When considering the size and scope of The Moonshiner’s Ball, a succinct, but not terribly imaginative term comes to mind as a description.

Small.

To a degree that’s appropriate. Compared to mammoth music festivals that precede the summer and fall months — Lexington’s Railbird and Louisville’s Bourbon & Beyond topping the list — The Moonshiner’s Ball is undeniably modest in size. But take in the sense of community that has developed around it during a 12-year history, one fortified by a devout audience base that has followed the event through two location changes before settling into what has become its permanent home at Rockcastle Riverside in Livingston, and a different tag comes to mind.

Intimate.

That might come across as just a polite way of saying “small,” but it perhaps better reflects a music festival removed from a major metropolitan host city to maintain a level of intimacy even as its reputation almost unavoidably grows. After all, how “small” can an outdoor music festival be when it boasts 19-time Grammy winning banjo great Béla Fleck and champion jam/funk band Pigeons Playing Ping Pong as headliners?

“We’ve remained a small festival through the 12 years that we’ve done this, but it’s grown,” said Travis Young, chief organizer and producer of The Moonshiner’s Ball and banjoist for the event’s host band, Blind Corn Liquor Pickers. “But it’s grown slowly and organically.

“I don’t think that’s exactly how I imagined it when I first started doing this. But because it has grown slowly, that growth has been mostly through word of mouth. It’s a friend of a friend telling a friend, growing with like-minded people joining with other like-minded people. That community has kept the qualities that made Moonshiner’s what it was in the beginning. People come out to the festival, they meet other people. It’s a very easy place to make friends, to expand your network. They leave knowing more people than when they arrived.”

Ragtags and Bluegrass Hearts

The Moonshiner’s Ball began in 2014 by what its bio says were “a ragtag group of musicians and music-loving friends.” The types of music it promoted were often open-ended. New generation folk, funk, bluegrass, and jam band music dominated, but varying shades of Americana and world music also seeped into the mix. The booking focus leaned on, but was not exclusive to, local and regional artists. But as the event grew, so did its ability to pepper the lineup with a prominent national headliner. In recent years, Sam Bush, Lucinda Williams, Margo Price, Marcus King, and Jerry Douglas have topped the bill.

This year, The Moonshiner’s Ball will boast two headline artists. Banjo innovator and one-time Lexingtonian Fleck will headline on Friday with the latest edition of his My Bluegrass Heart ensemble. This version will feature 12-time International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Fiddle Player of the Year Michael Cleveland (“The hardest driving fiddle player I’ve ever heard,” said Young). The performance will preface, by a mere week, the release of a concert album by an all-star edition of the band, Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman.

The psychedelic-tinged progressive funk unit Pigeons Playing Ping Pong will be Saturday’s featured act. Young’s succinct description: “Everything they do is in service to a good time and positive ideology, positive vibes.”

Performers as patrons

At the core of the festival lineup, though, will be a swarm of expert Kentucky artists and bands, including several that have performed at The Moonshiner’s Ball frequently enough to appreciate its appeal to patrons as well as performers.

“It seems like everyone I love and admire has played at Moonshiner’s,” said Maggie Noelle, lead vocalist and guitarist for the Lexington-rooted Appalachian soul band Magnolia Boulevard, which plays The Moonshiner’s Ball on Saturday afternoon.

“It still feels that way. For such a small festival, a community-based festival, it still feels like a group of friends. It’s also a bit of a reunion for us at this point, because we travel so much. It’s so good to be with all of our musician friends, hang out, and stay up later than we probably should, picking around the fire. It’s one of my favorite festivals for sure.”

David O’Neal, fiddle player with Louisville’s Mama Said String Band, Thursday’s headline act, concurs. If he wasn’t invited to play the festival, he would go anyway just to be part of the audience community.

“Oh, 100%,” he said. “I would have every intention of doing that. The Moonshiner’s Ball is just that cool.

“We played a bunch of festivals this summer and I always look forward to doing The Moonshiner’s Ball the most. Moonshiner’s is the only festival Mama Said will always try to play as often as they will have us. They have incredible acts, which goes without saying, but they also do so much work on the production end to make it feel like a community. Just the way they have the campgrounds set up down there, where they string up all these lights, is just beautiful.”

Down by the Riverside

The “down there” O’Neal speaks of is Rockcastle Riverside. Located by the Daniel Boone National Forest in Rockcastle County, the property and accompanying campground has served as home to The Moonshiner’s Ball ever since a permanent outdoor stage was built there in 2018. In fact, it was the stage’s very construction that dictated moving the event from its late spring beginnings to the fall.

The event was previously presented in May for three initial years at Homegrown Hideaways in Berea and then for one year at the Jenkins’ Family Farm in Irvine. 

“There were plenty of other good reasons,” Young said of the calendar move. “When we moved to Rockcastle Riverside, the stage was still being built, so we had to move from spring to fall. But there were also two disastrous years back to back, year three and year four, where the weather was terrible.

“Irvine was the big storm. I had to cut Marcus King’s set in half. That was tough. It rained ... I mean, it just dumped for an hour. That alone should have had us thinking of moving to the fall, but we weren’t quite clever enough to have that thought. Fortunately, the new venue not being finished forced our hand. Since we moved to the fall, we haven’t had weather problems at all. It’s been awesome.”

The move to the autumn also meant going from being the first event in the regional outdoor music festival season to the last. Young, though, thinks of The Moonshiner’s Ball fall placement in more ceremonial terms.

“We consider it the grand finale. We love the fact that we go last. The weather is fantastic. It’s perfect for a camping festival — tee shirts during the day, hoodies at night. It’s one of the first weekends of the year that you want to be around a bonfire, so we have lots of those. The leaves are just starting to change. It’s really beautiful.

“For festival season, this is the last hurrah.”

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The Moonshiner’s Ball will be presented Oct. 8-11 at Rockcastle Riverside. 4211 Lower River Rd. in Livingston, approximately 75 miles south of Lexington.

Performing will be Béla Fleck’s My Bluegrass Heart, Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, The Rumble featuring Chief Joseph Boudreaux, Magnolia Boulevard, Mama Said String Band, Blind Corn Liquor Pickers, and more.

Tickets: $.28.90 to $263.16. For a full schedule and ticket information, click here.