Major concerts coming to new Sussex County stage

A new major concert spot will open this summer in Sussex County, drawing national acts to what will be the largest-capacity venue in the county, organizers told The News Journal ahead of Friday's announcement.

Dewey Beach-based Highway One Group, which owns the Bottle & Cork and co-produced the ill-fated 2015 Delaware Junction Music Festival, will begin hosting concerts at Hudson Fields off Del. 1 near Milton in June.

The concert space will take up about 18 acres of the 80-acre Hudson Fields, the original home of Punkin Chunkin, which hosts events like the annual Foodie Fest, along with sports tournaments and private events like weddings.

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It won't be the first time Hudson Fields is hosting national acts. In the late '90s, the Delaware River & Bay Authority hosted a string of annual benefit shows for Beebe Medical Center with the Beach Boys, Chicago and Hall & Oates all performing there.

The first act for the new concert series will be Nashville-based country rock five-piece Old Dominion, the reigning Academy of Country Music Awards New Group of the Year.

The show will be Thursday, June 1, at 8 p.m. Tickets, $25-$50, go on sale Friday, Jan. 20, at 10 a.m. at hudsonfields.com. Opening acts will be announced soon. Other upcoming shows have yet to been revealed.

The seating layout at Hudson Fields will be flexible and able to change from show to show. For Old Dominion, there will be a general admission area where fans can stand or sit on blankets and chairs that they bring. There will also be a standing-room-only "party pit" in front of the stage, along with 100 VIP seats on each side of the field.

After years of booking up-and-coming acts that have blossomed into music superstars that have become too big to return to the 1,100-person Cork, Highway One now has a 4,000-person outdoor stage that can host more shows by major acts.

"With Old Dominion, just like those other bigger acts, they are like, 'Unless you come up with something bigger, we're gone. Bye-bye, Delaware,'" says Alex Pires, a Highway One partner. "Now they can stay."

Cork booking agent Vikki Walls has been on a winning streak in recent years, booking performers that have since exploded in popularity, including country stars Miranda Lambert, Eric Church and Jason Aldean, along with acts like Lady Antebellum and Trombone Shorty.

At the Hudson Fields stage, acts that outgrow the Cork will find a home, even though it's still not large enough to get acts like Lambert and Church back since they now fill arenas.

Old Dominion is the perfect test case for Highway One's newest venture.

The band's relationship with Highway One started in October 2014 when they headlined a free show at Dewey Beach's Rusty Rudder. By June of the next year, Old Dominion returned to play a free show at the Bottle & Cork -- five months before the release of the act's full-length debut, "Meat and Candy."

Once the album hit stores, the RCA Nashville release peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard country charts and spawned a trio of singles, including their breakthrough hit "Break Up With Him."

By last summer, the band was touring stadiums with Kenny Chesney, Lambert and more. Even so, Old Dominion squeezed in one final Cork performance, which came a couple of weeks before their Chesney tour stop at Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field.

Now, the band is coming back for a fourth time to break in the new Hudson Fields stage.

And for Old Dominion lead singer Matthew Ramsey, who grew up in Virginia and spent summers in Rehoboth Beach as a kid, it will be a special, if not surreal, experience.

"Talk about a full circle moment. It's wild," Ramsey says. "I was talking to my brother the other day and I told him that we're playing Delaware again. I said I thought it was outside and he goes, 'What are you going to do, play the Rehoboth Beach Bandstand?'"

Highway One presents Hudson Fields, the official name of the new partnership, will be larger than the 2,400-person Freeman Stage at Bayside near Selbyville, which opened in 2008. As the two largest Sussex County concert venues, both will bring national acts to an area that has traditionally been underserved in the past.

Pires expects to host about a half dozen shows in his first year at Hudson Fields with more 2017 concert announcements coming soon. Fans should expect a similar booking formula to the Delaware State Fair with a mix of country, rock, pop, Christian and jam acts expected.

"We want to start out slow, be careful and do a good job," Pires says. "There's so much demand [for concerts] here. It seems like we can't satisfy the ever-growing population."

The demand is especially strong for country music after Delaware Junction and its one-time competitor, Big Barrel Country Music Festival, both shuttered after one year.

Last summer's Cork concert by country star Cole Swindell sold 1,100 tickets in 80 seconds.

"If you told people five years ago that we would have four or five country sellouts in Dewey Beach, they would have thought you're crazy," Pires adds.

The concert stage will be up against an Eagle Crest-Hudson Airport airstrip, facing southeast toward Del. 1 to help direct the sound away from nearby residents.

"We want to be good neighbors and we're sensitive to noise," says Christian Hudson, a managing partner with Hudson Fields. "We'll try to mitigate the sound with how we position the speakers and other things."

The concerts at Hudson Fields mark Highway One's first return to large-scale, outdoor concerts since 2015's Delaware Junction, which came in with a bang, but ended with a thud.

Highway One partnered with concert giant Live Nation to curate a lineup of national modern country acts for the three-day Harrington festival, including headliners Jason Aldean, Florida Georgia Line and Toby Keith.

The festival drew an estimated 30,000 fans, according to organizers. And those fans saw Pires on stage telling them that the festival would be back in 2016. But that never happened. The websites for the festival disappeared from the internet and both Pires and Live Nation stopped taking calls about the festival, never announcing it had been scrapped.

Pires now says he was a silent partner and could not comment at the time. He says he was as unhappy as the fans with the way it was handled.

"I didn't like it. I wanted us to go out there, but the guy who held the purse strings, the so-called principal promoter for Live Nation, had a position that they would handle it and I should stay out of it. And they never did. They never answered," he says. "Now that it's over, I do openly apologize. I think people in Delaware deserved an explanation."

This time around, Pires notes, Highway One is not partnering with an outside promoter.

"We may not be as fancy and we may not get someone like Luke Bryan," he adds, "but there's a lot of young, soon-to-be-famous bands out there and we'll have a fair shot at them."

Contact Ryan Cormier of The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier), Twitter (@ryancormier) and Instagram (@ryancormier).

IF YOU GO

What: Old Dominion

When: Thursday, June 1, 8 p.m.

Where: Hudson Fields, 30045 Eagle Crest Rd., near Milton

Cost: $25. Front-of-stage, standing-room-only "party pit" ($35) and seated VIP ($50) tickets are also available. 

On-sale date: Friday, Jan. 20 at 10 a.m.

Information: hudsonfields.com (The website will be updated in the coming days.)