Moonshiner’s Ball 2024 Review: A Homegrown Kentucky Tradition

Words and Images by Laura Ray for Festy GoNuts

The Moonshiner’s Ball is a homegrown Kentucky music festival hosted at a Rockcastle Riverside Campground in beautiful Rockcastle County, about 35 miles south of Berea. Taking place October 10-13, 2024, this year marked the 10th Moonshiner’s Ball, which was founded in 2014.

For the past decade, musicians and fans from Kentucky and beyond have been coming together to connect over bluegrass, folk, Americana, and roots music and jars of corn liquor. In fact, Travis Young and Joel Serdenis of the Blind Corn Liquor Pickers are the ones who put on the fest.

I made the five-hour trip from my home in Murray, KY to see my favorite male singer/songwriter John Craigie, my fellow Murray resident S.G. Goodman, and my buddies from Paducah, The Solid Rock’it Boosters, but was treated to much more, including Daniel Donato, Bee Taylor, Big Richard, and a wild rumpus with Thumpasaurus.

A Picturesque Journey to Rockcastle Riverside

Kentucky sure is pretty. Cloaked in fall foliage, the rolling hills looked bucolic AF as I headed east on my favorite highway, 68/80. Situated inside the Daniel Boone National Forest, Rockcastle Riverside is a beautiful campground in Livingston, KY. Leaves are literally falling as I arrive just in time to set up camp before dark. Sadly, this was during the same time Mama Said String Band was performing.

Not only was it my freshman Moonshiner’s, but it was also my first time camping alone. Tent camping is included in the ticket price, but car camping and RV sites are also available. I had packed a twin air mattress like I was going to sleep in my Jeep, not realizing that I wouldn’t be parked next to my tent. I pulled up to check-in and unload, then parked across the street and found a spot for my one-person tent by the river. Woodland firefighters helped campers haul their stuff to their sites on four-wheelers dragging trailers. As I was getting a ride to my site, we breezed through an RV site and I saw my friends from the Solid Rock’it Boosters. I was camping just down the hill from their compound of friends and family who had been coming to the festival since its inception – some even had a hand in its creation.

Rockcastle Riverside’s natural beauty makes for beautiful festival grounds. Some campers had their sites decorated for Halloween. Moonshiner’s is dog-friendly, so feel free to bring your four-legged friends. I must’ve hoofed it back and forth to camp about 1,000 times, but seasoned Moonshiners had bikes, e-bikes, mopeds, and golf carts. There were four actual bathrooms, a bunch of porta potties, and two outdoor shower houses.

A Close-Knit Vibe in the Heart of Kentucky

The vibe is intimate. Although it has grown since it started at an estimated 200 people, Moonshiner’s remains an intimate experience at a reported total of 1,250 folks in 2024.

It seems everyone there kind of knows someone tied to the festival, which is very Kentucky. Our commonwealth knows no strangers. Moonshiner’s is still small enough that bands hang out in the crowd. For me, it feels like home. Everyone sounds like me. I actually did run into several friends – this Kentucky music festival is a veritable who’s who of the scene, but it’s also for families.

This community-centric festival is rooted in Kentuckian traditions: drinking moonshine, smoking tobacco, and listening to some string music. And it’s not just pretending to be rural to be trendy. Rockcastle Riverside is a true service desert. I had one bar the whole time, but it was a welcome reprieve from social media. My friends took me in, letting me sit around their campfire. We’d mill about the campsite until noon having coffee and breakfast. Saturday, my buddies Nathan Brown and Todd Anderson from the Solid Rock’it Boosters made burgoo, a traditional Kentucky stew. Josh Coffee was strumming the mandolin as the smell of mirepoix permeated the air and now I understand why they say heaven must be a Kentucky kind of place.

