A Musical Road Trip

By Richard Harrington
Friday, September 22, 2006

Dedicated in 2004 as Virginia's Heritage Music Trail, what has come to be known as the Crooked Road is long -- 253 miles of highways and back roads -- and definitely crooked, winding through 10 southwestern Virginia counties and highlighted by the eight primary landmarks we recently visited. Those places honor and explicate regional traditions that have deeply influenced American music while showcasing a culture that stubbornly insists on its place in the contemporary world.

Ferrum to Clintwood isn't just a journey through exotic locales, of course, though it traverses the western slopes of Franklin County and the coal fields of Dickenson County, a hauntingly beautiful region bounded by the Blue Ridge, Allegheny and Cumberland mountains. It's also a passage through the place where American music took root centuries ago as Irish, German and African strains blended into mountain music, which evolved into old-time, bluegrass and country, though that last is probably least around these parts.

"Virginia has the deepest history of music, and people are unaware of it," says Joe Wilson, chairman of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, manager of the recently opened Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax and author of a new book, "A Guide to the Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail" (John F. Blair Publishing). Paul Bunyan-like, the 68-year-old Wilson also helped build the Crooked Road. According to Wilson, it's not the ancient history of Williamsburg or Jamestown that the Crooked Road champions but living history "in one of the places America invented its music," birthed when the African banjo was brought here by former slaves after the Civil War and paired with the European fiddle to produce some of the most exciting instrumental dance music ever heard -- then and now. String band music ruled the region pre-mass media.

But records and radio took the music nationwide: Seminal 1927 recording sessions in Bristol helped make Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family the father and the first family of country music. A third generation of Carters keeps the family legacy alive every Saturday in Hiltons, while bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley often can be found in a wonderful new museum that bears his name in Clintwood, just miles from where he has lived most of his 79 years. These are the Clinch Mountains, but they also cling.

For years, folks have come from all over for southwest Virginia's fiddle conventions and bluegrass festivals, for lively dances in down-home venues and for spontaneous jams just about anyplace. For anyone who loves live music, this corner of the commonwealth has never been common, but it has always had a great wealth of uniquely American music that's not that different from its roots. Music doesn't change much when it's passed down through multiple generations of families, friends and neighbors. It's why these tiny rural communities scattered along the Crooked Road have produced an abundance of extraordinary musicians and instrument makers, testimony to traditions that not only survive, but thrive.

To explore it, just follow the Crooked Road's yellow banjo-emblazoned signs, spaced every seven miles; they should keep you from getting lost (though not totally, I admit). Common sense dictates that weekends are the best time to plan a Crooked Road trip: Fridays offer regular events in the Floyd Country Store and Galax's Rex Theater, with Saturday night action farther down the road at the Carter Family Fold and the Country Cabin in Norton. Remember, it's always best to get to these places early. Many are small venues -- and always popular -- and ridiculously inexpensive, with admission ranging from $3 to $5. That is not a typo, folks.

There are also several culturally focused museums and a lot of regular, mostly free weekday jams -- Wilson's book lists many, and you can get up-to-date information at the Crooked Road's own site ( http://www.thecrookedroad.org/ ), Blue Ridge Music Trails ( http://www.blueridgemusic.org/ ) or the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance ( http://www.birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/ ). The last is a terrific source of information on concerts, events and exhibitions, with streaming audio featuring thousands of songs by regional artists, both historic and contemporary.

The Crooked Road is actually many linked roads, notably U.S. Routes 221, 58 and 23 and Virginia Routes 40 and 83. Some you can travel at a decent clip, though you might want to snake over to Interstate 81 from Floyd via Route 8 for a straighter, speedier shot to Bristol (at 106 miles, the biggest gap between major Crooked Road stops). From Bristol, you might want to jump ahead to the Ralph Stanley museum in Clintwood to double back to Saturday night music and dance events in Norton and Hiltons.

By the way, crooked doesn't begin to describe the tight S-curves, steep inclines and dramatic drop-offs on Route 72 leading into Clintwood or Route 860, a.k.a. Shooting Creek Road, a treacherous shortcut from the Blue Ridge Institute in Ferrum to Floyd.

