Bourbon and Beyond returns to Louisville September 11-14. Produced by Danny Wimmer Presents, these festivals not only bring world-class music but also celebrate Kentucky’s bourbon and culinary culture.
Beyond the festival grounds at the Fair and Expo Center, their impact ripples through the city—boosting tourism, generating millions in tax revenue, and supporting local businesses. Additionally, partnerships with arts organizations help strengthen Louisville’s creative community.
We spoke with Doris Sims of Danny Wimmer Presents and Tory Parker of Fund for the Arts to explore how these festivals contribute to the city’s cultural and economic vitality.
Listen to the full interview below:
Doug Dreisbach: We are excited about another year for Bourbon & Beyond and Louder Than Life here in Louisville. It is still months away, but it feels like Christmas is coming every year. With the band line-up coming out early in the year, and then the anticipation all summer, when the festivals get here everyone is ready for a great weekend. Not only have the bands and music been out of this world, but the full fan experience has been impeccable, from parking to concessions to experiences. I don’t know how you guys do it.
As you know, Louisville has a deep arts and cultural history with different programs. How do some of these programs and arts groups make Louisville a great city for festivals like Bourbon & Beyond and Louder than Life?
Doris Sims with Danny Wimmer presents with Louisville mayor Craig Greenberg and his wife Rachel.
Doris Sims: You know, Danny Wimmer, when he came to Louisville, he fell in love with the city. He actually came to start at bourbon and had really no idea what to think about Kentucky or Louisville, as did the rest of our team. I was working with Louisville Tourism at that time, and he fell in love with the city and the people and the vibrant arts culture, which Danny is very passionate about, not only performing arts, but visual arts. So, he started working with the mayor’s office and Louisville Tourism at the time, and was like, “OK, let’s start a festival.” We started with Louder than Life in 2014, and here we are now, going into our 11th year, and we’re just getting bigger and better every year. It is a part of our culture, is just all the awesome performing and visual arts opportunities we have in the city.
DD: It is great how the festivals embrace the arts and local culture, whether it’s bourbon or the amazing chefs and the culinary caveats we have here and that kind of thing.
DS: Exactly, and you know another art we celebrate is culinary arts. Our festivals are what we call destination festivals with 70% of our fans coming from outside of the host city. So, according to surveys, 25% of our fans said they’d never been to Louisville, and then 90% say they will return because of coming here for the first time. So, how amazing is that? And they’re out there experiencing everything from Kentucky bourbon to our awesome restaurants, museums and attractions.
Danny tries to take a little bit of what is authentic about every city and integrate it into the festival. So, you’ll see beautiful art displayed by local artists at the site. We have local chefs incorporated into programming, our distillers, as well as local music incorporated. Bourbon & Beyond is Danny’s love letter to Louisville, and he wants to make it exciting for anybody who comes here, as well as everybody who lives here.
DD: Tory, from the Fund for the Arts perspective, what are some of the things that the festivals and the Wimmer Group bring to the table for Fund for the Arts that you see, as far as partnerships, grants, initiatives? We know that the festival brings tourists to the hotels, they eat at the restaurants and go out in the city. But what are some of the things that maybe go overlooked that the Wimmer Group does provide for this community, that we maybe don’t see?
Tory Parker with Fund for the Arts addresses the crowd at an event.
Tory Parker: Danny Wimmer Presents has been a very generous partner to a lot of nonprofits in town. They give back to various organizations as well as to the Fund for the Arts and it is an uplift to specific communities in Louisville. They also invite different groups to have a presence at festivals so that people can engage with them while they’re visiting.
Like Doris mentioned, a lot of those folks are tourists, but they might not be tourists from terribly far away, and they might be interested in how that nonprofit, how that charity, can get involved in their own community or how they can bring that work back. And then, of course, we have our locals, who might have never heard of a place like Sweet Evening Breeze or someplace that is small and specific but serving a very underserved community in Louisville.
But at the same time, it’s more than that. It’s bringing in people who care about music and culture and the specific je ne sais quoi (A quality that cannot be described easily) that makes Louisville really special. It’s bringing those people into the city and getting them curious about what more Louisville has to offer. I think that’s so awesome, that 90% of people say they want to come back and explore Louisville, even if maybe it’s outside of a festival weekend, or maybe they’re doing two weekends. And they want to come back and explore downtown, explore Museum Row, visit KMAC, visit the Frazier, pop into the Speed Museum. Maybe they’re going to come in the summer. They’re going to check out a Kentucky Shakespeare performance in Central Park. These are people who want to go out and do stuff, and those are the people that we get invested in arts and culture in Louisville. So we’re very grateful to Danny Wimmer Presents for bringing them into these incredible festivals that bring fine artists from across the world to our stage.
Everyone who lives in Louisville knows how special it is, and it takes something, a can’t-miss event like Bourbon & Beyond sometimes, to get people to take a chance on it. But once they’re here, they get it.
DD: In follow-up to that, Doris, do you see the same from the production perspective, looking out into the communities? And how do you see the festival as part of a broader arts and entertainment reach, not only for Louisville, but do you do that everywhere you go?
