Festivals in South Dakota

Stretched between the wind-swept Great Plains and the wooded ridges of the Black Hills, South Dakota grows a festival scene in its own image: plain-spoken, down-to-earth, built for wide-open country. In Sioux Falls, the state's largest city, Rock the Country Sioux Falls raises its stages each summer beneath the vast Midwestern sky, rolling out an unapologetically country and Southern rock lineup — Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, the Marshall Tucker Band. The Rock the Country - 2 Day Pass and the Sunday Pass break that headline weekend down into à-la-carte options, from the full two days to a single Sunday.

Yet the state's musical identity runs deeper than the national headliners: Lallycooler keeps a July tradition of prairie community celebration alive, while Four Twenty Falls shows as early as spring that Sioux Falls can also draw a looser, more carefree crowd. To make sense of this handful of gatherings scattered across hundreds of miles of plains, FestT calculates your FestiScore — how well a lineup matches your favorite artists — and keeps dates, headliners and ticketing up to date. Everything you need to map out a festival road trip between Mount Rushmore, the Badlands and South Dakota's warm summer nights.