Moonshiner’s is so grassroots-feeling that it’s more like camping with musicians like the old bluegrass festivals of the mid-’60s, à la Bill Monroe’s Bean Blossom. I only spent $16 the whole time because you can bring in your own food and drinks, and as I mentioned, my friends were feeding me. The burgoo was divine, by the way. It is supposed to have all the meats: pork, beef chuck, and chicken. I believe ours had seven including homemade venison sausage.

Musical Highlights That Hit Home

I know it is unladylike to say that a lineup makes me wanna squirt, but goddamnit if this Moonshiner’s didn’t fuck, from the headliners to the up-and-coming regional artists.

Shannon Vetter was camped a couple tents down from me on the river’s edge with his girlfriend, Katie “Didit” Caudill, from Mama Said. Turns out he played sax in a band with a bunch of my buddies from back home called Big Atomic. Vetter sat in on sax with a bunch of the bands over the weekend, but he also performed on the Forest Stage with fiddle player Anna Blanton as Shannon Vetter and the Sleepless Pilgrims. Matt Fassas, son of former Blind Corn Liquor Picker Tom Fassas, was serving up tasty guitar licks all weekend long as the artist-at-large and joined Vetter onstage as well.

When I arrived Thursday night I only caught the last song by the Virginia-based Low Water Bridge Band, but it was a banger. I believe it was “Midnight in Virginia.”

DOOM GONG rocked out with two keyboardists. The Louisville band was formed in 2022 by seven self-described “music school nerds.” They put their “denim psych” spin on “A Few of My Favorite Things” with double trumpets.

Based out of Nicholasville, KY, Abby Hamilton has been opening for American Aquarium. You may have heard her song “Big Time” that starts with the lyric “I’d kill for some Tito’s and corn chips.” After playing her song “Fried Green Tomatoes,” Hamilton said she was “all done with the sad stuff.”

My buddies the Solid Rock’it Boosters are the best band on the planet, not just at The Moonshiner’s Ball.

The roots band centers around Nathan Brown on guitar and vocals and Todd Anderson on stand-up bass and vocals. This amalgamation featured Jason Crivello on drums, Josh Coffee on fiddle, and a welcome new addition, Bryce Hayden on guitar. Tom Fassas and his son Matt sat in on guitar and Vetter was on sax, so there were like eight people onstage. The fact that they all sounded so good together despite never practicing as a unit speaks volumes about what great musicians they all are. Brown would just call out the key and off they went on classics from “Little Liza Jane” and Elvis Presley’s “Baby, Let’s Play House,” to “Ridin’ on the L&N” and “Caldonia.” SG Goodman even joined in to sing “Pig in a Pen” and her drummer Stephen Montgomery banged his drum so hard he hurt his hands. I’m seeing the Solid Rock’it Boosters again at our local Oktoberfest and can’t wait!

Speaking of SG Goodman, Travis Young, one of Moonshiner’s organizers said she may as well be the queen of western Kentucky as far as he’s concerned in a Facebook post looking back at the event. Goodman took the cowboy hat off her bassist and put it on all the different members of the band, naming their new alter egos. Hers was Twila Dawn Parrish, while the guitarist’s was “Two-buck Tim.” Someone came up and handed him a $2 bill, which he stuck in his frets. I was glad I got to see SG with her drummer Stephen Montgomery one last time before he retires from the band. They played her song “Supertramp” then made it a medley with a cover of “Boys of Summer.”

Geno Seale wrote Tyler Childers’ hit single “In Your Love,” that was nominated for a Grammy this year in three categories: Best Country Song, Best Country Solo Performance, and Best Music Video. Silas House produced the music video which starred two men as lovers. Seale was slated for the first set on Saturday morning, but had to cancel due to his day job, so Matt Fassas filled in, putting together a veritable super group starring his dad Tom, Todd Anderson and Bryce Hayden from The Solid Rock’it Boosters, and Joel Serdenis, the mandolinist from Blind Corn Liquor Pickers. Matt joked that the band’s name was “Geno Seale’s Proctologist.” They had us stompin’ gravel before noon, playing classic tunes from “In the Pines” to “Dang Me.”

