My father was from eastern Tennessee, 30 miles from Bristol. A relative of mine, very highly educated Ph.D guy, really looks down on people from Appalachia, and the South in general. And especially country music. Why? I don't know, maybe that's what they teach them at Berkeley? After all, they describe themselves as "The Elites". Anyhow, I don't get the hate, "they're racist", but hating people from a certain section of the country isn't racist? I have an appreciation for "them people from the hills". I'm glad to see others do too.
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I have read all this article, so interesting. You bring me back to learn more story from almost 100 years ago. Great and thanks
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Don't miss the Jonesborough Storytelling Festival either. My hometown (the oldest town in Tennessee) grows from 2000 to 10,000 people, many of whom come from all over the world just for that weekend (which is usually the first weekend of October).
Get your place to stay well in advance.
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A well-written introduction to the founding and continuing pleasure of bluegrass music. A few errors here and there, which readers are correcting and which The Times will hopefully adjust in later editions. Still, some nice suggestions on places to visit and people to see. I'm sending this article to my fellow bluegrass musicians here in NYC (there's plenty of us!). Makes me want to rent an RV and once again head down Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to Bristol, TN/VA (like I did 40+ years ago in a VW camper).
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Thanks for this great story. Well done
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If you’re in this area there used and may still be a red barn that hosted old time, bluegrass and gospel pickers once a week. All locals, all free, all good.
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Follow the Crooked Road of Country Music through Virginia
To Floyd County-- lots of stops and lots of pickin'. Great!!
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Great story and very informative. The region is on my places to visit this fall. The photo of Bill Kirchin playing tells a lot about the high quality of guitar pickers in that area. Bill played lead guitar with Comander Cody and is a master of the telecaster. Very well done NYT.
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"Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music" (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015) by Barry Mazor is definitely worth reading.
Of course, what is now referred to as Country Music existed before the Bristol Sessions. cf. “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” by Fiddlin’ John Carson’ with “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” on the flip side. It was recorded on June 14, 1923, by Ralph Peer. Check out the Wiki entries for Fiddlin' John Carson and “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” for starters.
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Shouldn't it be called The Big Twang?
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There were no ''tapes'' [2nd paragraph] in 1927. [Tape recorders did not come into usage until the end of WW II.] A 78 rpm record in 1927 was made by recording directly onto a wax master disc. From that master, stampers would be made which would be used to manufacture 10-inch shellac records, with a playing time of about 3 minutes per side [so, these were the 'singles' of the day].
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@Jason1538 Thanks, I was going to make that point about the article's anachronistic reference to "the tapes" of the Bristol sessions. But you added additional valuable technical information.
Incidentally, overall it's a very good article on a worthy topic in American cultural and artistic history.
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It's nice to finally read something positive about Appalachia instead of the usual pieces on the region's abject poverty, opioid addiction and shuttered coal mines.
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The "middle of nowhere" is a cognitive region.
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I have seen the Middle of Nowhere and it is NOT in Bristol--
Try Fort Peck, ND-- it says welcome to Middle of Nowhere
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"...a nearly spectral folk duo from Nova Scotia, two women who switched from fiddle, banjo, guitar and mandolin while harmonizing to deliciously grim original songs..."
Please tell the duo´s name (or names)!
I have loved American traditional (and not so traditional) music since I found Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, and a compilation of railroad songs (with The Carter Family and other bands) among my father's LPs in the mid 60ies (and Tom Lehrer, not so traditional...). Sadly, I have not visited the Appalachians for decades - this article reminds me of why I want to visit again, thank you!
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@Sandelius The name of the duo is "Mama's Broke".
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@Sandelius Sounds like the group "Mama's Broke"
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Very nice article, thank you.
The Grand Guitar ( building)at the top of the article was recently demolished.
The street scene which includes the Paramount Theater is actually the Tennessee side of town.
The Down Home is a true jewel in the crown of Northeast TN.
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The best song by Jimmie Rodgers is "Travelin' Blues" as performed by Lefty Frizzell.
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What a pleasant surprise to see Redd Volkaert in the NYT! We are lucky to have him in Austin playing his frequent matinees at the Continental Club.
On the Texas-side of things, if you are not familiar with the late Don Walser, he is worth checking out (and much missed):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEtSwJ0mxjk
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"The tapes would become an inflection point in the history of what we now refer to as country music." There were no tapes. The songs were recorded by making a disc, a record. It would br a 78 rpm record. When you hear an old 78 you are hearing what they played with no editing.