Traveling the Crooked Road

If you want to embark on the Crooked Road at the site closest to Washington (about 275 miles), head for the Blue Ridge Institute (540-365-4416; http://www.blueridgeinstitute.org/ ) in Ferrum. This impressive repository of rural and mountain culture, on the campus of Ferrum College, is home to the Blue Ridge Heritage Archive (holding thousands of recordings, images and documents reflecting Virginia's folk culture) and offers several valuable online services: Blue Ridge Music Trails lists hundreds of traditional music and dance events along the Crooked Road and throughout Virginia, and the institute's online exhibit, "Deathly Lyrics: Songs of Virginia Tragedies," is pretty self-explanatory. (Hear "The Battle Song of the Great Kanawha's" exhort "Ye daughters and sons of Virginia / Incline your ears to a story of woe.") The gift shop has a dozen or so institute-produced "Virginia Traditions" CDs and tapes chronicling different aspects of the state's musical heritage -- white and black, secular and sacred -- good driving music, of course.

The institute's current gallery exhibit is "White Liquor, Blue Ridge Style." This comprehensive exhibit on moonshine was funded by a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities & Public Policy, so it must be legal; in any case, there's a sign saying, "Thank you for asking, but we do not have any samples nor do we know where you may find any to take home." You'll find several types of stills (turnip, submarine, steam, even a cute vintage toy still); a souped-up, jury-rigged 1951 Ford pickup used until the '70s to deliver jars of moonshine over bumpy roads; the restored coppersmith shop of Abraham Lincoln Gussler (who worked for moonshiners and built copper instruments); and videos and texts explaining everything you might possibly want to know about moonshine. The exhibit focuses on Franklin County, which in the '30s was dubbed "the Moonshine Capital of America" for its corrupt law enforcement and numerous illicit distilleries -- hence "stills" -- operated by folks unwilling to pay those pesky liquor taxes. The institute's galleries are free and open Monday through Saturday from 10 to 4:30.

This year's Blue Ridge Folklife Festival (Oct. 28 from 10 to 5 at Ferrum College) will feature a moonshiners' storytelling stage but, alas, still no samples. The festival is the largest in Virginia celebrating regional music and crafts, folkways and food ways; there will be two stages for Crooked Road musicians and such additional delights as coon dog water races and coon mule jumping. Admission is $9.

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If it's Friday night, the action is at the Floyd Country Store (296 S. Locust St., Floyd; 540-745-4563; http://www.floydcountrystore.com/ ), a near-century-old general store that's open only six hours a week. Except for T-shirts, CDs and snacks, the stuff on the shelves is mostly leftover stock-as-props. The middle of the store is occupied by folding chairs and looks like a town meeting or a humble church service is about to be held. In fact, by 6, folks have started filling those seats for the gospel hour that begins at 6:30, kicking off the Friday Night Jamboree . An hour later, the place is packed, as is the oak dance floor a nanosecond into music played by the first of several old-time or bluegrass bands. One of the regulars is Ralph Haden and Barbershop Grass, though Haden might be thinking about a new band name. Over the Labor Day weekend, he retired from the adjacent Floyd Barber Shop, which has been around for 65 years, half of them with Haden taking a little bit off every top.

The Floyd Country Store doesn't hold a huge number of people -- 100 or so, though 300 may pass through during the evening; folks are always spilling into the Country Store or spilling out. (A larger stage taking shape behind a back wall will improve capacity.) Some never make it off the bench out front, even as Locust Street swarms with folks heading to nearby restaurants-with-music such as Oddfellas Cantina or Cafe Del Sol. Amazing that a town with a population of fewer than 500 has an active Music Row!

In the Floyd Country Store, the dance floor isn't much bigger than a sheet of postage stamps. Whether old-time or bluegrass, the music is accompanied by the percussive clacking of metal taps on the shoes of ardent flat-footers. Flat-footing is associated with traditional string band music; distinct from its uptight cousin, clogging, it better serves free-spirited flat-footers, whose heels and toes thump with dizzying speed.