“If the moonshine don’t kill me it certainly won’t be from lack of opportunity,” sang Blind Corn Liquor Pickers frontwoman Beth Walker. The host band played a relevant Woody Guthrie cover, “All You Fascists Bound to Lose,” and The Lasses sat in as well. BCLP also played a killer version of “Murder on the Dancefloor.”

New York-based psychedelic soul band Ghost Funk Orchestra is led by Seth Applebaum, but vocalist Romi Hanoch’s panache stole the show as she got down in the crowd with her tambourine. The horns – sax and trumpet – were a welcome break from bluegrass.

Wearing coordinating pink outfits, Big Richard got our Saturday started right with Blue Monroe’s “The One I Love is Gone.” I adore them all: Eve Panning on fiddle, Dr. Joy Adams on cello, Bonnie Sims on mando, and Hazel Royer on bass and guitar. To counter all of the traditional bluegrass songs that don’t paint women in the best light, they played a trad-style bluegrass female empowerment song that they wrote about sex.

Big Richard brought the house down with “The Missing Stair,” a song about “a person or problem within a community, family or organization that everyone avoids and refuses to address, so it inevitably keeps hurting people. Sometimes these missing stairs go unfixed for generations, and create cultures of disrepair and harm.” It was written by Sims of Big Richard along with Phoebe Hunt and Melody Walker. The moving song was popular on TikTok, but also irl. One man told me it moved him to tears. He was emotional because it pointed toward our responsibility toward one another, something that was fresh on our minds after seeing folks pull together in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Bee Taylor came dressed for the ball in a floor-length long-sleeved black dress. She had to be hot, but she looked hot, so it was worth it. She played her song “Twenty Seven,” the title track of first-ever studio album, out on November 15. Apparently her previous recordings have been live or from her kitchen. Taylor had the same set up I saw her in at the Ohio Pawpaw Fest recently: a saxophonist named Jason Threm and a woman on keys. Free to just sing as a frontwoman on some songs, Taylor sat down at her piano or picked up a guitar for others. They played a song about how “Southern peaches make the best pie,” and one about how “Randy Newman always makes me cry,” as well as some of my faves from her 2021 album ‘Bee Taylor’s Gas Station Takeover,’ “Company,” “Warmer Weather,” and “10 Foot Pole.”

After Taylor, we moseyed over to the Forest Stage for John Craigie.

I’ve seen Craigie a few times, first at Fort Zachary in Key West a couple Januaries ago, then at City Winery in Nashville, then once hanging out at Dee’s Lounge in Nashville before he played at Exit/In. This was the first time I’d seen him with The John Craigie Band. A woman named Alex was on drums, but that was all I caught. Someone handed him a can of beans during the set, which has a backstory that he did not explain and may have left the crowd a little confused. As explained on his latest album of live tunes, Craigie liked the Louisiana brand beans, Blue Runner so much that he tried to get sponsored by them, but they said “no,” “we’re a canned bean company, we don’t sponsor people.” Anyway, someone else tried to hand him a CD or something and he couldn’t tell what it was and asked if it was drugs and made a joke about signing drugs. I may or may not have had him sign what was left of a baggie of weed after the show when he greeted everyone by the merch table. He said it was the first baggie he’d ever signed. Definitely a novel autograph experience for me as well.

Next up was the formidable Jerry Douglas Band. I was sitting next to their sound guy in my lightweight camping chair I had posted up in the front row all weekend. Daniel Donato walked up and stood in front of us. They played “We Hide and Seek” and a song written by their badass guitarist Mike Seal. Donato joined for amazing renditions of Douglas’ “Something You’ve Got Baby” and a cover of “My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

Speaking of the amazing Telecaster country pickin’ savant, Daniel Donato was next to take the Main Stage. Josh Coffey called Donato the “Billy Strings of electric guitar.” The entire band is so talented. I was disappointed the keyboardist didn’t sing lead on any songs like they did at Hillberry. But we got cosmic! Matter of fact, I just finished dusting off my neon cowboy hat.

