Earlier this year, Jason DeFord — better known as Jelly Roll — swept three awards at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, including Best Contemporary Country Album for Beautifully Broken, an album that had already topped the Billboard 200 all-genre chart. A month later, he announced The Little ASS Shed Tour: eleven amphitheater dates, deliberately scaled back from his concurrent BIG ASS Stadium Tour Part 2 with Post Malone. The intentional contrast between those two tours tells you something about where Jelly Roll is right now — a stadium-level act who still insists on rooms where you can feel the crowd breathe.
The Syracuse date lands on Tuesday, June 23, five days after his stop at SPAC in Saratoga Springs, making it the penultimate Northeast show on the run. The tour name traces back to Jelly Roll’s keynote address at Pollstar Live 2025, where he talked about what he called a “fan-first spirit” — the conviction that proximity to an audience matters, that bigger is not always better.
About Jelly Roll
Born in Antioch, Tennessee, Jelly Roll spent years building an independent following across country, hip-hop, and rock before 2022’s “Son of a Sinner” and “Need a Favor” broke him into the mainstream. His debut country album Whitsitt Chapel debuted at number one on the Billboard Country Albums chart. Beautifully Broken followed in 2026 and topped the Billboard 200. The three-Grammy sweep in February — winning alongside Shaboozey and Brandon Lake — confirmed what his live audiences had already concluded: this is not a moment, it’s a career.
His public mission is as well-documented as his music. He visits correctional and rehabilitation facilities regularly and donated a recording studio to the juvenile center where he was once incarcerated. The redemption narrative isn’t marketing copy — it’s the architecture of the work.
About Empower FCU Amphitheater
Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview sits along the Onondaga Lake Parkway in Syracuse and Central New York, roughly fifteen minutes from downtown. Opened in 2015, the venue holds approximately 17,500 — 5,000 covered pavilion seats and 12,500 lawn — making it the region’s primary outdoor amphitheater. Jelly Roll is the second major country act booked there for summer 2026, following Tim McGraw.
Tickets & Details
Tickets start at $98. Opener Kashus Culpepper — an Alabama-born country artist on Big Loud Records who has toured with Leon Bridges, Sierra Ferrell, and Darius Rucker — joins the bill. Showtime is 7:00 PM.