All this started about 20 years ago when the store's then-owners needed a place for their band to practice on Friday nights. Curious passersby begat crowds that went from small to packed, and an institution began. According to Woody Crenshaw, who owns a lighting manufacturing business in Floyd and bought the Floyd Country Store 18 months ago, the Friday night crowd is about one-third local people from Floyd, a third semi- or irregulars and a third newbies, some from distant lands. (They always get introduced to great applause.) There's food on-site, but there's no alcohol, smoking or cussing allowed, the so-called Granny Rules that apply at pretty much every traditional music venue and festival.

Pickers also jam informally on the bench out front or in nearby alleys, driveways and parking lots, weather permitting. When it doesn't, they gravitate to the store's upstairs rooms. The evening's last band is often ad hoc, made up of whoever's handy and ready to keep the jam in jamboree. Admission is only $3 (younger than 16 free), and that also gets you a raffle ticket for a ham.

Also worth checking out: County Records/County Sales (117A W. Main St.; 540-745-2001; http://www.countysales.com/ ), the world's best-stocked traditional-music store, with a huge international mail-order and online business, and Scott Perry's the Pickin' Porch (133 Willis Ave., behind the post office; 540-745-8863; http://www.thepickinporch.com/ ), which offers locally made and vintage acoustic instruments, such as beautifully detailed fiddles by 82-year-old Arthur Conner of Copper Hill, Va.; mandolins by Stanley Lorton of Willis, Va.; ("Arthur calls him 'old man,' " Perry chuckles); and dulcimers by Charles Spangler and W.K. Webster.

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Galax is legendary as the home of the annual Old Fiddler's Convention (276-236-8541; http://www.oldfiddlersconvention.com/ ), which every August swells the town's population for a week from 7,000 to as many as 50,000. The convention has been held at Felts Park since 1936, making it the biggest and oldest mountain music festival around and allowing Galax to call itself "The World Capital of Old-Time Mountain Music." About a third of the attendees are musicians: Many participate in the multiple competitions (despite the festival name, categories include dobro, dulcimer, banjo, fiddle and even clogging), and thousands join informal and seemingly round-the-clock campground and parking lot jam sessions. It's mad fun and astoundingly cheap -- $30 for the whole week.

There are only three live bluegrass/country radio shows in the country (including the "Grand Ole Opry"), and one of them comes out of Galax: "Blue Ridge Backroads," which since 1999 has been broadcast Friday nights from 8 to 10 on WBRF (98.1 FM). The shows originate from the historic Rex Theater (113 E. Grayson St.), a renovated 475-seat movie theater with a neon-light marquee, wood floors and comfy seats. Most of the shows are free, though not all are broadcast. WBRF's 100,000 watts reach deep into Virginia and neighboring states. For more information and schedules, call 276-238-8130 or visit http://www.rextheatergalax.com/ .

Just around the corner is Barr's Fiddle Shop (105 S. Main St.; 276-236-2411), a music shop where master luthier Tom Barr crafts fine fiddles as well as banjos and dulcimers.

About nine miles outside Galax, the Blue Ridge Music Center and Museum sits at Milepost 213 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Situated in a gorgeous rustic location overlooking Round Peak, the center was established by Congress in 1985 to commemorate and showcase traditional music and culture. (It's jointly operated by the National Park Service and the National Council for the Traditional Arts.) But it took 17 years to create the 3,000-capacity outdoor amphitheater and two more years to build the impressive visitor center, with its 100-seat auditorium, exhibit space and classrooms, and a luthier shop where Saturday visitors can watch stringed instruments being made.

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.

Partly because of that festival's popularity, Country Cabin III is being built. It's a pavilion that will accommodate as many as 450 people, more than twice the limit at Cabin II, which on this particular night is full to bursting. Bluegrass Circle alternates between lilting two-step such as the Osborne Brothers' "Making Plans," during which dancers waltz around the floor in a more-or-less circle, and high-energy tunes such as "Rocky Top," during which the dancing is freestyle, genially competitive and noisy, thanks to metal taps resonating in a wood-rich environment.

