When the Red Clay Strays took the Halstead Amphitheater stage in Fairhope in the spring of 2024, the band from Mobile played to a sold-out crowd of about 3,000 people — its third appearance at the venue, but the first since one of its songs went viral on TikTok and carried the group from roughly 100,000 monthly streams to 5 million. Seventy-five percent of the tickets that night were sold to buyers from outside Baldwin County, many of them visiting Fairhope for the first time.
The evening was a milestone for the band. It was also the payoff for a decade-long experiment in community-run concert production that began in 2017, nearly died in 2019, got a second life through a neighborhood conversation in a front yard, and now funnels its profits back into an unusual form of charity: direct grants to local musicians who need help staying in music.
Building the amphitheater, and the series
The Live at Five concert series is set in the heart of downtown Fairhope at the Halstead Amphitheater, on the Coastal Alabama Community College campus. Fairhope writer, editor and former dance studio owner Gina Lanaux helped raise funds to build the amphitheater and played a role in producing the first concert series in 2017. In those early years, the College underwrote the shows with free admission and an appeal for donations to cover costs.
By 2019, the College told the organizers the structure was not sustainable and that it would stop producing the events itself. Rather than let the series lapse, the college’s campus director, Mandy Bezeredi, suggested the organizers form a nonprofit with a proper board to keep the music going. The plan was interrupted by a pandemic break — and then accelerated by it.
In the spring of 2021, during a front-yard conversation with a new neighbor, Lanaux asked Clifton Mosteller, a Mobile native, if he would join the board of the newly created Friends of Halstead, Inc., the 501(c)(3) formed to take over Live at Five. As chairman, Mosteller added structure and wrote the bylaws. He served in the role from 2021 to 2023 and remains on the board.
The mission, as he describes it, has stayed constant: “to continue Fairhope’s storied history of supporting the performing arts by providing an outlet for the local music community, both its patrons and the artists. We want our shows and non-profit organization to be profitable, but only so that we can be charitable.”
The Jacob Hall Memorial Music Grant
That word — charitable — has a specific meaning at Live at Five. Concert profits flow to local musicians with a demonstrated need through the Jacob Hall Memorial Music Grant Program, named for a Mobile multi-instrumentalist widely regarded as one of the most talented musicians in the area’s music circle, who died during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jacob Hall was also the brother of the Red Clay Strays’ founding drummer.
The grant’s origin story is the kind of small kindness that compounds. As a high school junior, Jacob could not afford to join the school band; his music teacher, seeing his talent and love for music, quietly paid his way. “It was an act of kindness that we wanted to perpetuate in his memory,” Mosteller said.
In its first three years the program awarded $38,000 to musicians of all ages. Recent grants paid for piano lessons for an 8-year-old with perfect pitch and a new tuba for the Alma Bryant High School band. Applications open each spring and are reviewed through the summer, with awards presented at the first fall concerts; five awards were handed out in a single recent fall.
A pandemic silver lining
The series’ unlikely breakthrough came from the pandemic itself. With the live music industry shut down in 2020 and Fairhope cautiously reopening in 2021, bands that would normally play larger cities were eager to take any stage. Friends of Halstead raised money from local sponsors and booked the biggest name it could afford: the Spin Doctors, the band behind multiple Billboard Top 20 hits and a Rolling Stone cover — albeit in 1993. The gamble worked. The show sold well, and it gave the young organization an answer to the first question every booking agency asks: who have you hosted before?
The resume grew quickly — Sister Hazel, North Mississippi Allstars, Drivin N’ Cryin, Taylor Hicks, Anders Osborne, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and others — always with local bands on the bill. Since reorganizing in 2021, Live at Five has produced more than 30 concerts and sold more than 35,000 tickets.
In October 2022 came the first sellout: Blues Traveler, the most expensive ticket to date at $30. An hour before showtime, frontman and harmonica player John Popper was still in his hotel bed, sick. With about ten minutes before the scheduled start, a car pulled up backstage and Popper climbed out with a cane — then immediately locked eyes with a man in the crowd, hugged him, and seemingly made a miraculous recovery. The band played a 90-minute set with, in Mosteller’s telling, as much energy as it had in 1995 when it won a GRAMMY, including a harmonica take on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
The man Popper recognized was Ben Jernigan, a Mobile native and working musician who had played with Popper and many other well-known artists and had simply come to see his friend play. Mosteller introduced himself after the show and asked Jernigan to join the volunteer board. He agreed on the spot: “I have been to dozens of venues and this is a special situation, I want to help.”
A professional operation, run by volunteers
Jernigan became Live at Five’s executive director, handling talent purchasing and day-of-show operations. His resume helped professionalize the operation: he has produced music festivals for cities and stadium shows for universities, helped build Dauphin Street Sound, a state-of-the-art recording studio in Mobile, and has shared a stage with surviving members of the Grateful Dead. Before he arrived, the organization was, by its own description, a novice at negotiating with agents and managing sound systems.
Producing roughly ten concerts a year remains a team effort. Coastal Alabama Community College, whose Fairhope campus has the oldest continuously operating fine arts program in Alabama, provides the amphitheater as an in-kind donation, fields student ambassadors to scan tickets, and assigns campus police officers to work the shows. Bezeredi, a founding board member of Friends of Halstead who still serves as its secretary, says hosting the concerts strengthens the College’s community relationships. The City of Fairhelp provides extra trash cans; the board coordinates food trucks and recruits sponsors at several tax-deductible levels.
The show format is part of the appeal: gates open at 4 p.m., attendees stake out a spot on the grass with their own chairs and coolers, and a wrist stamp lets them come and go. Golf carts get a designated parking area, dogs are welcome, and the crowds drive late-night sales for downtown businesses. With a capacity of about 3,000, the venue stays accessible — big enough for national acts, small enough to feel like a town gathering.
Full circle on a spring night
The Red Clay Strays’ return to Fairhope brought the story full circle. Local songwriter Sumerlyn Powers and the River Dan Band opened the show before the hometown band — now one of the hottest acts in American roots music — played to a packed amphitheater. Afterward, board members met with the band and the Hall family, and the Red Clay Strays presented Live at Five with a $5,000 donation for the Jacob Hall Memorial Music Grant.
A band whose drummer’s brother inspired the grant, playing a venue that a pandemic almost killed, donating grant money to the next generation of Gulf Coast musicians — it is the kind of circular, community-woven story that Fairhope has specialized in for a century. And on the next Friday night, the Marshall Tucker Band played another sold-out show under the pines, another evening the town won’t soon forget.
How the grant works, and what makes the venue special
The grant program that Live at Five profits fund is open to musicians and aspiring musicians with a specific musical need. Qualifying uses include money for instruments and equipment, music lessons, attendance at music camps and recitals, tuition for music majors, and music books. Grant recipients are announced on stage at the first fall concert of each season, where the community that funds the series hears exactly where its ticket money went.
The venue itself is part of the formula. The Halstead Amphitheater sits on the Fairhope campus of Coastal Alabama Community College with roughly 65,000 square feet of grassy, open-air space tucked among soaring pines and live oaks. Guests bring coolers, lawn chairs and picnics — or buy dinner from the food trucks — while opening acts take the stage at 5 p.m. and headliners at 6:30 p.m. Local businesses have backed the series since its early days, with sponsors including Truland Homes, Portside Advertising, Anne Dorman, Mobile Bay Realty and Fairhope Furniture Consignment.