The bill said Lexington-based Reggae group deep.nourished.roots, DNR, was supposed to play Sunday morning, but instead Louisville-based folk/soul singer Scott T. Smith took us to church.

It was a gorgeous fall day for his first Moonshiner’s Ball. Speaking of firsts, he’s recording his first full-length album right now. “You’re not alone. Fear can be your friend,” said Smith, “I said you’re not alone.” Smith played “Appalachian Love Song” which he assured us “no one has heard” and had us stomping to the beat of his bass drum, which he thumped with one foot, one-man-band-style, although he had a fiddle player and keyboardist accompanying him. As an encore, Smith sang “Call Your Mother,” a song about our responsibility to Mother Earth. After his set, Smith thanked me for being so present with him. “I looked up and you were just with me every step of the way.” I melt!

Last but not least, Joel’s Front Porch Jam played us out, but first they offered the audience free beer from the keg or two they had left over. I counted 12 people onstage including Joel, the guitarist from Blind Corn Liquor Pickers, a nine-year-old guitarist, and many more. A trio from the Gorge area composed of Brittany Dawn Samples, Erin Sliney, and Abby Rank called Them Lasses joined to sing songs about sitting around the campfire with friends that put a perfect end to the weekend.

Moments That Made This Moonshiner’s Special

The brainchild of Lucas Tamaren (vocals, guitar), LA-based indie-funk band Thumpasaurus freaking rocked their second appearance at Moonshiner’s. Tamaren and Henry Was (drums and production), Logan Kane (bass), Henry Solomon (sax), Paul Cornish (keys), and Ben Benjamin (visuals/pancakes) all came out in white jumpsuits with hand drawn designs. People were wearing onesies and jumpsuits like the band, so I knew it must be somethin’.

Thumpasaurus frontman Tamaren was directing the audience right out of the gate, having us say “hi” when he pointed at us and “hello” when he pointed at himself. (I think that’s how it went anyway, I may or may not have had a small bite of shroom stem.) Benjamin displayed off-the-wall graphic designs on a screen in the background. “Have You Ever Been so Lucky” had sad puppy dogs up on screen. At first I thought they were new-wave like an A-ha moment, but soon found I could not put my finger on what it was all about. Tamaren passed the mic to a little kid to let her belt the “I borrowed this body because I like to party” refrain of their song “Alien.” An audience member had a lit-up sign that read “Dance” that they got up onstage with during the song “Dance Like It’s Your Life.” Before the show was over they invited all the kids on stage, a surprising number of which were still up around 1am. When the audience demanded more, they acquiesced with “Space Barn.” (Space Barn! iykyk)

Festival Life: Camping, Community, and Connection

Moonshiner’s authentic sense of community and connection sets it apart from bigger festivals. Beyond the bands, there were food trucks, craft vendors, and a kids’ activity tent. A man on stilts made balloon animals. On Friday, kids were playing tag on the gravel dancefloor before SG Goodman took the stage.

There were activities for grown-ups, too. I started one chilly morning with yoga over by the Forest Stage. The grounds are nestled along the beautiful Rockcastle River, which is fun for all ages!

Imbible Belt

With lots of actual moonshine, The Moonshiner’s Ball offers a taste of Kentucky’s local flavor. People pass it around and gift it to each other.

Buc-ee’s Pit Stop

On the way home, I stopped by the recently opened Buc-ee’s in Smiths Grove along with what seemed like the rest of my fellow Kentuckians. It was pure chaos. Cars ceaselessly streamed in. I got an overpriced pulled pork sandwich, a Coke Icee and lots of strange yet delicious treats, such as peanut butter and caramel popcorn.

Shine On

“Hopefully we’ll ride that momentum to a glorious 2025,” I overheard Joel say as everyone was packing up on Sunday. He gave me a peace sign as I rolled out of the intimate Kentucky music festival. Until 2025 – shine on, Moonshiners!