreshing by Music City's current standards.

"It is an anomaly to see an entire band do well in Nashville," says drummer Chris Fryar. "It's definitely a sense of pride."

Even though Zac Brown Band blew up in 2008 thanks to its Americana country jam "Chicken Fried," to call the group an overnight success would definitely be pushing it.

Brown started performing in Atlanta 12 years ago as a singer/songwriter and acoustic guitar player before forming the Zac Brown Band's current lineup in 2004. Since then, the members - with Brown, Fryar, John Hopkins (bass), Jimmy De Martini (fiddle) and Coy Boyles (guitar, organ) - have cut their teeth playing more than 200 shows a year in bars across the country, releasing albums independently and building a grassroots following that ultimately led to a spot on the Bonnaroo 2006 lineup and opening gigs for ZZ Top, Alan Jackson and the Allman Brothers.

Fryar says that while the band took the long, hard road to its current stardom, it's molded the members into a tight group of musicians who know a thing or two about what makes a good live show.

"You have to capture an audience's attention, especially in a noisy bar where a lot of people are just chilling and talking and just doing their thing," he says. "It enables us to do a great job holding onto a crowd when we're playing for 5,000 people as opposed to 500."

The Zac Brown Band's crowd got substantially larger with the release of the major label debut "The Foundation" and the breakthrough single "Chicken Fried," which went to No. 1 on the Billboard country charts. The song's laundry list of everyday pleasures, like cold beer, a favorite pair of jeans and, you guessed it, fried chicken, is something Fryar thinks strikes a chord with country fans.

"It was the right kind of message at exactly the right time when people really wanted to hear something like that," he says. "The song is a list of simple things in life that people really cherish."

The rest of "The Foundation" hops loosely between genres. "Toes," the band's second No. 1 country hit, has an island feel with a zip code somewhere in Margaritaville while "Where The Boat Leaves From" is reggae-infused, frat-boy funk. And while the boys get tender thanks to Brown's James Taylor-timbre on the ballad "Highway 20 Ride," they display scorching bluegrass runs and pitch-perfect harmonies on "Mary" and the Charlie Daniels-esque "It's Not OK."

Fryar says that while the emphasis on storytelling helps cement ground in country music, the band tries to bring every influence to the table.

"We never classified ourselves as any one specific genre of music. We just consider ourselves to be a band from the South," Fryar says. "We just try to put it all out there because that's the kind of music we like to play."

The Zac Brown Band plans to bring a little bit of country and whatever else it feels like playing to multiple tour stops and will come to our area to perform at 7 p.m. Nov. 17 at the Independence Events Center in Independence, Mo. The crowds will probably just keep growing for the Zac Brown Band from here on, but the band's work ethic ensures the members will play with the same fire regardless of the crowd's size.

"Even if we're not necessarily popular, what we put out is our absolute best," Fryar says. "If we have an impact on the world of country music, that would be awesome. If we're not, we're going to be slugging it out every night anyway."