Bayfest 2013 Fan Poll Reveals Alabama Shakes, The Black Keys Among Most-Wanted Acts

Music fans across the Gulf Coast made their voices heard in the Bayfest 2013 poll, casting votes for the artists they most wanted to see at Mobile’s premier outdoor music festival. The results painted a picture of a community with wide-ranging musical tastes, from Southern rock and indie favorites to hip hop and electronic acts.

Bayfest has long been one of the largest festivals on the Gulf Coast, drawing tens of thousands of attendees to downtown Mobile each October for a weekend spread across multiple stages near the waterfront. The fan poll gave the festival’s organizers a direct read on what that audience wanted, and the responses poured in from across the region — Mobile, Baldwin County, the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the Florida Panhandle.

Alabama Shakes Lead the Pack

Topping the poll with 55.6 percent of the vote was Alabama Shakes, the Florence, Alabama-based rock band that had taken the national music scene by storm. The Black Keys followed at 42.8 percent, with Jack White rounding out the top three at 36.6 percent.

The Lumineers (33.8 percent), Fleetwood Mac (30.6 percent), and a three-way tie among The Avett Brothers, Cake, and The Killers (each at 29.1 percent) demonstrated the eclectic appetite of Bayfest attendees. Prince and Dave Matthews Band also garnered strong support, each pulling in roughly 28 percent of the vote.

Alabama Shakes was the obvious favorite for a Gulf Coast audience. Fronted by the powerhouse vocals of Brittany Howard, the band had broken out nationally in 2012 with its debut album “Boys & Girls,” earning Grammy nominations and saturation play on rock and alternative radio. For Alabama fans, the Athens-formed band’s ascent carried a hometown resonance — a group formed at a band practice in Florence, honed in Muscle Shoals’ legendary musical shadow, suddenly on festival main stages across the country. Booking them would have been both a commercial slam dunk and a statement about Alabama music on an Alabama stage.

The Black Keys’ strong showing reflected their status as one of the biggest rock acts in the world at the time, fresh off the blockbuster “El Camino” album and a string of arena dates. Jack White, meanwhile, occupied his own lane as a touring draw — a former White Stripes frontman whose solo debut “Blunderbuss” had arrived in 2012 to critical acclaim, with a live band that alternated lineups between men and women on stage night to night.

The middle of the poll told its own story. The Lumineers’ stomp-and-holler folk hit “Ho Hey” was inescapable in 2013, Fleetwood Mac represented the classic-rock constituency that turns out reliably for outdoor festivals, and the tie among The Avett Brothers, Cake and The Killers spanned alt-country harmonies, deadpan nineties alt-rock and Las Vegas synth-rock in a single line of the ballot.

A Diverse Wishlist

The poll results reflected a broad spectrum of genres. Alternative and indie acts like The Cure, MGMT, Vampire Weekend, and The Flaming Lips all earned more than 20 percent support. Country fans rallied behind Zac Brown Band (21.6 percent) and Brad Paisley (10.9 percent), while electronic music enthusiasts pushed for Bassnectar (16.6 percent) and Deadmau5 (14.1 percent).

Gulf Coast favorites also made strong showings. Trombone Shorty pulled 16.6 percent, and New Orleans-based Galactic earned 17.2 percent, reflecting the region’s deep ties to Southern and roots music traditions.

The New Orleans acts carried particular weight on the Gulf Coast. Trombone Shorty — Troy Andrews, the New Orleans prodigy whose brass-fueled funk had grown from Treme street corners to late-night television and festival headlining slots — is a fixture of the region’s live circuit, and Galactic’s funky instrumental grooves have made the band a perennial favorite anywhere within driving distance of the Crescent City. Mobile’s musical identity has always been entwined with New Orleans, just two hours west along Interstate 10, and the poll numbers confirmed that the festival’s audience crosses that border constantly for live music.

The electronic entries, Bassnectar and Deadmau5, pointed to a younger segment of the Bayfest crowd — one raised on festival culture farther afield, where dance music stages had become headline attractions. Their combined showing suggested that Mobile’s audience, like festival audiences nationwide, was diversifying beyond the guitar-and-horns bookings that traditionally anchored Gulf Coast events.

Write-In Votes Show Even More Demand

Beyond the official ballot, fans submitted dozens of write-in suggestions spanning virtually every genre. Requests ranged from classic rock titans like Tom Petty, Aerosmith, and Metallica to contemporary acts such as Florence and the Machine, Mumford and Sons, and Pretty Lights.

