Every Thursday from late summer through October, something quietly unusual happens on the shore of Mobile Bay: office workers trade their break rooms for a park, unpack lunches on blankets and picnic tables, and listen to live music with the bay at their backs. The Brown Bag by the Bay concert series at Daphne’s May Day Park has been doing this long enough that it now counts among the longest-running lunchtime concert traditions on the Gulf Coast.
A park with a very long memory
May Day Park sits at the end of College Avenue in Daphne, where a bandstand, a fishing pier, a playground, picnic tables, and a boat launch meet the water. A plaque near the shore reminds visitors that this stretch of coastline has been inhabited for some 9,000 years, making the park one of the region’s oldest continuously used gathering places — a claim the ancient live oaks, heavy with Spanish moss, do nothing to undercut.
On a breezy September afternoon the crowd is a cross-section of the city: workers on their lunch break, young parents pulling babies in wagons, and neighbors who walked over from the streets around the park. Some claim the tables; most spread chairs and blankets on the grass. Nobody pays for admission, because there isn’t any.
Catt Sirten’s lunchtime invention
The series traces back to 1985, when the late Catt Sirten started the original Brown Bag concert series in Mobile, with Daphne shows following soon after. Sirten, a longtime radio personality and tireless champion of Gulf Coast musicians, built the format that still holds: free lunchtime performances, Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., heavy on singer-songwriters and regional acts. After Sirten’s death, the City of Daphne continued the tradition, and the fall series remains a fixture of the city’s events calendar — with spring sessions in April and May rounding out the year.
The performers are the kind of working musicians who define the local scene. On one recent Thursday, Eric Erdman held the bandstand, playing original songs for the gathering crowd — including a love song built around a lyric any long-married couple will recognize: “We’ve been down this road before, and I’ve enjoyed the drive.” Past lineups have included Mobile soul and jazz vocalist Symone French, the duo Eden & Raul, Camm Lewis, Emily Stuckey, and Red Gate Road.
What to bring, what to expect
The logistics are refreshingly simple. Pack a lunch or pick up takeout on the way, find a spot on the grass, and stay as long as the lunch hour allows. The park’s shade helps in the early weeks of the series, and by October the weather usually cooperates on its own. Picnic tables under the oaks go early; regulars know to arrive with a chair.
The series is sponsored by the City of Daphne, which maintains the park and books the acts, and the schedule is published on the city’s calendar. Concerts run rain or shine is not exactly the rule — a Gulf storm will move a Thursday indoors or cancel it — but the series has survived hurricanes, ownership changes, and four decades of September heat.
Why a free concert matters
Events like Brown Bag by the Bay do something a ticketed festival cannot: they fold live music into an ordinary weekday. The audience is not an audience that bought tickets; it is a crowd that happened to be hungry at noon in Daphne. Some discover a songwriter they will follow for years. Others simply eat lunch outside and go back to work lighter than they arrived.
Nine thousand years of visitors to this shoreline have come for the water and stayed for the company. On Thursdays in the fall, the company brings guitars. Grab a sandwich and join them — the wind off the bay is free, and so is the show.