A New Home for an Old-Time Tradition
The Family Hoedown started on a whim. Nine years ago, someone decided to gather a few dozen friends on a piece of land, play some old-time music, and see what happened. What happened was a community — one that has grown from a backyard hangout into one of the Northeast’s most genuine folk gatherings. For 2026, that community has a new address: Cortland Country Music Park, and the move feels less like a disruption than an expansion.
The ninth annual Family Hoedown runs June 5 through 7, shifting from its longtime home at The G Lodge — twenty-nine wooded acres that shaped the festival’s identity — to Cortland Country Music Park, a venue with its own deep roots in live music and outdoor gathering. The bones of the Hoedown remain unchanged: folk, old-time, camping, and the deliberate absence of anything that feels like a production.
The Anti-Festival Festival
What makes the Hoedown work is what it refuses to be. There are no sponsored stages, no influencer activations, no craft cocktail bars with twelve-dollar drinks. There’s a pancake breakfast on Sunday morning. There are kids running between campsites while their parents tune fiddles. There are local makers selling things they actually made. The programming is built around acoustic music played by people who learned it from other people, not from conservatory programs — old-time string band music, shape-note singing, flatfoot dancing, the living traditions that predate recorded music by centuries.
Camping is central to the experience. You pitch a tent, you settle in, and by Saturday night the boundaries between performers, volunteers, and audience members have dissolved entirely. Someone at the next campsite will teach your kid three banjo chords before breakfast. That’s not a marketing promise — it’s just what happens when you put folk musicians and families in a field for three days.
Cortland Country Music Park
The new venue brings its own history to the equation. Cortland Country Music Park has been hosting outdoor music events for years, and the infrastructure — permanent staging, established camping areas, proper facilities — gives the Hoedown room to grow without losing the intimacy that defines it. Tickets run through TicketSpice, and the pricing stays accessible in a festival market that has largely abandoned affordability.
Nine years from a whim to a tradition with a new home. The Family Hoedown has earned its name every step of the way — a gathering where family isn’t a demographic target but the organizing principle.