An intimate yet world-class music, art and camping festival cradled amongst the scenic rolling hills of central Kentucky opens Friday.
The Terrapin Hill Fall Festival is unique. It is not just another concert, but a three-day agritourism event held annually on a 350-acre, working organic farm and education center. Two hand-crafted cedar stages and an open-air pavilion are connected by wooded trails, creating a singular atmosphere and making it one of the most accessible festival venues in the country.
Boasting a positively-charged, boldly-varied spectrum of music, art, education and community awareness, attendees of the Terrapin Hill Fall Festival can enjoy a weekend full of distilled creativity, sensory awareness and progressive knowledge. Featured will be 35 bands covering a wide array of styles ranging rom high-power funk to earthy folk, authentic bluegrass to skillfully improvised jazz, and all manner of rock and rolls.
Also featured this season will be an all-local, multi-media art show, grass-roots activism, interpretive dance, various workshops, agricultural-education sessions, healing arts therapists and workshops, and a kids’ village full of activities. Also part of the weeknd festival is catered, locally-produced food.
What began more than a decade ago as small concerts has evolved naturally into the region’s only event of its kind, peacefully converging several thousand friendly people from all corners of the country to listen, look, think and grow each year.
This year’s festival schedule includes: Railroad Earth, The Code Talkers, Garaj Mahal, Donna the Buffalo, Barefoot Manner, The Duhks, The Bridge, Cornmeal, Madahoochi, Steep Canyon Rangers, Groovatron, Old Union, Peace in the Jones, Bockman, Big Leg Emma, Dubconscious, David Gans, Born Cross-Eyed, Myron Koch’s Catastrophic Symphony, Bloom Street, Watty Peytona Bluegrass Collective, King Rhino, Kentucky Fried Pickin’, Barnhouse Effect, Stonewheel, Blind Corn Liquor Pickers, What Happened When, New Kentucky String Ticklers, Sativa Gumbo, Papaw’s Dawg, Namaste, Percival Potts, Sexual Disaster Quartet, Pulitzer-nominated writer Ron Whithead with Sarah Elizabeth Whitehead, Zoe Speaks, kids’ programs, healing arts, percussion workshops, Rakadu Gypsy Dancers, artwork in various mediums by the Louisville Sculpture Society’s David Norris and Aaron Raymer, artworks by John Lackey, Whitney Petree, Alisha Eli, and glass-blowing exhibitions by Jeremiah Hunt and other Louisville Glassworks artists.
This family-owned farm not only provides its region with a high-quality, nationally- recognized crop of annual music events, but it also yields the finest-quality organic produce, plants, hay and pastured poultry on the market. In spring 2005, the farm was one of only eight in the state to receive a “Competitive Agri-tourism Award” from the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board. With this grant, development of an education center is well under way, which provides the public a rare opportunity to observe a working, sustainable farm while attending educational and recreational events.
originally in the Danville Advocate-Messenger
Tuesday September 20, 2005