Soul and R&B fans championed Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Jill Scott, while punk and metal supporters called for acts of their own, adding a harder edge to the wishlist that the main ballot only hinted at.

The write-ins functioned as an unofficial second poll, and their range was striking. Tom Petty and Metallica sit at opposite ends of the classic-rock spectrum, but both names surfaced repeatedly — a reminder that Mobile’s concert market sits far enough from Atlanta, New Orleans and Nashville that touring superstars skip it regularly, and fans who drive hours for arena shows will vote for them when given the chance. Florence and the Machine and Mumford and Sons represented the indie-folk wave then cresting nationally, while Pretty Lights continued the electronic thread from the main ballot.

Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin topped a soul contingent rooted in real musical geography. The Muscle Shoals sound — the swampy, soulful recordings cut in northwest Alabama at FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound — is one of the state’s great cultural exports, and Gulf Coast audiences have always shown up for artists connected to that lineage. Aretha Franklin’s catalog was practically built on those sessions, giving Alabama fans a direct emotional stake in her booking.

What the poll meant for the festival

Bayfest’s organizers have historically balanced big-name headliners against the practical economics of a multi-stage festival: booking fees that can reach into seven figures for superstar acts, a footprint in downtown Mobile’s streets and parks, and a ticket price that must stay within reach of a regional audience. The poll’s top names — Alabama Shakes, The Black Keys, Jack White — sat exactly at the boundary of what a festival of Bayfest’s scale could realistically pursue, which is precisely why the organizers asked.

The results also gave a snapshot of the musical moment. 2013 was the year folk-rock revivalists, stadium electro, and Southern rock revival all shared radio space, and the Gulf Coast’s ballot mirrored that spread almost exactly — The Lumineers and Mumford and Sons on the folk side, Bassnectar and Deadmau5 on the electronic side, Alabama Shakes and The Avett Brothers carrying the South’s banner.

For a festival that prides itself on serving a broad, family-friendly audience across genres, the poll affirmed the approach. No single genre dominated: rock led, but folk, country, electronic, soul, funk and metal all appeared somewhere in the tally, and the Gulf Coast’s own musical relatives in New Orleans earned double-digit support from both the ballot and the write-ins.

However the 2013 lineup ultimately took shape, the fan poll made one conclusion unavoidable: Mobile’s audience knows what it wants, spans every genre, and considers itself part of a wider Southern musical world stretching from the Shoals to New Orleans. The 55.6 percent who voted for Alabama Shakes delivered the poll’s clearest message — that the band an Alabama audience most wanted to see on a Mobile stage was the one that had risen from Alabama itself.

The poll also underscored the economics of the Gulf Coast’s festival circuit. Mobile sits in a corridor of competing events — New Orleans Jazz Fest to the west, Hangout Music Fest on the beaches of Gulf Shores to the east, Pensacola’s festivals just beyond — and each year the region’s audiences allocate a finite number of festival weekends and ticket budgets. A poll like Bayfest’s doubles as market research in that contest: every percentage point attached to a headline act is a gauge of how many weekend passes the booking could convert.

The strong country showing, led by Zac Brown Band at 21.6 percent, tracked the genre’s grip on the region. Country radio dominates the Mobile and Pensacola markets, and stadium-scale country acts reliably sell out amphitheater shows across the Gulf South, making Zac Brown Band — with its blend of Southern rock, beach-friendly grooves and jam-band improvisation — a natural fit for a coastal festival audience that spans ages and tastes. Brad Paisley’s 10.9 percent added a virtuoso-guitarist constituency to the same side of the ledger.

The alt-rock and legacy acts filled out a different demographic: the Generation X and older-millennial fans who came of age on The Cure, Cake and The Killers, and who now bring families to festival grounds. Fleetwood Mac’s 30.6 percent showed how deep that multigenerational reach runs — a band whose songbook belongs to grandparents, parents and teenagers simultaneously.

Prince’s roughly 28 percent was among the most intriguing lines on the ballot. A Prince booking would have been the festival’s largest gamble and largest prize in a single name: a legendary live performer whose tours were rare, expensive and mythologized, and whose appearance at a mid-sized Gulf Coast festival would instantly have redrawn its national profile. That so many voters reached for the ceiling rather than the attainable says something about how festival audiences dream when handed a blank check.

Whether every wish could be granted was never the point of the exercise. The poll gave Bayfest a detailed map of its own audience — Alabama Shakes first, genre breadth everywhere else, and write-ins reaching from Muscle Shoals soul to Colorado electronic music — and a reminder that the Gulf Coast’s appetite for live music runs wider than any single October weekend can hold.