Coming back strong after a year off?
It’s safe to say the first version of Morgan Wallen‘s Sand In My Boots Festival was a massive success in 2025. The festival, which took place in at the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama, as a one year takeover of Hangout Fest, sold out almost instantly when it went on sale with a lineup featuring Wallen himself, Post Malone, Brooks & Dunn and HARDY, as well as a wide range of artists from different genres including Riley Green, Wiz Khalifa, T-Pain, Chase Rice, 49 Winchester, and Three 6 Mafia.
Afterwards, the event drew high praise from the city. Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft even made it clear that he expected future versions of Hangout Fest to match the standard set by Sand In My Boots Festival going forward:
“My analogy has been, my own personal thoughts, in the past, we had young kids with their daddy’s credit card here and not a whole lot for them to worry about. They were on a free leash. So this year we had an older group that had their own credit card. And you could certainly see that they were more disciplined. There were less problems…
Really it was a much better behaving crowd.”
With the success of the festival and the praise from city officials, it seemed like all parties involved would want to run it back in 2026; however, that was not the case.
Despite the “Chasin’ You” singer saying that they would try to do it again sometime, Wallen’s Sand In My Boots Festival and Hangout Fest in general were cancelled in 2026. In fact, Mayor Craft ended up placing the blame on festival organizers, saying they waited too long to book the caliber of acts they needed:
“We are already approving the event in 2027. We delayed too long, or they did, in their application to be able to get the kind of acts that we required them to have to be successful in 2026. We will refuse to let them go back to the acts that we’ve had before and so they couldn’t do it…
They canceled the 2026 event, but they’ve got time now to pursue the type of talent we want on our beaches to invite the right audience that we want on our beaches, that we proved last time, the last event, that could happen. We’re determined if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen that way again.”
And after Hangout Fest 2026 was canceled, Sand In My Boots Festival made clear that there was never any plan for them to return next year – though they do plan on running it back at some point in the future. In a statement posted to their Instagram back in December 2025, the festival said the cancelation of Hangout Fest had “nothing to do” with them:
Between the back-and-forth between Gulf Shores and the team behind Sand In My Boots and the simple fact that there have been no further updates on the festival in over 10 months, the future of the event seemed to be in jeopardy. With that being said, however, it appears that the festival is set to make its grand return in 2027.
As reported by Foley News, a local Alabama news station, Mayor Craft officially announced the return of Sand In My Boots to Gulf Shores in 2027, with the official lineup set to be unveiled next month in November. Additionally, Craft would make security during the event a major focus, calling it a “paramount concern.”
As of now, there’s no further information surrounding Sand In My Boots’ return in 2027. With that being said, however, if a lineup announcement is coming in November, it’s incredibly safe to say an official announcement from Wallen and the festival promoters will be coming in the following weeks.
