By Jeff Vrabel

The Lowcountry is rich in a lot of things — seafood, humidity, insect life — but live music isn’t necessarily one of them. With the giant and thrilling exception of the Savannah Music Festival, there aren’t a lot of reliable live-music outlets in the zone here. That can be attributed to a number of things, but logistics is chief among them — Savannah, Charleston and the surrounding environs are lovely places to visit, but it’s tough to route a tour through them, if you want to make any money, anyway.

Enter Zac Brown. Last year, the quickly-budding country impresario — who grew famous, if you’re not familiar, by picking up the crossover island/country torch that Jimmy Buffett hasn’t laid down yet and has since expanded his musical reach to a much wider swath of the South — launched the Southern Ground Festival, a two-day mini-Bonnaroo of music and food that took place at the cozy Blackbaud Stadium on fancy Daniel Island on the ocean side of Charleston. Owing to the wide appeal of Brown’s music and, one imagines, a live thirst for live music that you didn’t have to drive to Atlanta or Charlotte for, it was a hit — big enough, at least, to warrant a 2012 sequel.

That second edition took place last weekend, Oct. 20-21, back at Daniel Island. It was actually an expended edition both in space — the festival’s second stage and sprawling food component moved to a much larger area afield from the main stage — and geography, as an earlier incarnation took place over two days in Nashville in September. The lineup was stronger too: this year’s included sterling North Carolina folk-rockers the Avett Brothers, the always-effervescent San Francisco reggae-hippie Michael Franti and Spearhead, pop-country pixie Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, the rising exhaust-smelling rockers Blackberry Smoke, the remaining reggae royalty in the Wailers, Florida-flavored bluesman JJ Grey and Mofro, the Charlie Daniels Band, Texas rockers Los Lonely Boys, and a collection of artists and side projects connected to Brown’s own Southern Ground label, including ZBB guitarist Clay Cook and Coy Bowles and the Fellowship, which constitutes something like 4/7 of the headlining band.

That wasn’t all: Sitting in with Brown’s band both nights were Gregg Allman (who seemed in fine form on tracks like “Melissa” and the once-again-short-haired-I-am-happy-to-announce John Mayer, who guitar-dueled ZBB’s Clay Cook on Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”; hometown hero Darius Rucker popped in as well.

If this sounds like a bit of a genre-smashing collection, that’s the idea: Like Buffett and Kenny Chesney, his mentors in marketing (if not music), Brown’s appeal is wide and growing, and his visage was used over the weekend as currency for everything from whiskey (Jack Daniel’s sponsored) to BBQ sauce to Camp Southern Ground, a function he launched for kids in the South. With the music business being shaky and rattled as it is, true staying power, particularly in country, seems safer achieved by not only expanding the scope of your sound — which Brown, by most accounts, seems to be doing — but your side projects as well. The fest’s tagline spoke of Brown’s “favorite things” — friends, family, food and music, natch — but though maybe cornball when you read them in marketing materials, they seem wrapped up nicely when spread out over two days on a gorgeous autumn afternoon.