With the Texas Country Reporter Festival having vacated town, Kelli and Bob Phillips will keep the tradition of bringing Texas-made arts, crafts, food and live music to Downtown Waxahachie on the last Saturday in October in a new event called the Crossroads of Texas Country Festival.
Date and Location
The festival will take place from 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. on October 26, 2024 in Downtown Waxahachie, surrounding the historic and ornate Ellis County courthouse at 101 W Main St., Waxahachie, TX 75165.
Admission is free.
Attractions
Past attendees of the Texas Country Reporter Festival over the past two decades who come to the new event will notice little to no difference as the Crossroads of Texas festival will feature nearly 200 vendor booths with artists, craftspeople and the all the perfunctory festival foods of hot dogs, cotton candy, funnel cake and beer.
Live Music
Live music will entertain crowds with ten stages set up in restaurants, breweries and wine houses around the courthouse square, in addition to a main stage outdoors where musicians from Texas and the surrounding states will perform.
Already announced as a headliner for the main stage is Western Swing and Honky Tonk Country legend, Asleep at the Wheel.
Grown Local Stage
As in previous years, the Grown Local stage at Railyard Park will present up-and-coming local Ellis County talent chosen by people’s-choice vote.
From the more than 1,500 votes cast by early August, the Grown Local music performance winners for 2024 are:
- Danni MacMaster
- Noah Derrick Music
- Ethan Pacheco & the RoadRunners
- South Bound Twin
- The BarnCatz
- Tickle & Croon
- Trigger Jones
- Unbroken Reign
Go Texan Food, Beverages, Gifts
A Go Texan exhibit will showcase Texas-made food and beverages, and artisan crafts will be sold throughout the festival area just in time for an early start on Christmas gift shopping.
“We look forward to welcoming everyone to the Crossroads of Texas Country Festival for a day filled with music, arts, and the unmistakable charm of Waxahachie,” says Kelli Phillips.
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Background
For more than 25 years, Bob and Kelli Phillips have hosted the Texas Country Reporter Festival in Downtown Waxahachie as the largest one-day festival in Texas drawing nearly 70,000 attendees. The festival was an up-close and in-person way to enjoy the Texas-based theme of the weekly television show, and it featured many guests who’d appeared in the the show’s episodes.
In the days following the 2023 Texas Country Reporter Festival, Phillips Production, Inc. announced that Kelli and Bob Phillips were stepping down as hosts of the syndicated Texas Country Reporter show and that Texas Monthly L.L.C. would wholly takeover the T.C.R. brand.
Texas Monthly then arranged a multi-year agreement with the City of Grand Prairie, Texas to relocate the T.C.R. festival in the spring of 2025 to a new 172-acre entertainment district that includes an indoor water park, a Vegas-style water and light show, waterfront dining options, live music stages, playgrounds, hotels and a convention center, and an indoor family adventure park — along with plenty of parking space.
Subsequently, Kelli and Bob have started a new podcast called On the Road with Kelli and Bob through which they continue to explore the people in and around the State of Texas who have extraordinary stories to tell.
The city’s use of the marketing and promotional phrase Crossroads of Texas began around 2014 with a film festival highlighting locally filmed movies and evolved to showcase local musicians.
Now that the T.C.R. brand has vacated the town, the Crossroads of Texas tagline has been reappropriated for the new festival. The phrase is a reference to Waxahachie’s location at the intersection of two major highways, U.S. Highway 287 and Interstate Highway 35E.