DS: I have to say, we do a little bit more in Louisville. Danny decided to open a Louisville office. When I came on board, one of the things we talked about and what I was interested in, was that Danny was giving back, and I wanted to kind of formalize that. So I said, “I want to continue to give back to the community that I love so much,” and we started a foundation and Danny came into town, and obviously we had the first Louder Than Life festival, and that was our first festival. Then we brought Bourbon & Beyond on board, and Danny talked about his vision of creating something even better and more special than a South by Southwest Festival in Austin.
So, our goal is to get out into the community in a meaningful way, and our foundation supports a lot of nonprofits here. Danny would love to be able to make sure that performing arts and visual arts is available to everybody in the community, so we support AMPED and Louisville Visual Art, making sure that arts are available in underserved areas. We’ve even brought students from AMPED on-site, where they can really experience a behind-the-scenes look at what we do. Our goal is that we hope some of these young people will decide to come into our world. They may not be able to be a singer or a performer, but there’s so many jobs in our industry that people aren’t even aware of.
The other thing is, looking at the South by Southwest, we encourage people to go out in the community, so we have parties at local venues. We want to support all of our performing arts venues. We’re working with even the Kentucky Center for Performing Arts, maybe doing an afterparty there. How do we continue to engage people? We’ve worked with the Speed Art Museum on their bourbon auction. Anything that we could do to kind of connect those dots within the community—it just expands our reach, and it allows, like Tory said, all these people who are coming in for the first time, or even for the 11th time, to really get out into the community and experience new and different things every single year.
DD: So, Tory, when a national group comes in with a local community splash like Doris mentions, what does that mean for the Fund for the Arts and the impact that you have on all these organizations?
TP: We have been around for a long time. Fund for the Arts is 76 years old this year, so we’ve seen what can happen when you have the foundation of a robust arts ecosystem. When you have a community that loves to uplift their arts institutions, like Actors Theater, Louisville Ballet and the Louisville Orchestra that travels all across the state of Kentucky, when you have a world-renowned art museum, you build that foundation of a rich ground of arts appreciation, you create an environment where festivals like this can thrive. You create an environment where people are excited to engage in this art, and where people are excited to have it be ours, to have Bourbon & Beyond be a Louisville point of pride.
We’d always known that great art comes from Louisville, and that’s not to say every artist in Bourbon & Beyond has to be a local musician. It’s to say, when we create an event like this, we are a place where great art happens. We’re a destination where people come to experience great arts and culture.
And to kind of go back to your question about, “What does it mean for the arts ecosystem?” it creates that sense of pride in our arts organizations, that they can be a part of it, too. And Danny Wimmer Presents has been really intentional about that, talking about working with the Speed, talking about working with AMPED. These community organizations that are uplifting people who live and work and do their lives and make their art in Louisville—if we don’t incorporate them, then who is it for? They’ve done a really great job of making sure those voices are heard in the process. And that’s what we care about here at the Fund, is those local artists and arts organizations that make the difference every day.
DD: Doris, with all the success here in Louisville and everything that we’ve talked about today, do you see other opportunities or room for expansion and to do more locally? Have you all discussed or talked about different things that are maybe on the longevity of your stay here in Louisville and how long you’re producing this?
DS: Our goal is to stay in the community forever, so we’re working on a long-term agreement with the Exposition Center, the Highland Festival Grounds, as we call it. We’re utilizing part of the Expo Center that has never been utilized before and improving it. Our goal is to be here for at least the next 10 years, until we can start to really incorporate even more investment into the Louisville area.
Danny is very into nurturing the up-and-coming talent. For example, Billy Strings, in one of the first years of Bourbon & Beyond, performed on the small stage at the Big Bourbon Bar, and now he’s selling out three days in a row in every city he goes to. So, he was up and coming, and now he’s huge.
Last year we started what’s called a Battle of the Strings to really find out, “What is that latest and coolest new talent in bluegrass?” and we are having it again this year. We have the contest at The Fox Den in St. Matthews, another local venue and great partners for us to work with. We’re going to have a rock band contest as well for Louder than Life. So, the band who wins these contests actually gets to perform on stage at a major music festival, and it’s just a great way to hopefully launch their career, as well.
DD: In closing, is there anything you would like to share about your organization or what’s coming up, or just for the listeners here in Louisville?
TP: For Fund for the Arts, we have an exciting event on April 19th, where you can come see—check out a Celebration of the Arts with a lot of local, very small to very large, performing arts organizations who will be performing on Christy’s Garden Stage at Paristown, so come check that out and learn more about your local arts organizations!
DS: I just want to encourage everybody to come out to Bourbon & Beyond and Louder than Life. Tickets are available and we want everybody to come out. September is a beautiful time of the year and Louisville will be the place to be. We’re hosting the eight largest days of music in the country and we encourage everyone who lives here and everyone who’s from out of town to come and join us, and let’s just have a lot of fun!
For line-ups, tickets and more information, visit BourbonAndBeyond.com or .
For more information about Fund for the Arts, visit FundForTheArts.org.
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