Fun Fest's Big Swing: Brothers Osborne, Daughtry, and a Stadium That Only Wakes Up in July

For fifty-one weeks a year, J. Fred Johnson Stadium in Kingsport is a high-school football field. For the fifty-second, it is the biggest music venue in the Tri-Cities. That week starts Friday: Fun Fest runs July 17–25, nine days that the organizers cheerfully advertise as "50+ locations, 100+ events," and the beating heart of it is the Sunset Concert Series.

Here's the lineup that matters if you like your music at stadium volume. Thursday, July 23 is the festival's gospel-and-contemporary-Christian night, with Jeremy Camp and Katy Nichole. Friday, July 24 goes full arena-rock nostalgia: Daughtry and Switchfoot, two bands that have quietly outlasted every trend that was supposed to bury them. And Saturday, July 25 is the closer you build a week around — Brothers Osborne and LeAnn Rimes, capped by the fireworks finale that has become Kingsport's unofficial midsummer holiday.

Give the booking committee credit for range. Brothers Osborne — the T.J. and John Osborne sibling duo who have spent a decade being the most interesting mainstream country act to also be genuinely good live — are the kind of act that reads equally to the pickup-truck crowd and the people who own three vinyl copies of a Sturgill record. Putting them on the same stadium bill that, a night earlier, hosted Switchfoot is a flex of a mid-size festival that knows exactly who its neighbors are.

And the neighbors show up. Fun Fest has been a Kingsport institution since the 1980s, and its genius has always been civic rather than curatorial: the concerts are the spine, but the body is the Crazy 8s 8K, the medallion hunt, the parade, the downtown street fair, and roughly a hundred smaller things designed so that no one in the family gets to claim boredom. The stadium shows are simply the nights everyone agrees to be in the same place.

There's a specifically Tri-Cities pleasure in a festival like this, and it's worth naming. You can see LeAnn Rimes — who has been famous since she was thirteen and has somehow made a whole second career out of being better than the material that made her a star — without booking a hotel, without a two-hour parking crawl, without the arena tax on a beer. The show is regional-scaled. The talent is not.

The catch, as ever, is that a stadium is a stadium. You will trade the intimacy that makes The Down Home sacred for the trade-off that makes a festival a festival: scale, spectacle, and a firework show over a football field in a town that decided, decades ago, that July should feel like this.

Nine days. One stadium that only remembers it's a venue once a year. Go before it forgets again.

Sources: Fun Fest — Kingsport