The Sandbar at The River Pub in Bay Minette will once again come alive with original music this weekend as the River Rounds Songwriters Festival returns for its second year on Sunday, May 15, starting at 11 a.m. The all-day event brings dozens of local and regional songwriters together along the banks of the Tensaw River for a rotating series of performances, storytelling and community fellowship, transforming a favorite riverside watering hole into one of the largest showcases of original music in Baldwin County. Tickets are $10 at the door for the festival, held at The River Pub, 7555 Cliffs Landing Road in Bay Minette.
The songwriter-round format that gives the festival its name has deep roots in American music. Rather than asking each act to perform a conventional set, organizers seat several writers on stage at once, and each takes a turn playing a song before passing the moment to the next. The result is an unhurried conversation in music, where the audience hears the stories behind the lyrics, writers trade admiration for one another’s work, and songs that might never share a bill otherwise end up side by side in the same afternoon.
Organizers are expecting another strong turnout after last year’s inaugural festival drew a large crowd of music fans and songwriters to the venue’s scenic waterfront setting on the Tensaw River. During that first festival, songwriters from a range of backgrounds took turns performing in rounds, sharing not just their songs but the personal stories behind them, while mingling with fans and fellow musicians well into the evening. The debut event’s success convinced organizers that Bay Minette could sustain an annual tradition built entirely on original material rather than cover bands, a rarity in the bar and festival circuit.
The Day’s Lineup, Round by Round
Organizers say this year’s lineup will carry that same spirit forward with eight rounds of performances spanning nearly nine hours. The day kicks off with Round 1 from 11 a.m. to noon, featuring Doc Leytham, Johnny Hayes, Wally Richerson and Gabriel Willis. Round 2, running from noon to 1 p.m., brings Mitch Swinney, Kalyn Muller, Christine Salter and Renee Amelia to the Sandbar stage. Johnny Barbato, Al P. McNab IV, Ric McNaughton and Aimee Tyree take over for Round 3 from 1 to 2 p.m., followed by Ed Adams, Chris Hergenroder, Ross Burroughs and Justin Hester for Round 4 from 2 to 4 p.m.
The evening portion keeps the same rhythm. Cary Laine, Les Hall, Brad Lawley and Brittany L. Grimes perform during Round 5 from 4 to 5 p.m., with Harrison McInnis, Emily Stuckey, Scott Bottrell and Drew Nix taking the stage for Round 6 from 5 to 6 p.m. Round 7, from 6 to 7 p.m., features Rhonda Huete, Nori Hendrix, Steve Silcox and Michael Copenhaver, and the festival closes out with Round 8 from 7 to 8 p.m., featuring Madison Autumn Bolt, Mary Alice, Jesse Ledbetter and Brett LaGrave. With four writers on stage in nearly every round, the roster amounts to one of the largest single-day gatherings of songwriters the county has seen.
The two-hour Round 4 block stands out on the schedule as the afternoon’s extended session, giving the mid-day crowd extra time to settle in with food and drinks while the music continues without interruption. Festivalgoers who arrive at the opening round and stay through the last will hear more than thirty writers pass songs around the stage, a feat of scheduling that organizers have stitched together with only short gaps between lineups.
Food, Drink and a Community Cause
Beyond the music, the festival will double as a community fundraiser, with VFW Post 3568 on site raising money for its organization. The post’s presence ties the event to Bay Minette’s long tradition of veterans’ service, and proceeds raised at the festival grounds support the organization’s work in the community. Fundraising tables and raffle-style drives at local festivals have become an important supplement to membership-based funding for veterans groups across Baldwin County, and organizers have made the post’s participation a visible part of the day.
Shotgun BBQ will be serving food throughout the day, Braided River Brewing Co. will have cold drinks on tap, and Perdido Vineyards will host a wine tasting session for attendees looking to sample local flavors between sets. The vendor lineup leans deliberately local, giving festivalgoers a taste of the same small-business community the event celebrates on stage. Braided River, based in Mobile, has built a following for its craft beers across the central Gulf Coast, while Perdido Vineyards has made fruit wines from regional crops a staple of area festivals, and food trucks and barbecue vendors have become the standard refueling stop for all-day outdoor music events in South Alabama.
