On a normal Saturday at Cuscowilla, the loudest sound on the golf course is a wedge landing softly on a green that slopes toward Lake Oconee. The club has run this way since 1997, when Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw laid out Georgia's only course carrying their names, routing it through native grasses and pine rather than around them. In 2016, Cuscowilla made itself even quieter, stopping outside visitor play entirely and becoming the only golf club community on the lake that keeps its fairways closed to anyone who isn't a member or a member's guest.
On September 13 and 14, that quiet breaks on purpose.
Everyday Life at Cuscowilla
Ask anyone familiar with Cuscowilla what sets it apart from the resort-scale communities elsewhere on Lake Oconee, and the answer usually isn't a number of courses or restaurants. It's the absence of a packed calendar. Life inside the gates runs on morning coffee with a lake view, a cart ride instead of a commute, and evenings that turn into porch conversations among neighbors. The relationships form through routine and the easy pace of daily life.
Which is exactly why September 13 and 14 stand out. For two days, the club that built its identity on staying low-key is hosting a ticketed fundraiser with a Grammy-nominated headliner, a golf tournament open to sponsors and teams, and a cause the whole community already knows by name.
Two Days, Not One
According to MSGR News, the event is called Songs & Drives for Lives, and the title does double duty. Day one, Sunday the 13th, is the Singer-Songwriter Night, an in-the-round set at Cuscowilla featuring Corey Crowder alongside fellow songwriters Ray Fulcher and Ben Williams. Day two shifts from stage to course, with the golf tournament portion that gives the event its second half. Tickets, sponsorships, and golf team registrations went on sale in July through the Spencer Bradley Foundation for Mental Health, and this is the foundation's first time running it, which makes the event a debut rather than a return engagement.
Oconee Cellar, owned by Daniela and Matt Garofalo, is presenting the event.
A Foundation Focused on Mental Health
The Spencer Bradley Foundation for Mental Health is behind this fundraiser. David and Patti Bradley also co-own Lake Oconee Dentistry.
MSGR News quoted Dr. Bradley saying, "This event is about much more than great music and great golf." He added that every ticket purchased, sponsorship secured, and golf team registered goes toward funding mental health education and resources across the communities the foundation serves.
The event also features Corey Crowder. Crowder is a Loganville, Georgia native who spent over a decade in Nashville writing hits for Chris Young, Florida Georgia Line, and Kane Brown, including the 2022 ASCAP Country Song of the Year, "Famous Friends," which Billboard named the most-played song of 2021. He is performing at the benefit at Cuscowilla.
The Sponsors Live Here Too
Every name attached to Songs & Drives for Lives traces back to Lake Oconee rather than to an outside sponsor list. Luxury Lake Oconee Real Estate Group, run by Riezl and Ted Baker, signed on as a headlining sponsor. Oconee Cellar is presenting. The performers bring the music. The foundation's founders run a dental practice most attendees have probably sat in a chair at.
That pattern matters more than it might seem at first. A community large enough to field a two-day fundraiser with a national-caliber musical lineup, but small enough that the sponsors, the performers, and the cause are all drawn from the same few hundred households, tells you something about the density of who actually lives at Cuscowilla. It is a community-backed event. It's neighbors supporting the foundation with the resources they happen to have on hand.
What Wednesday Looks Like at Cuscowilla
Strip away these two event days and the rest of the calendar looks like what residents describe when they talk about why they stay. The Waterside restaurant and the clubhouse dining room handle the routine version of a night out, the kind built for a family dinner or a drink after eighteen holes rather than a special occasion. The Cuscowilla Garden Club tends a community garden with raised beds and flower plots that supplies a seasonal farmers market, so the produce on a Saturday table might have been picked a few hundred yards away. Four pickleball courts and two Har-Tru tennis courts sit a short walk from the locker rooms, busy enough on a clear afternoon that meeting a neighbor there is closer to expected than accidental. There's a dog park, a playground, and a lakeside pool with a pool cabana that opens for the season.
None of it is loud. GolfWeek has ranked Cuscowilla Georgia's number one residential golf course, and Golf Digest currently places it 14th among all courses in the state for the 2025-26 cycle, rankings that reward a course built to reward patience over spectacle. The club has stayed exclusively private since 2016.
That's what makes September 13 and 14 worth marking on the calendar even if you have no connection to golf, songwriting, or the foundation personally. A place this deliberately quiet doesn't get loud without a reason. These two days bring together the foundation, the performers, and the wine shop presenting the event at Cuscowilla.
If you're at Cuscowilla this week, the singer-songwriter night on the 13th and the golf tournament on the 14th are both still open for tickets, sponsorships, and team registrations through the Spencer Bradley Foundation for Mental Health.
Charity Joiner + Company covers the neighborhoods we work in because we live in them too, and our own Charity Gives program ties every closing we handle to a cause in the communities we serve. If Lake Oconee living is part of a bigger move you're weighing, from a second home on the water to relocating full time, we'd welcome the chance to talk it through. Request a Red-Carpet Consultation whenever you're ready.