Cody Beebe and the Crooks: The Band That Built Yakima a Festival

Some musicians play the scene. Cody Beebe helped build it. The Northwest country-rock bandleader and his band, The Crooks, are Yakima Valley institutions, and this month you can catch them close to home: they headline Outskirts Brewing in Selah on Wednesday, Aug. 20, the closing bill of that brewery's summer concert series with Isaac Gambito opening.

The résumé is the story here. Beebe, with Crooks bandmates Eric Miller, Aaron Myers and Joe Catron, launched Chinook Fest in 2012 — the camping-and-music festival on the Naches River that has become one of the Valley's signature summer weekends, and that this June rolled out its 2026 edition with a lineup deep enough to give a young band like soma a main-stage slot. Building a festival that outlives its founding band's every tour is a rarer accomplishment than any chart position. By the band's own account, the Crooks have carried their Northwest sound across some 30 U.S. states and seven European countries over the years.

What keeps them relevant isn't the mileage, though. It's that Beebe has spent more than a decade being both an act and an organizer — the guy on stage and the guy who made the stage exist. That dual role is why his name turns up in Yakima music conversations that have nothing to do with his own set list. When a scene has people willing to do the thankless logistical work of building institutions, the artists who come after inherit a place to play.

A note on the catalog: the band has pointed to new recorded music in the works. Treat the Aug. 20 show as the reason to go and the songs as the bonus.

Why it matters: local-artist features usually chase the newest, buzziest name in town. But scenes also need their load-bearing walls — the veterans who tour hard, come home, and pour what they've learned back into the place that raised them. Cody Beebe and the Crooks are one of Yakima's, and a Selah brewery lawn in late August is a fine place to say thanks.

Catch them at Outskirts, then remember that the festival you'll go to next summer exists because this band decided the Valley deserved one.

Sources: Cody Beebe and the Crooks — Chinook Fest; Cody Beebe & The Crooks — official site; Festivals, stages and parks fuel Yakima Valley's summer 2026 music scene — Yakima Herald-Republic