The Red River Showdown pitting Texas and OU isn’t the only heated rivalry between Oklahoma and the Lone Star State. One might be brewing now over whose All for the Hall concert event can raise the most dough for Nashville’s non-profit Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
First, though, the backstory: All for the Hall, founded in 2005 by Country Music Hall of Fame member Vince Gill to raise money for the museum’s education programs, had alternated for years between New York and Los Angeles, with a recurring All for the Hall concert staged in Nashville. Then Big D entered the picture.
Dallas won the fundraising crown for an All for the Hall held outside Nashville with its inaugural benefit concert, which took place in 2021 at The Statler Dallas and featured CM Hall of Fame members Brooks And Dunn. The ’21 Dallas benefit — presented by Winston And Strawn and co-chaired by Anne and Steve Stodghill — also included a day-before patron party at the Stodghill manse featuring a backyard performance by Tricia Yearwood.
The two-day Dallas event raked in more than $630,000, including a net of at least $415,000, for the museum. It was a surprising record for a non-Nashville Hall — L.A. and New York ain’t exactly one-horse towns, after all — and the record stood until this year. In March, country superstar Blake Shelton hosted an All for the Hall benefit at Tulsa’s BOK Center that scared up nearly $800,000, according to Ben Hall and Lisa Purcell of the Hall of Fame and Museum.
That total, of course, blew Dallas out of the water.
Flash-forward to a Tuesday, April 30 announcement event at the Stodghill spread, where a crowd of 170 including Sunie and Steve Solomon, Tiffany Divis, Stubbs Davis, Barbara Bigham, Steve Kemble, Kara Goss, Denny Moon, Angela Choquette, Ryan Ross and Robbie Kruithoff learned about plans for the second All for Hall Dallas. It’s scheduled for September 9-10, with Co-Chairs Lisa Arpey and Vikram Agrawal and Anne and Steve serving as honorary co-chairs.
Once again the patron party will be held at the Stodghills’ place, where there will be a performance by the Grammy-nominated trio Midland on the evening of the 9th, guests learned. The following night, attendees were told, Gill and some yet-to-be-named artists would star in a “guitar pull” after a dinner at Gilley’s Dallas.
(A few weeks later, however, it would be announced that Gill “is no longer able to attend the headline event.” Artists on the September 10 Gilley’s bill will be Clint Black, Robert Earl Keen, Scotty McCreery and Carly Pearce.)
The April 30 event at the Stodghills’ included a performance by Runaway June, an up-and-coming, Chicks-like trio best known for their Top 5 hit, “Buy My Own Drinks.”
It will be interesting to see whether and how the upcoming Hall event in Dallas can wrest the non-Nashville fundraising crown back from Oklahoma. One thing to keep in mind is that Shelton’s Tulsa total came in a nearly-full venue seating about 19,000, while the inaugural Dallas event lured just 400 or so to the Brooks And Dunn show at the Statler. Shelton essentially donated to the museum all the proceeds from the March concert, which was the final stop on his 2024 Back to the Honky Tonk tour.
Says the museum’s Jeremy Rush: “The folks in Dallas have been amazing and very engaged in the fundraising and we’re excited to see the result.”
As a result of the All for the Hall fundraisers in Dallas and elsewhere, the Nashville museum provides its Words And Music program within the Dallas Independent School District and at other schools at no cost. Words And Music addresses social and emotional needs and bolsters literacy skills by teaching students to write original song lyrics.