The Golf Course Turns Up the Amps: Gates Four Hits Year Six
There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night than on a country-club lawn, chair reclined, kids running loose at the activities tent, a cold one in hand, and a band tearing into three chords a few hundred feet away — for free. Fayetteville figured this out five summers ago. Now it's a tradition.
The Gates Four Summer Concert Series returns Saturday, July 25, with Rivermist, the regional cover-and-variety mainstay, at 7 p.m. on the lawn at Gates Four Country Club, 6775 Irongate Dr. Admission is free and open to everyone in Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, and Cumberland County — you don't need to be a member, don't need to golf, don't need to do anything but show up.
The series, now in its sixth year, has become one of the more quietly brilliant civic institutions in the county. The billing puts it plainly: free live music "in a relaxed outdoor setting that brings together businesses, families, neighbors, and music lovers of all ages." That's not marketing fluff; that's an accurate weather report for the lawn on a concert night. Food vendors and bars set up on-site, there are children's activities so parents can actually watch the band, and if you want to do it properly you can reserve table seating through the Fayetteville Dinner Theatre (910-391-3859).
Rivermist is a smart get for the July slot — a working band that knows how to read a mixed-age crowd and keep the dance space full without alienating the folks who came to nod along from a chair. The 2026 season has already run through the Guy Unger Band, a Skynyrd tribute, an '80s night, and Autumn Tyde, and it closes strong: the Dalton Davis Band takes the same lawn on Saturday, Aug. 22.
Why single out a golf-course concert series? Because free, recurring, all-ages, no-catch live music is the connective tissue of a healthy town, and it is shockingly hard to sustain. Six years in, Gates Four has made it look easy — which means somebody is working very hard behind the curtain. The reward is a lawn full of Fayetteville doing the simplest good thing there is: gathering, in the summer dark, around a band.
Bring a chair. Book a table if you're fancy. Either way, get there before Rivermist's first downbeat.
Sources: Gates Four Summer Concert Series kicks off sixth year (Up & Coming Weekly); Summer Concert Series (Gates Four)