Lake Wales rests peacefully amid palmettos, live oaks, and citrus groves, despite its proximity to nearby metros Tampa and Orlando. While they were growing up, Rusty Ingley and Reid Hardman, the founders and cochairs of the Orange Blossom Revue (December 6–7), dreamed of something more. “All I’ve ever wanted was a traffic jam,” Hardman once quipped. Goal achieved: Now in its tenth year, the revue, formerly a community barbecue fundraiser, has transmogrified into a two-day musical extravaganza that far outkicks its coverage, with headliners like this year’s Robert Earl Keen, the War and Treaty, and JJ Grey & Mofro. One year, Langhorne Slim’s set even competed with the high school football game’s very vocal crowd, some two hundred feet from the stage. “We could be somewhere else and do the fifty-thousand-person show,” Ingley says, “but it would lose the intimacy that I think keeps people coming back year after year.”
Southern Agenda