This Kentucky music festival is small and secluded. That’s what makes it special

With the 11th very live episode of the annual Moonshiner’s Ball about to commence, Travis Young sees several reasons to feel encouraged.

For starters, the popular outdoor music festival he continues to oversee has landed one of its biggest-ever Saturday night headliners, country/Americana songstress Margo Price — an artist experiencing a bit of a career renaissance this fall thanks to laudatory reviews of her new roots-rich album “Hard Headed Woman” and a TV booking as the last music guest to perform on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” before the program’s brief, but much publicized, suspension from the airwaves.

Secondly, there’s the weather. Initial extended forecasts are promising. The goal: Avoid the torrential rains that moved the event from its original calendar placement in late spring, which made The Moonshiner’s Ball one of the region’s first major outdoor music festivals of the year, to its current mid-October slot, which makes it one of the last. The trick to staging in the fall, though, is to avoid the season’s first serious cold snap.

Finally, something unexpected, yet welcome occurred to make this year’s Moonshiner’s Ball unique from any other edition of the event. None of the artists initially booked for the festival have backed out.

“So the poster that we originally dropped for the festival,” Young said, “still has the same lineup that’s happening.”

The latter might seem like a small win. But for an event like The Moonshiner’s Ball, all favorable occurrences factor into a substantial, singular victory: Keeping a small, independently produced festival solvent after 11 years. That’s especially true during a time when concert markets have been saturated by larger, corporately assisted festivals and the increased evaporation of more modest-sized, indie-designed events.

“There are a lot of challenges in running a small festival,” Young said. “Last year seemed like a particularly treacherous time. I saw several of my favorite small, independently run festivals close up shop and call it quits, some of them after decades of operation.

“With a small festival like this, everything is sort hanging out there on the chopping block. There is not a lot of wiggle room. A combination of things could hurt — bad weather, an artist cancellation. It could be a year where a combination of financial anxiety with the public and an overabundance of festival options all compound into some formula you can’t overcome. It just takes one year.

“None of us take any kind of a salary out of this. We’re all just trying build this event for its own sake every single year. If, in any given year, we were to take a $20,000 or $30,000 hit, that would mostly be coming out of my retirement account. That would be a tough sell to my wife. That’s just kind of where it is. It’s a year by year thing. We don’t book any artists until we know we survived for another year. But it looks good for this year. I feel like people are coming out for it. The weather is shaping up, so the last-minute sales should be good.”

Moonshiner’s Ball vs. Bourbon & Beyond

The makeup of The Moonshiner’s Ball remains altogether different from large-scale festivals like Lexington’s Railbird and Louisville’s Bourbon & Beyond. All of these events strive for a sense of artistic diversity in the acts they present (aside from Price, this year’s Moonshiner’s Ball bill ranges from retro-leaning song stylist Pokey LaFarge to the New Orleans-rooted Cuban ensemble Cimafunk to the festival’s Kentucky-based host band, The Blind Corn Liquor Pickers, of which Young is a member.) But two things, both of which complement the other, distinguish The Moonshiner’s Ball — size and location.

Instead of the tens of thousands of patrons drawn by larger festivals, The Moonshiner’s Ball plays to average audience of 1,200 to 1,500. And where the bigger festivals invariably are presented in large, metropolitan areas, Moonshiner’s purposely goes remote. Since 2018, it has been staged at Rockcastle Riverside in Livingston. The venue is a secluded private concert event and campground area surrounded by the Daniel Boone National Forest.

“That sense of seclusion creates the feeling of being in a place where you are divorced from all the distractions of the rest of the world,” Young said. “You truly have a chance to just getaway. The getaway feel of it, I think, is a big part of the appeal for a lot of people. Also, the space, even though it’s not extremely huge in terms of the number of people you can put into it, has a million little nooks and crannies everywhere. You’re in the woods. At any time, you can walk off and just hang out on a rock by the river and skip stones or sit and mediate. You can go to what would be an obvious flat space near the stage or you can go all the way up a winding gravel road to a place where you will basically be by yourself in the middle of the woods. You can string up hammocks and build a fire there.

“That ease in which you can sort of be part of everything or separate yourself from it, along with this sense that the whole event itself is sort of separated from the world, is what’s really great about Moonshiner’s.”

Driving down for just a day is doable too

“Now, what I think might be difficult about Moonshiner’s for some people is it becomes a hard fit. It feels like an investment. People don’t think they can just come down for the day. You can absolutely do that. You can come down on a day pass, stay for six or seven hours and drive back home again. For a lot of people, though, that becomes a hang up. They’re not sure if they want to camp, but they’re also not sure if they want to drive all that way and not be able to stay. Sometimes I think it’s hard to break through to people who feel Moonshiner’s is something further away, maybe, than it actually is.”

Ultimately, for Young, the work he and his team put in year round to present the festival is as affirming and personally validating as the music Moonshiner’s summons every October.

“Even though it’s not the thing that pays my bills, it’s the thing that gives me a sense of purpose in life. I do think sometimes about what would I do if a year comes when things go South and I can’t do this anymore. What am going to do? Even though I have a 9 to 5 job, and I like my job, it’s not what gives me meaning. I consider this weekend to be an annual art project where 10 or 12 of us spend the whole year to create this one magical weekend. This is the result of that.

“There is so much exploration, there’s so much creativity. Some of the formula is repeatable. Some of it is brand new every single year. But that ability to create within the format to give so many people that we love their favorite weekend of the year, I mean that pays off for me in so many ways beyond money.”

The Moonshiner’s Ball

When: Oct. 9-12

Where: Rockcastle Riverside, 4211 Lower River Road in Livingston

Admission: $30.21-$299.73

Full schedule, tickets and information: themoonshinersball.com.