A Musical Road Trip

The Floyd Country Store is the place to be on Friday nights for the weekly jamboree, when bands take the stage and admission is only $3. Musicians also jam outside the building. (By Richard Robinson For The Washington Post)

SEPTEMBER CONCERTS Performances include Big Country Bluegrass and the Wolfe Brothers on Saturday, Country Boys and the Southfork Ramblers on Sept. 30. On Sundays, there are also concerts and lectures (with follow-up workshops). This week, it's Alan Jabbour, a fiddler and former director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, on Appalachian fiddle styles; Heritage Records owner and bluegrass musician Bobby Patterson on Oct.1; and guitarist and pencil artist Willard Gayheart on Oct. 8. 276-236-5309 orhttp://www.blueridgemusiccenter.org.

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Happy 150th birthday to Bristol, a city that straddles the Virginia-Tennessee border -- State Street is, in fact, the state line -- and is best known today as the home of the gargantuan Bristol Motor Speedway. It's a 79th anniversary that places Bristol on the Crooked Road: the August 1927 Victor Talking Machine Co. recording sessions conducted by Ralph Peer at a makeshift recording studio in a hat warehouse on State Street. In Bristol at the invitation of Fries native Ernest Stoneman, already something of a rural recording success, Peer made the first recordings by the Carter Family, from nearby Maces Springs, and Jimmie Rodgers, putting them on the road to becoming country music's first superstars. In 1998, Congress made official what Bristol had long called itself, dubbing it "The Birthplace of Country Music."

Since 1994, the story of the Bristol sessions, of how country music sprang out of the region's rich traditions and how it has continued to evolve, has been told in a small but charming museum and gift shop in the lower level of the Bristol Mall (Exit 1, Interstate 81), across from a J.C. Penney. The grass-roots museum, created by the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance, salutes regional history and cultural traditions through displays on Rodgers, the Carter Family, the Stoneman Family and Bristol native Tennessee Ernie Ford. There are vintage photos, posters and records, stage outfits and instruments, including a Martin D41 guitar autographed by dozens of participants at the 75th anniversary concert for the Bristol sessions. The museum is free and open year-round during mall hours. There are also free performances Thursdays at the Pickin' Porch (276-645-0035; http://www.mountainmusicmuseum.org/ ) on the upper level of the mall.

Though interstate signs still identify the mall location as the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, it is now called the Mountain Music Museum, run by the Appalachian Cultural Music Association, which is headed by Tim White. White, who plays banjo in the VW Boys and hosts the Thursday Pickin' Porch shows, is the one who in 1986 painted the Birthplace of Country Music mural at 800 State St., a 30-by-100-foot mural commemorating the Bristol Sessions with portraits of Peer, the Carter and Stoneman families, and Rodgers giving a double thumbs-up salute. In the summer, the stage in front of the mural is the site of free bluegrass concerts several nights a week. White will perpetuate the Bristol Mall location, even as alliance Executive Director Bill Hartley has announced plans for a Birthplace of Country Music Cultural Heritage Center in downtown Bristol, where a local businessman donated a 24,000-square-foot historic structure at 520 Cumberland St., not far from the site of the original Bristol sessions. The hat warehouse burned down in 1945; the location is marked by the Bristol Sessions Monument at Fourth and State streets.

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How often can you walk into a museum and talk to its inspiration and namesake? That's a possibility at the Ralph Stanley Museum and Traditional Mountain Music Center (249 Main St., Clintwood), a stately, four-story, century-old Victorian mansion that's the town's dominant structure. The $2 million facility opened in 2004, very much a consequence of the Crooked Road initiative and symbolic as well: What had most recently been a funeral home has brought new life to a hard-hit community the same year a Travelocity call center, the county's biggest employer, outsourced to India.

Most of the material here comes from Stanley, the silver-haired country gentleman who sometimes makes himself part of the wonderfully designed, state-of-the-art exhibits tracing his 60-year career, both with the Stanley Brothers from 1945 to 1966 and the Clinch Mountain Boys, formed in 1966 after the death of brother Carter. Flat-panel video displays offer vintage radio and record performances and oral histories, and headphones plug into wall-mounted listening stations for Stanley's engaging personal narratives. Even when Stanley's not there, it feels as though he is, an effect underscored by the banjo-head visitors desk and a wall design made to look like a banjo's fret board.

A small room by the first-floor gift shop is decorated to resemble the McClure Primitive Baptist Church, where Stanley learned to sing, displaying artifacts from the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," including the Grammy Award -- Stanley's first -- for its soundtrack. The museum is generous, honoring roots and inspirations and recognizing peers and progeny. There are vintage instruments, albums, stage costumes, a wall of awards and more. Admission to the museum is $12 for visitors, $10 for Dickenson County residents, students and seniors older than 55.

MUSIC ALONG THE CROOKED ROAD This month, the Ralph Stanley Museum and Traditional Mountain Music Center and the Jettie Baker Center, a renovated '40s theater across the street, began a series of monthly concerts. Held the first Saturday evening of every month at 7, they feature old-time and bluegrass performances from local performers as well as regional favorites; tickets for most events are $5. In addition, Clintwood hosts the second Ralph Stanley Museum Mountain Music Festival Sept. 29 through Oct. 1, with Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys headlining a Friday benefit concert at the theater at 6:30. Saturday's free events, from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Main Street, include performances by 14 bands on four stages as well as dancing, storytelling, craft displays and workshops, games and lots of "taste of the mountains" cuisine. It concludes Sunday with a free gospel sing at the Jettie Baker Center from 2 to 6. For information, call the Ralph Stanley Museum and Traditional Mountain Music Center at 276-926-8550 or visithttp://www.ralphstanleymuseum.com.

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Once all lights and the sound system are a go, Bill Jones tells the crowd at Country Cabin II in Norton, "I believe everything's working but the band." Fortunately it doesn't take long for Bluegrass Circle to crank up, which is doubly fortunate since it takes a measure, maybe two, for the venue's floor to fill with dancers and flat-footers who will somehow not run out of energy for about three hours. County Cabin II (6034 Kent Junction Rd., U.S. 23, about 1.5 miles west of Norton; 276-679-2632; http://www.appalachiantraditions.net/ ) is actually the oldest mountain music cultural venue on the Crooked Road, if you count the original Country Cabin a few hundred yards down the road dating to 1937 and President Roosevelt's WPA program. The original log cabin, a community facility for musicians to play traditional music on Saturday nights, is now a national and state historic landmark used mostly for meetings. It was supplanted in 2002 by Country Cabin II, a larger facility that is home not only to the ongoing Saturday night gathering but also to clogging classes and the annual Dock Boggs/Kate O'Neill Peters Sturgill Memorial Music Festival honoring Boggs, the legendary Norton-born banjoist and singer, and Sturgill, a celebrated ballad singer.