Sing Out Loud Festival Closes 10th Anniversary Weekend Today in Downtown St. Augustine

Sing Out Loud Festival closes out its 10th anniversary season today, Sept. 20, with the final day of free live music spread across downtown St. Augustine venues, including Spinster Abbott's, Colonial Oak Music Park, Hornski's Brewing Co., Dog Rose Brewing Co. and Jimmy Hula's. It caps three straight weekends of free shows that turned much of the city's bar and restaurant scene into a rotating concert hall, and it gives locals one more same-day reason to head downtown before the month's music winds down.

This was the third and final Local Artist Showcase weekend of September, following runs on Sept. 4-6 and Sept. 11-13. Altogether, the three weekends brought more than 160 acts to 17 venues around the city, all free to attend. The lineups this year covered indie rock, jazz, bluegrass, country, comedy and spoken word, a mix organizers say reflects how deep the Northeast Florida music scene actually runs.

A decade of free shows

Sing Out Loud launched in 2016 as a St. Augustine celebration of live music. Since then it has featured more than 1,700 national, regional and local musicians and drawn more than 360,000 attendees. The Local Artist Showcases have been the festival's backbone from the start, an annual September chance for fans to wander between small venues and catch acts they've never heard of alongside familiar local names.

This year marks a structural change for the festival. For the first time, the ticketed Francis Field weekend, normally the festival's marquee event, has been split off from the September showcases entirely. That weekend is moving to May 2027, which means this September belonged completely to the free, all-ages local showcases rather than sharing the spotlight with a ticketed headline act.

Ice cream and a finale still ahead

The festival's 10th year has come with a local food partnership too. Mayday Handcrafted Ice Cream created a limited-edition flavor called Spoonbill Guava Cheesecake, a guava-lime ice cream studded with cookie crumbles, named for the pink-and-white spoonbill that nests along the region's marshes. It's available exclusively at Mayday's St. Johns County locations through the end of September.

Today's shows don't quite mark the end of the celebration. Finale-week events run Sept. 23-27 and include a free Songwriters Festival and a Record Fair at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre, giving residents who missed the showcase weekends another chance to catch part of the festival's 10th anniversary run before it closes out the month.

For today's full showtimes and venue lineups, check singoutloudfestival.com or the festival's app.

Want to talk about tonight's shows or share who you caught this weekend? Join the conversation in our Community Forum. For more happenings around the county, visit St. Johns Community Website, follow us on Facebook, and check out more local events coverage.