By Rick Zeigler—
MUNCIE, IN—GRAMMY award winning musician Mike Farris, along with his band The Fortunate Few, will be performing a FREE outdoor concert as part of the 2026 Muncie Three Trails Music Series. This concert will take place at 7:00 P.M .on Saturday, September 19th at the Brown Family Amphitheater on the campus of Ball State University. Locals Mike Martin & the Beautiful Mess will open the show.
Mike Farris is an artist’s artist and a musician’s musician, celebrated and revered by his fellow performers. He is a GRAMMY, Americana Association, and Dove Music award winner, with six solo albums since 2001. He is also a founding member of 90’s mainstream rock group, The Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies.
Farris was born in 1968 in Winchester, TN. With a gospel-fueled voice that sounds like a cross between the hard rock blast of Bon Scott and the joyful sweetness of Al Green, Mike has taken a long time to balance his life and considerable talent. Devastated when his parents divorced when he was 11 years old, Farris tumbled early into the world of drugs and alcohol, a lifestyle that landed him in reform school. Nearly dying from an accidental overdose, he moved in with his father and began playing guitar and writing songs, gradually pulling himself out of the depths of his addictions. After forming the seminal 1990s blues jam band the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies, however, the endless touring and bars sent him right back to his old bad habits, and while he put out fine music with SCW, with Peaceful Knievel, and during his stint as the singer for Double Trouble, Stevie Ray Vaughan‘s old rhythm section, Farris was in deep emotional trouble. Finally, in 2004, while attending the funeral of a friend, he decided he had enough, and embraced both God and sobriety.
Since that time, Mike has put out four studio releases, two live records, and one charity EP (as Mike Farris and the Cumberland Saints). His music is diverse but tends to be rooted in early American gospel and blues. In 2008, Farris won the Americana Music Award for “New and Emerging Artist.” In 2010 , SHOUT!! Live won the Dove Award for “Traditional Gospel Album of the Year,” and his 2014 release, Shine For All The People, won the GRAMMY for “Best Roots Gospel Album.”
For 2025’s The Sound of Muscle Shoals, Mike Farris’s first album since 2018’s Silver & Stone, Farris made the pilgrimage to the doors of the legendary Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, AL. The resulting album is a culmination of all of Farris’s musical influences and life lessons learned, captured in a location that holds deep meaning for him. In collaboration with members of the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the band captures lightning in a bottle, channeling the spirit of their musical forebears, conjuring up the intrinsic magic of the Muscle Shoals sound, and wrapping it around Farris’s heartfelt and hardscrabble blue-eyed soul vocals. In the intertwining threads of spiritual and earthly, of gospel and rock ‘n’ roll, of faith and fire, Farris once again brings what Rolling Stone describes as his “…supersized voice filled with the electricity of Saturday night and the godly grace of Sunday mornings…” to the album’s 11 tracks.
The Muncie Three Trails Music Series is a non-profit partnership whose mission is to bring critically acclaimed, national recording artists to perform at Canan Commons, Muncie’s premier outdoor performance venue, located in the heart of Downtown Muncie, as well as at the Brown Family Amphitheater on the campus of Ball State University. A second mission is to promote the many recreational, artistic, and cultural attractions located along, or in close proximity to, Muncie’s popular “Three Trails” — The White River Greenway, Cardinal Greenway, and Muncie Arts and Culture Trail. We hope attendees will heed our slogan, “Explore the Trails, Enjoy the Music.”
Complete information about the Muncie Three Trails Music Series can be found at www.munciethreetrails.com.
The post ‘Mike Farris & The Fortunate Few’ to Headline FREE Concert in Muncie, IN appeared first on Muncie Journal.
