Damn Good Cowboy: Charlie Daniels Band’s Boxoffice Highlights

Charlie Daniels
 – Charlie Daniels

Part of the legacy of Charlie Daniels and his contribution to American music is his love of the road that stretches back more than four decades when he organized the first Volunteer Jams – if not even earlier when he was a young, multi-instrumentalist forming his first band right out of high school.


Pollstar’s archives contain a rich boxoffice history for the Charlie Daniels Band with many appearances through the years on festival stages, large stadium-sized events and multiple-act concerts along with the group’s success as a solo headliner.
Standout moments from the band’s headlining dates include the five best-attended shows logged in the archives along with the five concerts that made the most money from ticket sales. Three of the concerts listed below appear in both categories.

We must head back to 1988 to identify the largest sold ticket count for the Charlie Daniels Band as a concert headliner. On June 18 of that year, the group performed for a crowd of 34,403 at Marcus Amphitheater in Milwaukee (now American Family Insurance Amphitheater) just a year after the venue opened as the primary site for major concerts at the annual Milwaukee Summerfest. Joining the headliners on the bill were Waylon Jennings, Leon Russell and Bachman-Turner Overdrive among others. With a Boxoffice take topping $377,000, it is one of three performances that also land among Daniels’ top five gross records listed below.

The second-highest headcount was registered at a concert five years earlier in Tampa, Fla., at Tampa Stadium, the original home venue of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers before they moved to Raymond James Stadium. The band performed at the older venue on May 14, 1983, racking up a total sold-ticket tally of 30,500. The show featured tickets priced from $6 to $8 for a gross of $183,000 (valued at $478,000 today). Tampa Stadium was later renamed Houlihan’s Stadium and ultimately demolished in 1999.

Third among the top attendance tallies was a two-night engagement in 1991 at Kemper Arena, at the time a 19,500-seat indoor sports and entertainment venue in Kansas City but now a youth sports facility named Hy-Vee Arena. The Charlie Daniels Band performed at the venue on Nov. 16 that year with 23,500 fans present over both nights. The total gross for the run reached $210,400 (currently valued at about $402,000).

The fourth-highest ticket count is from a much more recent event – The Charlie Daniels 80th Birthday Volunteer Jam celebrated on Nov. 30, 2016 at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. With a packed arena crowd of 17,007, the Jam featured a host of stars including Chris Stapleton, Kid Rock and Luke Bryan. As was typical for the Volunteer Jams, the event also benefited a charity – in 2016 it was The Journey Home Project, a non-profit co-founded by Daniels and his manager David Corlew to benefit veterans of the American armed forces.

The fifth-best crowd was logged at Volunteer Jam XIII on Sept. 6, 1987 during the original run of Jams that started with the event’s inception in 1974 and continued through 1996. The 1987 concert was staged at Starwood Amphitheatre in the Nashville suburb of Antioch, Tenn. It drew a sellout crowd of 16,558 and marked the first sellout in the shed’s two-year history. The show ran over seven hours that day and included Lynyrd Skynyrd with Johnny Van Zant in his first year as frontman. Blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan also appeared along with The Oak Ridge Boys’ William Lee Golden at the beginning of his brief time as a solo artist.

Now looking at the top five grosses recorded for the Charlie Daniels Band as a headliner, Pollstar archives show that four of them came from Jams, the largest being the Charlie Daniels 80th Birthday Volunteer Jam. The show on Nov. 30, 2016 in Nashville is already mentioned above as the headlining event with the fourth-highest attendance. The performance grossed $657,921 and followed Daniels’ induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame just six weeks earlier.

In 2018, Bridgestone Arena again hosted another sold-out Jam on March 7 of that year called Volunteer Jam XX: A Tribute to Charlie Daniels. Produced by Blackbird Presents – also responsible for tribute concerts in Nashville for Kenny Rogers and Merle Haggard – the concert generated Daniels’ second-highest gross on record, a $495,633 take from 9,907 sold tickets. Joining the headliners was a huge slate of acts including Billy F Gibbons of ZZ Top, Alison Krauss, Alabama and Blackberry Smoke.

No. 3 among top grosses was the first concert listed above with the highest attendance on record for the Charlie Daniels Band – the June 18, 1988 performance at Milwaukee’s Marcus Amphitheatre. The concert grossed $377,250 which is valued at about $830,000 in 2020 dollars. The fourth-highest gross was Volunteer Jam XIII on Sept. 6, 1987, ranked above as No. 5 among Daniels’ best-attended concerts. The Jam produced a gross of $257,767, valued at over a half-million dollars today. Then, fifth among the top earners was Volunteer Jam XVIII, also known as the 40th Anniversary Volunteer Jam on Aug. 12, 2015. Once again held at Bridgestone Arena, the concert raked in a gross of $256,594 from a sellout crowd of 9,396. Along with the headliners, the lineup included a full list of country stars such as Billy Ray Cyrus, The Kentucky Headhunters, Montgomery Gentry, Travis Tritt, Lee Roy Parnell and more. Like the 2016 concert mentioned earlier, the 40th Anniversary Jam also benefited Daniels’ own The Journey Home Project as well as the Nashville Predators Foundation.

Although the first Volunteer Jam was held in 1974 at Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium, Boxoffice results from that original show are not in our archives, since Pollstar did not begin operations until 1981. However, the oldest Volunteer Jam found in the database is the 8th edition of the concert on Jan. 30, 1982, a sold-out event held at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. Fans numbered 9,150 for the show that grossed $111,875 with tickets priced at $12.50. Some of the stars on the bill were George Thorogood & The Destroyers along with country greats Johnny Lee, Crystal Gayle, The Oak Ridge Boys and Roy Acuff.