From North Carolina we crossed into Virginia – we wanted to finish up the last part of The Crooked Road Music Trail. We’d travelled a large part of the Crooked Rod last fall but we wanted to add two stops: the Crater Family Fold and the newly-opened Birthplace of Country Music Museum. The Crooked Road is a fantastic heritage music trail that winds through southwest Virginia. It was one of our favourite experiences on our fall 2013 travels through the roots of American music.
So, off we went to Bristol, Virginia. A winding mountain road 45 minutes north of the city took us to The Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, VA; the wellspring, as it were, from which this first family’s music flowed. It was here that A.P. Carter collected songs and ran a dry goods store – now a small museum of the family itself – and where we visited the Carter Family Memorial Museum Center, a thoroughly modern 800-seat performance auditorium cut into the side of a hill which has hosted country music troubadours since opening in 1976.
The music of the Carter Family was “like water rippling in a sweet, clear spring off Clinch Mountain,” enthused Johnny Cash who married Maybelle Carter’s daughter June and performed for the last time on this stage in July 2003.
The Carter Family burst onto the national scene through a famous 1927 recording session called The Bristol Sessions (“The Big Bang of country music”). They were the first time the music of the mountains had been recorded for popular distribution. Through a combination of luck and good marketing, the Carter Family parlayed those Bristol recordings into a radio empire that nearly covered the continental United States from Mexico. “It was said that you could pick up the Carter Family on the barbed wire and straight-razor in this part of the country,” explained Dr. Joe Smiddy who plays guitar and banjo when not serving on the Carter Family Foundation.
So, on a Saturday night the cars and pickups stream into Hiltons, park in a nearby field, and visitors pack the seats at the Carter Family Fold. Every Saturday night without fail. It’s old-time music and bluegrass only on this stage, played on the authentic instruments – fiddle, guitars, mandolins, banjo and bass – and flatfooting on the hardwood down front. Kids, parents and grandparents share the dance floor. Everyone in this area seems to play something. Music – and the community experience of song and dance – is deeply integrated into the lives of these mountain people.
“It’s therapeutic,” Smiddy said, “this is physical therapy, it’s immunity, it’s a sense of joy. You can dance, you can sing along, you can learn some new songs. It’s real – and a whole lot of people come here to find what’s real.”
Before the dancing starts the master of ceremonies welcomes the crowd and does a short inventory of visitors, encouraging them to call out their home states and countries. For some, it’s a pilgrimage to the source of the music that has moved them all their lives.
“The thing about this music,” Smiddy mused, “is that you can play it well into your later years.” Long after the appeal of rock ’n’ roll has worn off, this music can still draw an audience. The walls of the auditorium are papered with pictures and framed posters of the Carter Family and their numerous musical descendants, related and unrelated. There are people in this audience, Smiddy told us, that have been coming every Saturday night for 35 years.
In this part of the country, the Carter Family looms large. And with good reason.