The first month back in 2008, when the Hollowell family decided to revive Sunday blues on their family land outside Waterford, Cedric Burnside and Lightnin' Malcolm played every single week. Cars lined up along Old Oxford Road. People drove in from out of state to sit under the pavilion the family had just poured a concrete slab for, built originally to host their own 300-person reunion. That was the start of what became Foxfire Ranch's Sunday Blues Concert Series, a weekly fixture that ran from spring through Thanksgiving for the better part of a decade.
If you've lived in Marshall County long enough to remember when that show happened every Sunday, you should know it doesn't anymore. This year it happens once a month, on the second Sunday, and if you want to catch it before the season ends, you have exactly two chances left.
The Slow Shrink, Explained
Foxfire Ranch didn't cut its blues series all at once. The venue quietly moved from a weekly show to twice a month, on the second and fourth Sundays, roughly around 2018, as the Hollowells took on more weddings, family reunions, and private bookings on the same 80 acres. This year the schedule shrank again. Foxfire's own announcement for the 2026 season put it plainly: shows are now down to one Sunday a month, and the family framed the change as a way to make each date feel like something worth planning around rather than something you might catch on a whim.
The price moved too. For years, tickets to Sunday Blues ran ten dollars flat, a number the Hollowells held through the pandemic and every lean season since. Starting this year, general admission is twenty dollars, with a fifteen dollar student rate and free entry for kids under thirteen. The family has also said no one gets turned away for lack of funds, which tracks with how the venue has always operated, even as the sticker price climbed.
None of this means the tradition is fading. It means the county's best-known blues night has become scarcer on purpose, which changes how a resident should think about it. This isn't a show you stumble into anymore. It's a date you circle.
Two Sundays Left in 2026
Working from the current second-Sunday schedule, Foxfire's remaining dates for this year land on October 11 and November 8. The season has traditionally run through Thanksgiving, which falls on November 26 this year, but with the calendar now set to one show a month, November 8 is shaping up to be the last date on the books before the ranch closes out for winter.
Shows run roughly five to eight in the evening. If you want to make a full evening of it, Foxfire Ranch rents out four cabins on the property, and the family has been encouraging people to book ahead, pitch a tent, or bring a crew and treat it like a proper weekend rather than a quick stop after church.
Why This Sound Doesn't Travel Well
Part of what makes the scarcity sting a little is what you'd actually be missing. Marshall County is where Hill Country Blues took shape as its own genre, distinct from the Delta blues most people picture when they think of Mississippi music. According to the Mississippi Blues Trail, the style that came out of the greater Holly Springs area leans on few chord changes and unconventional song structures, built around a steady, driving groove rather than the slide guitar and harmonica that define Delta blues further south and west.
Two names carry most of that history: David "Junior" Kimbrough, who ran a juke joint in nearby Chulahoma until it burned down in 2000, and R.L. Burnside, whose grandson Cedric grew up playing that same style and headlined Foxfire's very first month of shows back in 2008. Cedric Burnside has since become one of the genre's most recognized living players, which means the Sunday nights at Foxfire weren't just a local pastime. They were, for a stretch, one of the only places to hear that lineage performed live on the land where it originated.
The tradition has institutional roots too. Rust College, the historically Black college founded in Holly Springs in 1866, has its own history of taking the music seriously as scholarship, not just entertainment, through faculty who ran a blues research label and helped organize regional blues and gospel festivals. That kind of attention from a local college is part of why Hill Country Blues has survived as a documented style rather than fading into general Southern folklore.
Chulahoma itself still gets its moment. The Chulahoma Blues Music Cultural Festival, held on a Saturday in mid-September each year in the community where Kimbrough played, took place again on September 19 this year, just two days before this piece went up. It's a smaller, more localized gathering than Foxfire's polished pavilion setup, closer in spirit to the porch and juke joint tradition the whole genre grew out of. Between the two events, a resident gets both versions of the same music: the raw original setting in Chulahoma, and the family-run, cabin-and-catering version at Foxfire.
What Twenty Dollars Actually Buys
The music is only half of why people keep coming back. Miss Annie Hollowell's cooking has its own following separate from the bands. Fried catfish, collard greens, cornbread, and barbecue show up at nearly every show, made in a full-service kitchen the family built out specifically to feed the crowds that started showing up once word got around. Some longtime attendees have said outright that they come for her food as much as the music.
The land itself is part of the draw. Foxfire sits in a historic settlement called the Dark Corner, between Waterford, Oxford, and Holly Springs, on ground the Hollowell family has held for more than a century. It's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a festival flyer but explains why the place feels different from a typical concert venue. This isn't a stage built for tourists. It's a family's backyard that grew into a cultural landmark almost by accident, starting with a reunion in 2007 and evolving from there.
What the Smaller Calendar Actually Says
A county doesn't shrink its most recognizable tradition down to two dates a year because interest dried up. If anything, the opposite: the Hollowells have said plainly that fewer shows means each one can carry more weight, more planning, more reason to book a cabin instead of just showing up for a couple hours. For residents, that means the informal, spontaneous version of Sunday blues in Marshall County is mostly gone. What's left is something you have to be a little more deliberate about, which might be the more honest version of what this music always was anyway. Junior Kimbrough's juke joint wasn't a nightly draw either. It was a place people made a point of getting to.
If you've been meaning to get out to Foxfire and haven't yet this year, October 11 and November 8 are what's left. After that, the season closes until spring.
For residents who've spent enough Sunday evenings in Marshall County to notice how much the place has changed, from its music calendar to its neighborhoods, Amy D. Woods has spent her career paying attention to those shifts across Greater Memphis and northwest Mississippi. If a conversation about the county's real estate side ever comes up, whether you're curious what a piece of land near Waterford is worth or just want a straight answer about the local market, reach out anytime.
