Family fun and some at Country Thunder '15

FLORENCE — The Duplessis kids — there are five of them, between 8 and 11 — shielded themselves from the mid-afternoon sun baking the grassy Country Thunder festival grounds Friday afternoon.

While the new duo of Maddie & Tae — Maddie Marlow and Taylor Dye — were warming up the stage for Friday night’s headliners, the Duplessis siblings were shading their eyes from the sun with cowboy hats.

This is their fifth festival, said mom Deb Duplessis, who with her husband Shawn brings the brood out for a long weekend of camping and country music.

“We get comments all the time: ‘Why do you bring the children out here?’ ” the Gilbert mother said as 8-year-old Amelia — twin of Aiden — pouted in a lawn chair and the boys — Aiden and older brothers Nicholas, 9, and Donovan, 10 — reclined on the lawn under an umbrella. “It’s a family event and our kids love country music.”

For the most part, the lineup of Country Thunder Friday filled that family-friendly bill. Maddie & Tae Friday afternoon, multitasking on acoustic guitar and mandolin, sang inspiring songs of learning to fly when you fall. The 1990s pop country band Diamond Rio chimed in around dinnertime with a catalogue of pop love songs — “One More Day,” “In A Week or Two,” “I Believe” — followed by neo-traditionalist Joe Nichols, who was set to open for Friday night’s headliners Big & Rich.

Friday was the second day of the four-day festival, which includes headlining shows by Blake Shelton Saturday and Luke Bryan Sunday.

Some highlights so far:

• By the middle of Brett Eldredge’s show Thursday night, a rumble took over the Country Thunder grounds and spilled into the nearby canyons and rolling hills hugging the campsites that circle the grounds. Applause turned into thunderous outbursts. Whistles sounded like a train barreling along the tracks that run in the middle of the campgrounds. If you closed your eyes, the plodding thud of fast-moving footsteps making their way to the main stage sounded like horses galloping to the finish line.

Eldredge remembers his first show at Country Thunder. He played one of those lonely early afternoon gigs, the ones where only a few hundred people show up.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

He was thrilled.

On Thursday night he headlined before a record crowd that beat last year’s 24,000-plus.

He was ecstatic.

“This is the best feeling, to close the show,” he said. “This is my favorite party of the year.”

• Old Dominion, a band that takes its name from the state of Virginia, kicked things off Thursday afternoon.

That’s a tall order since folks who show up that early — about six hours before the headlining show — tend to wander around, checking out the turkey legs smoking on the open grill at The Pit or wandering around the merch tents. But frontman Matthew Ramsey had the early afternoon crowd on its feet with songs that nicely balanced what we like about country music and what we like about pop. There were some guitar-shredding solos and percussion blasts on the punky “I Get Drunk” and some old-soul country on “Nowhere Fast.”

The band also covered a handful of songs they penned that other artists made popular: “Say You Do,” “Wake up Lovin’ You,” “Chainsaw.”

• Attendance this weekend could top last year’s 80,000. Organizers said they won’t have a final tally until they get the numbers from Walgreens, which sold tickets in hundreds of its stores statewide.