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It’s so much more than just disco: Friday night’s dance party in downtown Maryville, arranged as part of the Summer on Broadway festivities, will allow participants to don headphones and dance to popular music.

Presenting partner XL Event Lab will provide the deejays and the headphones for Friday night. Summer on Broadway participants are responsible for their own dance moves.

It’s so much more than just disco: Friday night’s dance party in downtown Maryville, arranged as part of the Summer on Broadway festivities, will allow participants to don headphones and dance to popular music.

Presenting partner XL Event Lab will provide the deejays and the headphones for Friday night. Summer on Broadway participants are responsible for their own dance moves.

Imagine, if you will, the sight that might greet a completely unaware pedestrian wandering Maryville’s downtown area on Friday night, past the craft vendors, food trucks and canines throwing themselves into a body of water.

Summer on Broadway, they might think, is a delight … and then they hear it: the off-key singing of dozens, maybe hundreds of voices, half of them belting the words to Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” the other half crying out howling the chorus of Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart.”

There is no music behind such a bizarre-sounding chorus, no guitars or drum loops or any sort of instrumental accompaniment: just singing, matched only by the percussive rhythm of pounding feet on the concrete surface of the Municipal Parking Deck beside Bluetick Tavern on West Broadway Avenue. There, in the fading light of a summer evening, glowing headphones turn and swirl on exuberant dancers, neon fireflies against a backdrop of a laser-lit stage upon which two deejays hover over consoles like digital scientists.

This is what a silent disco looks like, according to Elijah Morin, and that’s only half as entertaining as what it sounds like.

“I understand that some people are reluctant to try it, because I get a little stressed out when I’m on a dance floor with normal speakers, and you feel like everyone’s watching you,” said Morin, head of college and special events for XL Event Lab, the company contracted by Blount Partnership to organize Friday night’s centerpiece entertainment event for Summer on Broadway. “But you get a pair of headphones, and you have different songs going, and everybody’s moving at different rhythms, and you realize people aren’t watching you dance.

“And then, if you take your headphones off for a second, you don’t hear any music, but you hear dozens of people singing off-key to the songs. In that sense, it’s kind of a karaoke vibe, and you can see what channel someone is listening to based on the color of their headphones. You’re all kind of circled around, dancing if you want, and no one’s really standing around looking at the deejays or the other dancers. It’s like a karaoke vibe, and it’s definitely a lot of fun.”

The logistics of the silent disco begin with XL Event Lab itself, a company founded in the United Kingdom but with American headquarters in Orlando. The organization works with a number of different brands, from concerts to festivals — which is where many patrons were introduced to the idea of the silent disco.

According to most pop culture historians, the idea originated with a French electronic artist in 1997, who streamed a live concert over the web to listeners in Japan. In America, the rock band Flaming Lips organized the first “headphone concert” in which the group used an FM signal generator to broadcast to attendees who were given headphones and miniature FM receivers. It wasn’t an entirely silent event; standard concert speakers were also used, and technical glitches made for occasional problems … but the idea itself caught on.

Today, wireless limited channel headphones — the ones that will be distributed on Friday can only tune to two different frequencies — sharper transmission and the aural manipulation by deejays makes for a more streamlined, enjoyable experience. Silent discos have become a standard feature of many festivals, and while their most often associated with electronic music and EDM artists, Morin said Summer on Broadway attendees won’t be subjected to obscurity or literal disco.

“I think the biggest misconception is that because the word ‘disco’ in the brand, people are like, ‘I don’t want to listen to the Bee Gees!’” he said. “EDM (electronic dance music) is a lot of what we play at our music festivals, because that’s what they request. But a lot of times, venues like (Summer on Broadway) ask for what’s known as open format: top 40, throwback classics, ‘The Electric Slide,’ everything you’d hear at an upbeat wedding.

“You won’t hear any of the obscure house music, especially at a big community event like this. And because these types of events are family-friendly, we like to make sure everything is radio edited (for profanity) as well. Really, it’s becoming a lot more mainstream, and we’ll have a huge quantity of headphones; lots of deejay lights; giant, inflatable headphones on stage; basically everything you want for a big party.”

It’s fitting, because that’s exactly what Summer on Broadway has become. The Big BBQ Bash was the seed that started the tentpole event for downtown Maryville; first held in 2007 at Springbrook Corporate Center in Alcoa as a project of Leadership Blount, it’s grown over the years into championship-level barbecue competition that qualifies winners for both the American Royal World Series of Barbecue cook-off and the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue.

As it grew in reputation, organizers moved it to downtown Maryville, and both Blount Partnership and the City of Maryville built Summer on Broadway around it in 2014. That first year, streets were closed and vendors were invited, but it was 2015 when the event found its legs, as the Smoky Mountain DockDogs (the aforementioned leaping canine competition) came for the first year and the Hops in the Hills craft beer festival was launched. Today, the event is the work of several organizations, including the Maryville Downtown Association, the City, Blount Partnership and a number of individual businesses.

Music has long been a part of the festivities, with local performers booked for various stages throughout downtown, but in 2019, organizers brought in an outside act: The Cleverlys, a comedy-music group from Arkansas that drew a respectable crowd and gave planners the idea to have a marquee event.

In 2021 (the event was canceled in 2020 due to COVID-19), they brought in regional favorites The Dirty Guv’nahs to headline the main stage beside Bluetick.

This year, they opted for something different with the silent disco.

“We’ll have two different deejays, and each of them is going to be playing on a different channel on the headphones,” Morin said. “As the attendees come up, they’ll go through a designated entrance, and each person will grab a pair of headphones. They will have all been sanitized and have fresh batteries, and there will be a little button where you can toggle between the two different channels.

“The red channel will be hip-hop, and the blue channel will be Top 40 and EDM, and each set of headphones has a volume adjustment. People can put on, and they’re free to roam about and dance, and then whenever they’re done, they head toward the designated exit area, where the staff will collect the headphones, sanitize them and return them to the entrance for the next person to use.”

Summer on Broadway volunteers will help with the logistics, he added, and as late summer twilight transitions to full dark, the glow of headphones bobbing and dancing amid a cacophony of sing-alongs will ensure that the festival is a party.

“It’ll be a perfect cap to a great weekend,” Morin said. “A lot of the normal shows are just the headphones and the deejays, but the organizers have opted for all the extras with lasers and lights and sparkler machines, so it’s definitely going to be a really big party vibe. You’ll hear everything you know from the radio, from ’90s hip-hop and R&B to classics to songs that are really current and fun. And obviously with that quantity of headphones and that amount of people, it’s going to be a lot larger than our usual show. And it’s definitely going to be a good time.”

Steve Wildsmith has worked as a writer, editor and freelance journalist for The Daily Times for more than two decades. In addition to coverage of entertainment, he also serves as the social media specialist for Maryville College. Contact him at

WHEN: Friday and Saturday, June 24 and 25

Friday: Smoky Mountain DockDogs competitions begin at noon; streets open to the public at 5 p.m.; silent disco at 9 p.m.

Saturday: Streets open at 9 a.m.; Smoky Mountain DockDogs competitions begin at 9 a.m.; Big BBQ Bash awards presentations at 3:30 p.m.; Hops in the Hills craft beer festival begins at 5 p.m. (tickets sold separate for Hops in the Hills)

Award-winning freelance columnist and entertainment writer Steve Wildsmith is the former Weekend editor at The Daily Times.

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