The Earl Scruggs Music Festival, a Labor Day weekend tribute to the pioneering bluegrass banjo player, debuted in 2022 after being canceled twice during the coronavirus pandemic. We've attended the 2022 debut, the 2023 fest, at which organizers said attendance was twice the first year's, and in 2024.
The festival has everything going for it to become one of the state’s top bluegrass/Americana music festivals. It presents about 30 acts Friday through Sunday, many of whom have direct connections to or were influenced by Scruggs, including in 2022, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Bela Fleck, Molly Tuttle, Alison Brown, Dom Flemons and Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley.
Below, Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives play on Saturday evening of the 2024 Earl Scruggs Festival.
Sam Bush (second from left below) and Dominick Leslie (fifth from left) join Bela Fleck’s My Bluegrass Heart for the festival in 2022.
Jerry Douglas serves as festival host, and plays with his Earls of Leicester, the Jerry Douglas Band and with several other acts during the weekend. Below, he plays solo on the main Flint Hill Stage in 2022.
The festival is staged at the incredible Tryon International Equestrian Center & Resort in the Mill Spring community of Polk County, near where Scruggs was born and grew up. In addition to the resort, its primary sponsors are the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby and Isothermal Community College and its WNCW radio station in Rutherfordton.
The Tryon Center, which also hosted the Night in the Country Carolinas Music Festival in 2021 and 2022, is as much a part of the festival as the bands. The festival itself occupies a small portion of the 1,600-acre complex, which is home to three 3,000-seat equestrian arenas (including one indoors below), four additional show rings, seven barns and 1,400 stalls, as well as eight restaurants and bars and several shops. The resort also offer more than 60 cabins (see more below), a 50-room inn, a 200-site RV park and tent camping onsite during the festival. For 2025, the resort will open the Overmountain Lodge & Conference Center, an upscale hotel.
For each festival through 2024, two performance stages and a workshop stage have been grouped around the central Legends Club building (below), and the Legends Plaza connecting them stayed busy but never seemed overcrowded. The facility has plenty of space to add more stages if the festival grows — its brochure boasts “14 fully-engineered arenas.”
The screened porch at the Legends Clubhouse below is part of the Legends Grille (and bar), which was open for the festival. A sushi restaurant, which was also open, occupies the other wing of the building.
The Flint Hill Stage was in the resort’s International Stadium, which features a 3,000-seat covered grandstand. (More stage area photos below.)
The secondary Foggy Mountain Stage was in a gazebo on Legends Plaza. (More stage area photos below.)
The workshop stage was on the covered back porch of the Legends Club building (which overlooks the 3,500-seat Tryon Stadium). Below, Scruggs biographer Tommy Goldsmith (left) talks to Peter Rowan about Old & In the Way and other highlights of his early career.
In 2024, music journalist Craig Havighurst (right) led a series of discussions with musicians at the Silo Bar. Here, he's talking to Wyatt Ellis.
In addition to two restaurants and a bar at the Legends Club and a general store that sells all kinds of snacks, ice cream and pastries (and resort souvenirs) while also housing a Starbucks, there's also a diner (below), an Italian restaurant and a barbecue stand adjacent to the plaza. We have eaten at all of them and have been pleased with each meal or snack.
Roger's Diner is next to the Foggy Mountain Stage, which makes tables on its patio popular.
Across the plaza from the Foggy Mountain Stage gazebo, a carousel offers free rides.
A promenade lined with shops and a restaurant leads to the Silo Bar.
In 2024, a gazebo on the promenade welcomed pickers and music fans.
Several vendors lined the plaza between the festival entrance and the Legends clubhouse and restaurants. Several food vendors occupied a parking lot behind the general store (see the map below).
Just off of the plaza, the Earl Scruggs Center occupied a kiosk alongside of a tent with festival merchandise.
The grandstand at the International Stadium has 3,000 seats, which are padded but somewhat cramped. Tickets were available for admission to the stadium floor, or for a bit more money, the floor and grandstand, which included access to indoor and air conditioned restrooms. On Sunday in 2022, which was rainy, festival organizers opened the grandstand to all ticketholders. Those who paid for VIP admission had access to tables and chairs on the balcony at the top of the grandstand, which included a buffet and seating indoors, as well as a sequestered area on the arena floor.
Several picnic tables — most with umbrellas — were positioned on the arena floor. They provided a good view and space to spread out, but the benches were hard and uncomfortable after a couple of hours. The floor of the arena is a mixture of sand and cotton, which makes it less sandy and slippery and kick up less as horses run on it.
Festival organizers have repeatedly reconfigured the stadium floor setup. Mostly is a version of the setup in the video below from Sunday of 2023, with the bar and tables moved aside for camp chairs. Note the standing-room-only section just under the video screen and banner to the left of the stage.
At right below, see the three luxury cabanas set up for the 2022 show (there were five in 2023) and the VIP area in front of them. Cabanas weren't offered after 2023, leaving an open area on the stadium floor behind the VIP section.
The video below shows the Flint Hill Stage audience on Sunday afternoon of the 2023 festival.
The Flint Hill Stage is in the International Stadium, to the left on the map below. The grandstand is adjacent to the three-story International Pavilion, which houses event space that was open for VIP ticketholders' buffet and bar, as well as a gym and rec center. The Foggy Mountain Stage gazebo, which we discuss further below, is depicted near the center of Legends Plaza and to the left of Roger's Diner.
Several rows of plastic chairs are set out in front of the Foggy Mountain Stage gazebo, and there were a few picnic tables on the plaza nearby. People could bring their own camp chairs, too.
Above and below, Darin and Brooke Aldridge play a Sunday gospel brunch on the Foggy Mountain Stage.
The Foggy Mountain Stage area gets most crowded during special shows presented on Saturday afternoon, such as when Fireside Collective hosted several other bands in 2022 to recreate the Earl Scruggs Revue's 1972 "Live at Kansas State" album. In 2023, Tony Trischka and his band hosted a rendition of the Earl Scruggs Revue's "Live! from Austin City Limits" album, which was released in 1977.
The smaller Foggy Mountain Stage offers the easiest opportunity to see musicians close up, such as below, a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration with Tony Trischka (left), Tray Wellington, Jerry Douglas and Michael Cleveland.
The one-bedroom cabins are very small but are only a 10-minute walk from the festival entrance. There is also a free shuttle.
Cabins have a stove, microwave and refrigerator, and are air conditioned.
The one-bedroom cabins have pull-out sofa beds, which we did not try, and below, incredibly cramped lofts with mattresses.
Here's the festival organizers' video recap of the 2022 festival:
As we said above, the Tryon Resort has plenty of options for more stages if organizers decide the Earl Scruggs Music Festival should be bigger in the future.
The Tryon International Equestrian Center and Resort is on U.S. 74 between Mill Spring, Rutherfordton and Forest City.
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