Country musician, Comanche pilot: Clayton Corn

For 25 years, pianist Clayton Corn was one of those guys, playing venues like Red Rocks in Colorado and The Gorge in Washington for stars like Kenny Chesney, Huey Lewis, Phil Vassar, ZZ Top, and Pat Green. He could write his own country song: “I spent over a million miles on a tour bus.”

“I grew up in a tiny town on the Texas/New Mexico border, Farwell, Texas. I moved to Nashville in my early 20s and became a touring and studio musician and did that for the better part of two decades. That’s where I learned to fly, right there at KBNA. The chief instructor at the flight school flew Alan Jackson’s [Lockheed] JetStar. It was neat seeing the fleet in the hangar when we’d taxi in from a lesson,” Corn said.

After the birth of his first child, he decided to stay closer to home. He started Craftsmen Events, an event production company, producing acts in the Austin, Texas, area with friend and fellow musician Cory Morrow. The pair produced the highly successful Go Wheels Up! Texas event, which was supposed to be part of the AOPA Fly-In schedule in 2020 but was cancelled because of COVID-19. But just like a country song, Corn found a silver lining in the pandemic—more time to fly his Piper Comanche and finish his instrument and multiengine ratings. “If nothing else, I’ll consider myself a real pilot and use that [experience] to produce more aviation events,” he said.

Corn caught the flying bug early. “Our next-door neighbor had a Cessna 210 when I was a kid. He took my dad and I up for the first time when I was probably 8 years old. Dad let me sit in the front seat. It was right at sunrise on a clear morning at Clovis Municipal Airport in eastern New Mexico. I’ll never, ever forget looking out the window at the right main as it lifted off from the pavement and the way the airplane’s shadow separated from us and grew smaller and smaller. I was completely hooked. I thought about aviation as a career, but I figured out mid-high school that I had a real shot at being a successful musician, so I chased that dream all over the world for most of my adult life.”

Corn was living in Nashville when the terrorist attacks of September 11 happened. He feared his dream of eventually becoming a pilot could be affected, so he started training and got his certificate in early 2003. “I mostly fly for fun and family travel, but I’ve been flying more for work lately, or at least I was before the pandemic,” he said.

“The best aviation activity or experience for me was going to Oshkosh. That’s part of why I wanted to do Go Wheels Up! I wanted to at least try to build something like that, albeit on a much smaller scale, here in Texas,” he said. “Cory and I were talking, and he said let’s do a music festival and have the cool stuff we love like cars and airplanes,” said Corn. The group hopes to bring back the event post-COVID-19.

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