In the fall of 2009, a few friends gave longtime local and event producer Jennifer Steele an idea: Florida’s Scenic Highway 30A should host a music festival. She developed the concept and pitched it to the board of the Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County, where she had recently been named the director. It could be held in the winter, a time when the then-lightly populated stretch of beach was all but deserted. It would draw musicians and music lovers to the area during the slow season and serve as a fundraiser for the arts alliance. With no major music venue in the region, the artists could play at pop-up stages at restaurants and bars along the 19-mile stretch of Scenic Highway 30A, a coastal road and string of beach towns along Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The following January, a motley crew of headstrong volunteers pulled it off. They enticed more than 80 artists, including nationally renowned songwriters like the Indigo Girls, Rodney Crowell, and Jeffrey Steele, one of Nashville’s hottest songwriters at the time. They created stages at a dozen locations, most of which did not exist before, including a makeshift main stage overlooking the dunes in Alys Beach. The 30A Songwriters Festival was born.

That first year, 800 tickets were sold. Seventeen years later, over 5,000 people attend each year, and the festival is stronger than ever, hosting major acts, longtime favorites, and rising stars. Artists come from varied backgrounds, including country, folk, blues, Americana, jazz, R&B, and alternative rock.

This year’s festival, to be held January 16 to 19, 2026, will span 30 venues and feature more than 125 artists, including headliners Mavis Staples, I’m With Her, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and 10,000 Maniacs. With the festival’s increasing popularity and more people discovering the perks of visiting 30A in the cooler months, the area’s shoulder season has all but disappeared. The festival has become the primary year-round fundraiser for groundbreaking arts and cultural events.

“I wish we could say we had some type of 20-year plan, but we really just had a group of passionate people,” said Russell Carter, who co-produces the festival with Steele. “That first year, we pulled it off and were happy everyone had a good time. It wasn’t until the second year that we really started to see the potential.”

Where It All Began

These days, when a popular tune is often created by purchasing a song, recording it, producing it, and pumping it out to the masses via social media, the songwriters behind the music are often the unsung heroes of the hits. The 30A Songwriters Festival set out to celebrate those writers and anyone whose craft involves taking a blank space in the world and filling it with sound and story. While the main stage can accommodate thousands, most venues hold between 200 and 1,000 guests, offering a far more intimate concert-going experience.

“Songwriters are the heart and soul of the music industry,” Carter said.

“In our minds, it’s a profound experience to walk into a venue with 200 people up close and personal and hear an artist that’s written a song tell the story of why they wrote it, what it means to them, and then hear them perform it.”

This vision was what pulled the volunteers together that first year. A nearby festival, the Frank Brown Songwriters Festival, held each October in Orange Beach, Ala., provided some inspiration. After some friends invited Steele to attend, she could see the potential for something similar in the 30A area, bringing world-class musicians to some of the world’s most beautiful beaches.

In just two months, Steele and the volunteers, learning on the job in a labor of love, hobbled together a modest budget of $8,000, gathered a roster of performers, sold the concept to local restaurants and major resorts in the area, marketed it to fans, schlepped tickets, and organized how it would all come together at showtime.

One of the group’s first calls was to Russell Carter, who owns his own artist management company and represents Shawn Mullins, a highly respected singer-songwriter in the folk community. Carter happened to be vacationing in Grayton Beach at the time.

He was intrigued and offered to meet for coffee. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, vacationing,” Russell recalled.

He recalls meeting the group in Seaside and could immediately see their passion and the individual strengths they brought to the table. He also thought he might have something to throw into the ring, with more than 25 years of experience in the music industry, representing and managing musicians. Having caught the bug, he started calling in favors to artists he knew, selling them on the concept of playing at a secluded beach in the dead of winter.

The team ended up lining up more than 80 artists to play on 12 stages across the area at venues that mostly didn’t have any stages to begin with.

“Everybody who jumped in and helped did it with enthusiasm and with a sense of purpose,” Carter said. “The local sound companies threw everything they could into transforming bars and restaurants into cool little venues.”

Finding the Rhythm

There was a learning curve. At Fish out of Water in WaterColor, the staff brought out their fine wine glasses for the festival. “We broke about half,” Carter said. The following year, they converted to plastic.

The temporary stage constructed at Alys Beach for the Indigo Girls was beautiful, but unexpectedly strong, frigid winds blew Gulf water over the dunes and onto the equipment. The band delayed the show, huddled up in coats and scarves, but eventually threw off their gloves and played anyway before an ecstatic crowd. Today, main acts perform on a professionally constructed stage at Grand Boulevard, which can accommodate up to 6,000 people.

The first year’s check-in and box office were held in a 200-square-foot hallway in Seaside, squeezed between the elevator and staircase.

“That’s just hilarious to me now,” Steele recalled. Today, the box office is housed in a massive tent at Marina Park in WaterColor, complete with computer stations, a merch section, and a lounge featuring a cocktail bar.

Robin Beans volunteered that first year and has worked the artist check-in ever since. Every time an artist came to check in, she would run outside and around the corner to The Rep Theatre, to grab their supplies. She brought her own snacks to share with the artists.

