Ontario Country Music Festival Boots and Hearts Gets Cody Johnson, Thomas Rhett and Jason Aldean For 2024
Boots and Hearts, which bills itself as Canada's largest music and camping festival, returns to Ontario's Burl's Creek Event Grounds from August 8 to 11, 2024.
Boots and Hearts Festival
Warm weather might seem far away to Canadians right now, but summer festival lineup announcements are in full swing. Today Ontario’s Boots and Hearts festival announces Cody Johnson, Thomas Rhett and Jason Aldean as its 2024 headliners. The popular festival, which bills itself as Canada’s largest music and camping festival, returns to the Burl’s Creek event grounds in Oro-Medonte, Ontario, from August 8 to 11 next year.
Headliner Cody Johnson is making his Boots and Hearts debut in 2024. The Texas-born singer-songwriter has been building his profile in the country market for years, self-releasing albums before his 2019 major-label debut, Ain’t Nothin’ To It, which topped the Billboard Country Album charts. In 2022, Johnson had his biggest single to date, “‘Til You Can’t,” which reached No. 18 on the Hot 100 and won two Country Music Awards.
Thomas Rhett and Jason Aldean are both returning to the festival, having performed in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Aldean had a big hit this year with the controversial No.1 “Try That In A Small Town,” which had its video removed from Country Music Television following criticisms that it glorified racist violence. Rhett, meanwhile, racked up his 19th Country Airplay No. 1 this fall with “Angels.” Rounding out the lineup are Brothers Osborne, the 2023 CMA Duo of the Year, who are appearing for the first time at Boots and Hearts, as well as Carly Pearce, Megan Moroney and more.
Eleven years after its first edition in 2012, Boots and Hearts shows no signs of slowing down. The festival is the flagship event of entertainment company Republic Live and has become a destination event for thousands of country fans. In 2023, the festival says it had record-breaking attendance, with forty thousand people trekking to rural Oro-Medonte — near Barrie, Ontario — to see headliners Tim McGraw, Keith Urban and Nickelback.
The popularity of a festival like Boots and Hearts is indicative of country music’s current commercial success across the charts. Morgan Wallen had the biggest Hot 100 song of the year with “Last Night” as well as the biggest album on the Billboard 200, One Thing at a Time, with artists like Aldean, Zach Bryan and Luke Combs also scoring high-charting hits.
This week, Live Nation Canada announced the launch of a major country festival in Vancouver, Coast City Country, demonstrating that the industry is willing to bet big on the genre.
Tickets for Boots and Hearts 2024 go on sale Dec. 8.
