Healing Appalachia Festival Heads to Kentucky with Stapleton and Childers Taking Center Stage

The Healing Appalachia Festival will take place on Sept. 19–20 at the Boyd County Fairgrounds in Ashland, Kentucky. This marks the first time the event will be held in Kentucky after five years in West Virginia. The festival, organized by the nonprofit Hope in the Hills, aims to combat the opioid crisis and support recovery efforts in Appalachia.

Kentucky natives Tyler Childers and Chris Stapleton will headline the event. Childers has been a consistent presence at the festival since its inception in 2018, while Stapleton joins as a co-headliner for the first time. Their participation underscores the festival's mission to address substance use recovery through music and community engagement.

"Moving Healing Appalachia to Kentucky is special for a lot of reasons," said Ian Thornton, Childers' manager at Whizzbang BAM Booking and Management. "It exemplifies the growth of something that started as an idea on how we could create change in a world that we were watching destroy our friends and families firsthand — starting at home in WV with 1500 people, to becoming this movement that it is today, and being able to start its own travels through Appalachia. It's an honor to have Tyler and Chris headline the inaugural trip across the Big Sandy as a couple of local boys who did it right."

The festival coincides with National Recovery Month in September, emphasizing its focus on recovery and support for substance abuse victims. Organizers of the Healing Appalachia festival are focused on their mission of community engagement in recovery, and they have hired over 500 recovery volunteers to involve people and tell their recovery stories. Naloxone education will be an important part of the event, and they have provided over 20,000 doses of Narcan to treat overdoses.

Tickets are on sale now. General admission tickets are $199 for adults and $25 for kids aged 12-17. VIP passes are available at the early-bird price of $650. The entire lineup will be announced within the next few weeks. For additional information or to purchase tickets, visit healingappalachia.org.