The festival was a success. Several major resorts in the area reported festival weekend sales that exceeded their totals for the first few months of the year. From there, the festival kept growing, drawing more fans, bigger headliners, and even more economic activity to the area.

“All of a sudden, the dead month became a very active and profitable business. Sixteen years later, it’s hard to even see traces of a shoulder season anymore,” Carter said.

Where Art Pays Off

By 2019—the last year the Walton County Tourist Development Council gathered this data—the group found that what had once been a little beachside festival was generating over $8 million in economic impact. That number has only grown in the years since, Steele said.

“The festival is a perfect example that investing in art and culture is actually a sound financial decision. There’s a big payoff,” Carter said. “Nobody goes into the arts thinking, let’s make a lot of money for the community, but they should. Because it works.”

The Cultural Arts Alliance has grown along with the festival. It now produces groundbreaking arts programming, including the country’s only Underwater Museum of Art, a prison art initiative, dozens of festivals and events, and year-round programs for both kids and adults. When the festival began, the organization had just one part-time staff member. Today, it employs a team of eleven.

“We wouldn’t be where we are without the Songwriters Festival. It’s at the core of the CAA’s growth,” Steele said. “We wouldn’t have the strengths we have today—the budget, the visibility, or the interest from national artists to come here.”

From Openers to Icons

Now, when Carter calls artists about attending the festival, everyone already knows about it and the 30A area in general, he said. Usually, the artists call him.

They’ve landed some major acts over the years, including Tanya Tucker, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, Jackson Browne, John Prine, Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris, Graham Nash, Lucinda Williams, and Cheap Trick.

Plenty of newcomers also play the festival each year, often tucked into lineups at smaller venues, and many have seen their careers take off since. Brandi Carlile played in 2019 as she was quickly becoming a nationally recognized artist. Jason Isbell played the festival as a relatively unknown artist when he launched his solo career after his run with the Southern rock band Drive-by Truckers. When he returned several years later, he was a headliner, having become one of Americana’s most acclaimed songwriters and a three-time Grammy winner.

This year, Nikki Lane and Paul McDonald, both of whom started in small venues during earlier years of the festival, will open for headliners on the main stage. And perhaps the biggest rise: Meghan Trainor, the high schooler who came down years ago with her mother to play guitar and perform her original songs, is now a household name and chart-topping pop powerhouse.

The festival has created countless special memories for everyone involved. When Prine played in 2020, he was 73. He performed on the main stage, but he also played a smaller show, and it was a rare moment that Steele was able to sit still and listen to an entire performance. “I was pinching myself and crying a little bit, smiling and laughing. It was just so special.”

Less than three months later, Prine passed away from complications from COVID, making the performance at the 30A Songwriters Festival one of his last.

One of Carter’s favorite moments, among many, was seeing Jackson Browne, an artist Carter grew up listening to. “I taught myself guitar by playing his songs.” In 2016, at 67, he agreed to play the festival and decided to turn it into a small tour. He pulled up to the main stage with a truck and trailer and unloaded a collection of guitars and a grand piano. He played solo acoustic, moving between guitars and the piano for each song. “He played every great hit… I mean every single one of them. It was just a phenomenal concert,” Carter recalled. “It was jam-packed, and everyone was just enthralled from start to finish.”

Feels Like Home

Staples, a legendary singer from a legendary musical family, will perform at this year’s festival at 86. For the first time, a Friday afternoon kickoff event will be held at the Seaside Amphitheater, featuring Margo Price. In addition to the headliners, other artists of note include Benmont Tench, the keyboard player from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Amy Helm (Levon Helm’s daughter), Jonatha Brooke, and Joseph Arthur.

While every year gets smoother in some ways, Steele said, there are still always plenty of unexpected twists to navigate. Coordinating the main stage is one thing, but with 30 other venues needing lighting, sound, security, and staffing, it’s a significant undertaking. And organizing the schedule, coordinating several shows per artist across venues in the area, and trying to figure out how to make it all come together require plenty of late nights for Carter and Steele, who have since married. “I’ll keep at the schedule for long hours until I can’t take it anymore, and then Jennifer will come in and help me make sense of it again,” Carter said. When asked about working together, the two joked they shouldn’t talk about it but agreed that each brings a unique skill set to make it happen.

Even though she’s moved away, Robin Beans, the longtime volunteer, will return to artist check-in this year. “I’m never leaving unless they kick me out or I become too old to do this,” the 69-year-old said. She labors all week preparing then takes pride in being one of the first faces the artists see.

Many of the artists who play the festival return year after year. Beans said she knows they love the beautiful beaches, but she’s also heard that other festivals just aren’t as friendly. Each year, some of the same faces return to help make the festival the best it can be.

A getaway in the dead of winter has become a beloved tradition for both fans and the artists performing for them. “I try hard each year to make it feel like a welcome back,” Beans said. “A welcome home.”

Stay in tune with this year’s artists, updates, and ticket info at 30ASongwritersFestival.com.