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@Richard Wissing
An important point. Thank you
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I grew up in Bristol - the Virginia side. My husband grew up there as well- the Tennessee side. As a young musician, I played both at Down Home and at The Carter Family Fold. (I was so brash as to sing old Carter family tunes! but the remaining Carters were kind and appreciated my performance). Reading this article brought me back to a time when music was a huge part of my life and happiness was finding others to sing and play late into a Saturday night. And the mountains-how I miss that backdrop! Thanks for a lovely memory. It’s made my day.
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It really said something about the country music industry in the 70s that when I purchased a new release on RCA records the LP pressing was so poor that it was virtually unplayable on my high end turntable. They were always replaced by the record store without question, the store knew that RCA had little regard for country music fans with their poor pressings.
Back then A&M and Deutsche Grammophon were the gold standard for LPs. Not much country music from the Germans though.
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@Paulie. There were small private labels in Germany preserving classic country artists recordings being neglected by the US companies and many music buyers. I received copies of these for use on the local public radio station in Johnson City. Today Bear Family in Germany is busy preserving our countries music heritage and offering great boxsets with accompanying booklets of great country music from our past.
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Well!
It's always interesting when a section of modern day America rediscovers part of the history behind our home grown, rural, traditional music. Ralph Peer, an early A&R man for the Victor Talking Machine Co., worked tirelessly to produce hundreds of recording sessions throughout the South, and later world-wide, seeking talented singers and composers who had material he hoped would sell records. It would be difficult to find the original "tapes", since tape recordings were not used in this country until thirty years after the so-called Big Bang. Mr. Peer and assistants had to lug around large crates filled with heavy recording equipment, including a lathe and two inch thick wax discs, into which the sounds picked up by primitive microphones were etched.
The record companies were looking for saleable songs, essentially the "software" used to make the new phonograph players (the "hardware") more attractive to the huge, untapped rural audience, lurking along country back roads just waiting to be sold. And find them they did, creating the first wave of interest in a huge, unexplored ocean of rural music, some outright awful, some extraordinarily beautiful and compelling -- to listeners which soon spread around the world. This first flood of recorded music exploded in the next half dozen years, before the Great Depression closed operations down considerably.
For a great introduction to this music, try the Anthology of American Folk Music - Smithsonian Institution.
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@Pete The AAFM is a not only a great place to start, but a great work in and of itself. I've owned mine since the 1960s. And although I was skeptical at first, I came around to enjoy "American Epic," which covers much of the same territory. (The PBS series, the CD set and the book)
As the old saying goes, "there's no such thing as bad publicity," so anything that makes people aware of America's rich (but largely forgotten) musical history and heritage is a plus. In addition, I'd also recommend Greil Marcus' "The Old, Weird America" which is an interesting and enjoyable read, IMHO.
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Great article about music.
Also about time-travel, when referring to the 1927 Bristol sessions:
“The tapes would become an inflection point...”
Magnetic tape didn’t become a practical medium for music until after WWII, when the Allies captured German high-frequency bias technology. Prior to that, virtually all music recording was scratching a groove in a rotating disk. The only exception was film music recorded in sync with picture, which modulated a light shining on perforated photographic film.
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@Jay Rose Thanks for bringing this to our attention. The editors have made the correction.
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Tape recording did not exist in 1928, music was recorded on disks using a cutting turntable.
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No question that the 1927 Bristol Sessions were important, but to repeat the assertion that it was the "Big Bang of Country Music" ( a term coined by Johnny Cash in order to bring honor to the Carter Family into whom he married ) is historically incorrect.
Recording of country music had already been in full swing for over five years before Peer arrived in Bristol and had already offered a dynamic platform to a cadre of great popular performers such as Uncle Dave Macon, Fiddlin' John Carson, Samantha Bumgarner, Charlie Poole, Eva Davis, the Skillet Lickers and Ernest Stoneman (who is repeatedly not credited with helping Peer find the talent to showed up in Bristol) and dozens more. While it is nice to have a phrase which trips off the tongue so lightly, it defeats the purpose of doing credible and supportable history on this powerful and influential music.
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@Henry To be fair, the writer doesn't simply repeat the Big Bang assertion as an undisputed fact. Rather, it is the framing device for this travel (not historical) article about the Tri-Cities region, which in fact uses the birth of country story as a major piece of it's tourism promotion strategy.
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@Henry. Many have distinguished the Peer recordings from others as they became the first widely distributed and bought in large number from the many previous recordings. This the "Big Bang" is often referred to as having launched the legitimate (successful) commercialization of country music on a national level. As we know "country music" has no one birthplace no more than does blues or most any other music genre. Perhaps one can say JAZZ was born in New Orleans. But that could also be argued.
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@Henry
The "Big Bang" tag is because the sessions included the premier recordings of two of the most important artists in country music history, Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family
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