Frank Brown Songwriters' Festival — the November secret
If the Mullet Toss is the Bama’s loudest week, the Frank Brown International Songwriters’ Festival is its quietest. Ten days every November. Sixty-plus venues across Perdido Key, Pensacola, Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, and points around. Songwriters in residence at restaurants, bars, condos, churches, theaters, oyster bars, and once or twice a year, somebody’s house.
The locals love this week harder than any other.
The setup. The festival pairs songwriters — mostly singer-songwriters in the Nashville / Texas / Gulf Coast tradition, but a growing roster of broader-Americana folks — with venues across the region. You buy a wristband. You go where you want. Each venue runs multiple shows a night, usually multi-songwriter “in the round” sessions where three or four players take turns playing a song and telling the story behind it.
The vibe. Different from a regular concert. Listeners are quiet. The room is small. The songwriter is two feet from the front table. You hear the song and you hear how it got written, which is the whole point. The festival’s full name honors Frank Brown, a longtime Bama doorman whose belief in songwriters drove the early festival, and the in-the-round tradition is what the Bama and Joe Gilchrist built.
What’s at the Bama itself. The main bar runs the marquee sessions; the back stages run the smaller ones. The Bama is the heart of the festival in the same way Newport is the heart of folk — even when the action is happening at thirty other venues, the Bama is the gravity well that holds it together.
What’s at the smaller venues. Restaurants you’ve eaten at five times during the summer turn into listening rooms. Hub Stacey’s. Cosmo’s. The Pizza Kitchen. The little oyster bar you didn’t notice was there. The whole region quietens down and pays attention.
Who plays. A rotating cast over the years has included most of the touring Nashville songwriter circuit, plus a deep bench of Gulf Coast and Florida-Texas singer-songwriters. The names that headline the Bama main stage are usually songwriters you’ve heard on the radio without realizing — the people who wrote that song for that artist. Smaller venues have rising songwriters and local regulars who play the festival year after year.
When. Annually in early-to-mid November. Specific dates announced each summer at fbsongwriters.com. The festival website is the authoritative source for the schedule.
How to do it. Get a wristband (covers most venues; some shows are separate-ticketed). Pick three or four venues you want to anchor at. Don’t try to see everything — the schedule is overwhelming and the sessions overlap. Eat. Drink. Sit close to the front if you can. Buy a CD or a digital download from a songwriter you liked. They live on this.
The off-season magic. November on the Gulf Coast is one of the best times to be here, full stop. Temperature in the 60s and 70s. Locals back to themselves. Restaurants quiet outside of festival night. Sunsets the right color. The festival uses all of that and turns the whole region into one extended back room.
Pro tip: book lodging early. Festival weekends fill the smaller condos and the boutique hotels even though the rest of November is otherwise wide open. The Bama itself doesn’t have lodging but the surrounding condo complexes are walking distance.
If you’ve never come for the festival and you want to see what this stretch of coast is actually like when it’s at its best — this is the answer.
— Kathy