The venue itself is part of the draw. The River Pub sits on Cliffs Landing Road along the Tensaw River, in the yawning wetland country north of Mobile Bay where the delta’s tributaries braid through cypress and marsh. The Sandbar, the venue’s outdoor stage area, looks out over the water, and past events there have traded on the combination of live music and river scenery to pull crowds from well beyond northern Baldwin County. For a Sunday show, the setting gives attendees a reason to make a full afternoon of it.
A Growing Tradition in North Baldwin
Organizers are encouraging music fans throughout Baldwin County and beyond to make the drive out to Cliffs Landing for a full day of homegrown songwriting, food, drinks and riverside scenery. Bay Minette sits a short drive from the faster-growing cities along Interstate 65 and the Eastern Shore, and events like the festival have given the north county seat a cultural draw of its own at a time when much of the county’s growth and attention flow south. Local civic and business leaders have increasingly looked to music and waterfront events as ways to showcase the area’s natural setting.
With last year’s debut event drawing praise from both performers and attendees, the festival is quickly becoming an annual tradition for the Bay Minette music community. Songwriters who played the first year are returning with new material, and word of the format has spread through the regional circuit of writers who move between listening rooms and festival rounds from New Orleans to the Florida panhandle. If Sunday’s crowd matches or beats last year’s turnout, organizers will have a strong argument that the River Rounds Songwriters Festival has earned a permanent place on Baldwin County’s spring calendar, one round at a time.
Doors open with the first round at 11 a.m., and the $10 admission covers the full day of music. Attendees are encouraged to arrive early, bring chairs if they want a comfortable spot near the stage, and plan to stay through the evening rounds, when the delta breeze and the sunset over the Tensaw traditionally give the Sandbar its best light of the day.
Why Songwriter Rounds Matter
The rounds format has flourished across the South in recent years precisely because it gives listeners something a standard concert cannot. In a typical show, an audience meets a performer through a finished product. In a round, they meet the writer mid-process, hearing how a line about a hometown or a hard year turns into a chorus, and hearing other writers nod along because they have lived the same story. Venues that host regular rounds tend to develop loyal followings of listeners who come as much for the between-song talk as for the songs themselves, and the River Pub’s riverside setting gives that intimacy a backdrop few urban listening rooms can match.
For the writers themselves, festivals like this one carry practical weight. Original music is a hard way to make a living, and regional rounds let performers sell merchandise, meet booking contacts and build audiences one county at a time. A writer who plays a strong round in Bay Minette on a Sunday afternoon may walk away with invitations to similar events across the Gulf Coast, which is part of why organizers have found no shortage of acts willing to make the trip. The rotating format also means that even the final round of the night plays to a full share of the day’s crowd, rather than being treated as an afterthought.
The Tensaw River Setting
The Tensaw River, which flows past the festival grounds, is one of the central waterways of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the vast wetland complex that links Alabama’s river systems to Mobile Bay. Cliffs Landing Road runs north from Bay Minette into that delta country, an area long beloved by anglers, boaters and birders. On a festival Sunday, the same waters that draw fishermen at dawn frame the stage at midday, and boat traffic near the landing often pauses to listen from the water. Few music venues in the county can claim a backdrop of cypress and open marsh within earshot of the stage.
Getting there is straightforward for most of the county. Bay Minette anchors north Baldwin County along Interstate 65, and Cliffs Landing Road lies just off the city’s western side, a drive of roughly half an hour or less from communities like Spanish Fort and Stapleton and an easy run up the interstate from Mobile. Organizers have pointed attendees to the venue’s address at 7555 Cliffs Landing Road and reminded fans that the $10 ticket is payable at the door, with no advance sales required for the event.
A Sunday for Original Music
The festival’s Sunday placement makes it an easy addition to a weekend that already includes the area’s other springtime draws, from youth sports to church homecomings to fishing tournaments on the delta. By starting at 11 a.m. and wrapping the final round at 8 p.m., organizers have structured the day so that families can come for the early rounds while night-owl music fans settle in for the later lineups, and the spacing of the rounds leaves room for lunch from Shotgun BBQ and an afternoon wine tasting without missing songs from the stage.
What began as a single-day experiment last year has turned into the kind of event that communities across Baldwin County now compete to host: affordable, family-friendly, locally sourced and rooted in the landscape that makes the area distinctive. For one Sunday in May, the Tensaw River will carry more than water past Bay Minette. It will carry the sound of more than thirty songwriters doing what the format was built for, trading songs and stories in eight rounds along the banks of one of South Alabama’s most scenic waterways, with the whole thing costing a single ten-dollar bill at the door.