These country dances attract a wide range of participants, mostly local, but are welcoming of strangers and neophytes. Some of the jokes emanating from the stage sound more vintage than the tunes, though always family-friendly: The edgiest it gets is when banjo player T.C. Harvey jokes to the assembled dancers, "The only thing we clog is toilets!" Upcoming performers include East Ky Tyme on Saturday and the Midnight Ramblers on Sept. 30. Tickets for adults and children 12 and older are $5, $1 for children younger than 12. Country Cabin II also hosts jam sessions Tuesdays from 7 to 10 p.m.

At the Carter Family Memorial Music Center, on A.P. Carter Highway in Hiltons and better known as the Carter Family Fold, the music starts at 7:30 p.m. and usually ends by 10 or 10:30, "so folks can get home and be ready for church in the morning," says Rita Forrester, who runs the Fold with brother Dale Jett. Both are third-generation members of the legendary Carter Family: children of Janette Carter, grandchildren of A.P. and Sara Carter, niece and nephew of Maybelle Carter. They're carrying on a tradition dating to 1974, when Janette (who died in January) promised her father she'd create a venue to both honor and foster traditional music. (No electric instruments are allowed.)

Resembling a small, rustic concert hall, the Carter Family Fold is built into a hillside and covered by a metal roof, with sides that open up in good weather. It's quickly packed, not surprising with $5 tickets for adults, $1 for kids 6 to 11 and free admission for children younger than 6. The music is courtesy of New Ballard's Branch Bogtrotters, an old-time quintet named in honor of the Bogtrotters, one of Galax's best-known string bands in the '30s; their musical progeny has won best old-time string band honors at the Old Fiddler's Convention on six occasions. Every time fiddler Eddie Bonds launches into an up-tempo standard such as "Cotton Eyed Joe" or "John Brown's Grave," the dance floor fills instantly. Fiddle is king in old-time music, which is mainly for dancing and favors well-worn fiddle tunes. At evening's end, Jett, who often performs here, admiringly notes, "You about wore them out." He's not talking about the band -- he's talking about the dancers, who sometimes partake in "dance ovations," refusing to abandon the floor after the last dance until the band returns for one more tune.

The Carter Family Fold holds about 850 people, many of whom come to dance in front of a spacious stage that looks like a combination living room and front porch and is decorated with portraits of the Carter Family, among the first artists inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. As crowded as the dance floor gets, hundreds of people watch from new folding seats (funded by the state), cooling themselves on this summer night with hand fans and downing Forrester's sweet, home-brewed iced tea, seemingly by the gallon. She also cooks such concession-stand favorites as hot dogs with homemade chili, bean soup and pork barbecue, and it's priced on par with the admission.

Johnny Cash made his last public performance here in an unannounced concert July 5, 2003, about two months before he died. The tuxedo and long gown that he and June Carter Cash wore to the Nixon White House in 1970 are in the Carter Family Museum a few dozen steps from the Fold. Housed in the old general store A.P. Carter operated in the '40s and '50s, it's chock-full of photos, instruments, show and work clothes, newspaper and magazine clippings, vintage radios and record players, and troves of family artifacts and memorabilia. It feels, and smells, like a cluttered curio shop: Forrester says the museum will soon undergo serious renovation to make it a little more user-friendly. A few feet away: the A.P. Carter Cabin, a modest log cabin moved -- board by board, brick by brick -- from a remote location in Poor Valley. Both buildings are open from 90 minutes before showtime and during intermission; admission to each is 50 cents.

CARTER FAMILY FOLD Upcoming shows include Bill Wells & Blueridge Mountain Grass on Saturday and Bill Lowe & Cripple Creek on Sept. 30. Additionally, the musical "Man of Constant Sorrow: The Story of the Stanley Brothers" will be presented Sept. 29 at 7:30 and Sept. 30 at 2. 276-386-6054 or 276-386-9480 or visithttp://www.carterfamilyfold.org/.

Richard Harrington is the music writer for Weekend.