Tyler Childers will play his biggest Lexington venue yet: Can he fill Kroger Field?

In case you need a reminder regarding the sustainability and devotion of Tyler Childers’ popularity in his home state, click on the Ticketmaster web page handling sales for the Lawrence County native’s concert this weekend at Kroger Field.

The venue, needless to say, is no honky tonk. Attendance for sold-out football games there average about 61,000. The stage artillery and construction for Saturday’s performance will likely knock that figure to the neighborhood of 50,000. The show is not sold out, but a Ticketmaster scan reveals only a smattering of seats — nearly all of which are singles — remain. So let’s offer a wildly conservative estimate that the Kroger Field crowd will be only 40,000.

Only 40,000.

Think about that. Those are Rolling Stones numbers. Yet those are the stats that have become business as usual for Childers, especially in Lexington.

In fact, the most modest turnout for one of his Lexington concerts over the last six years was 14,000 for the October 2022 Kentucky Rising flood relief benefit at Rupp co-headlined by fellow Kentuckians Chris Stapleton and Dwight Yoakam.

And that was because the performance, an instant sellout, was designed not to exceed that attendance figure. Childers likely could have doubled that turnout, even if he had been the only act on the bill. In fact, he did exactly that a mere 15 months later by selling out Rupp for two concerts over New Year’s Eve weekend in 2023.

Discussion of the now stadium-sized Childers made me think back to his final appearance in Lexington as a club act. The time was late June 2018, when the song stylist played a sold-out two-night engagement at Manchester Music Hall. Career momentum was already in acceleration mode with the ongoing visibility of his breakthrough album, “Purgatory” (released in August 2017.) It was obvious to anyone in attendance that the size of the venues Childers played was about balloon in accordance with his rapidly expanding fanbase.

From my review of the first of those 2018 shows:

“If there was a moment last night at Manchester Music Hall that defined the transformation of Tyler Childers from revered home state songsmith to progressive Americana star, it came late in the program following a jubilant roadhouse transformation of the breezy country reverie ‘Feathered Indians.’ As the music settled, the crowd roared. And roared. And kept roaring. This wasn’t just tipsy barroom acknowledgment of a favorite tune. What transpired was a full-blown acknowledgment of Childers as an artist whose status can no longer be contained by local clubs. And make no mistake, Manchester Music Hall could in no way contain the outpouring of popularity the Lawrence County artist now enjoys.”

A year later, Childers was the headline act on the Elkhorn Stage at the first Railbird festival.

Such growth was even less of a surprise to those who followed Childers in the years leading up to the Manchester show — a period where he cut his performance teeth by playing comparatively smaller rooms, from show-opening gigs at Al’s Bar in 2013 to headline shows at The Burl in 2017.

Sure, Kentucky fans likely had Childers pinned as a super-sized talent long before “Purgatory” won over a national fanbase. But the real magic within the stardom that has embraced him over the past eight years is just how unique his breakthrough has been.

In perhaps overly simplistic terms, Childers is a country artist. Using such categorization today, though, means paralleling his music to that of Morgan Wallen or Luke Combs. Childers, though, has little-to-nothing in common with such chart-topping stars. His brand of country proudly bears a pronounced sense of Appalachian authority, authenticity and empathy, whether through the homier outlines of the title tune to 2019’s “Country Squire” album, the unspoiled gospel jubilation of “Way of the Triune God” or, in its finest moments, a common thread of human faith that reaches beyond cultural, geographical or even religious borderlines. Place the brilliant “Purgatory” tune “Universal Sound” in the latter category. Its solemn, affirmative country reflection was placed on regal display when Childers performed the song at the inauguration for Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s second term in December 2023 (two weeks prior to the two-night Rupp residency.)

The narrative and stylistic appeal of his songs hasn’t gone unnoticed outside of Kentucky, either. In a 2023 story published ahead of the release of Childers’ most recent album, “Rustin’ in the Rain,” Marissa R. Moss of The New York Time wrote, “Childers has long told rural stories: about people trying to get by with poisoned water or blackened lungs, about drug addiction and the impact of corporate greed on the people who tend the land — but also about the sheer beauty of these places, too, and the love within them.”

Try looking for that in a Morgan Wallen song.

So now we come to the next chapter, one that takes Childers from the home of UK basketball, where hundreds of concert artists have played, to the home of UK football, which has hosted only one other performer — Stapleton.

Fittingly, the two acts who will be opening for Childers at Kroger Field are a pair of Kentucky artists from opposite ends of the state representing two generations. Both are women.

One is Ashland-born Wynonna Judd, half of the mother/daughter duo The Judds that helped lead a new traditionalist movement in country music during the 1980s. The other is Hickman native S.G. Goodman, a critically lauded Americana-rooted songwriter whose third and newest album, “Planting by the Signs,” is due for release in June. (Childers has been performing Goodman’s “Space and Time” in his shows for several years.)

“Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia, even if it is this beautiful place with beautiful people, you’re kind of told to get out of here,” Childers said in a 2023 interview with NPR. “Work really hard, move away. And in all of that constant thinking about how music is my ticket out of here, it was like, ‘Well, don’t be too outspoken. You’re going to cut your feet out from under you.’ I kept my head down and worked. But now’s the time that I need to give my tithing, my offering, to the world that I hope to see and think can be.”

Tyler Childers, Wynonna Judd and S.G. Goodman

When: 6:30 p.m. April 19

Where: Kroger Field, 1540 University Drive

Tickets: $24.50-$194.50

This story was originally published April 15, 2025 at 4:55 AM.