It starts with a well-worn fiddle, held in equally well-worn hands above a tapping black cowboy boot. Then in comes the banjo, plucked with steel finger picks, followed by the autoharp, the mandolin, the beat of an upright bass. Another banjo grabs the melody, and suddenly the room is bursting with knee-slapping, country-porch music. A man in a crisp checked shirt gets up and starts to dance, bouncing out a complicated bumbumBAM bumbumBAM with his feet, moving as smoothly as a Martha Graham dancer, hitting the floor on the downbeat.
It is Thursday night in Fries (pronounced freeze), Virginia, population 600, on the wide New River. In the century-old Fries Theatre, the silk wallpaper, once a glorious aquamarine embossed with gold ferns, is faded. A sign promises movies for 10 cents, 25 cents on weekends, but there hasn’t been a film here in years. The Fries high school closed in 1989 after the cotton mill that gave birth to this hamlet in 1902 shut down. But where the economy has faltered, the local music culture is thriving. Take a drive through the dozens of one-stoplight towns that are planted along highways that twist through this region’s blue hills and green valleys, and you’ll find that music is the manna of the community.
Fries was my first stop on the music trail known as the Crooked Road – an official designation of the state of Virginia since 2004. The heritage of the path can be found in this dance, in that tune, learned by ear from house to house and passed down through generations. The Road isn’t one single highway – it’s a roughly 482-kilometre series of interconnected two-lane byways and long stretches of Route 58, which skims Virginia’s North Carolina and Tennessee borders all the way to Kentucky.
The sound here is Appalachian: mountain music. Joe Wilson, who wrote a book on the Crooked Road, calls the area the “pickle barrel” of American music.
“You know you can’t make a good pickle by squirting vinegar on a cucumber,” he said. “You have to let it sit.”
Over five days in April, I rambled along part of the Crooked Road and towns around it, from Fries up to Ferrum and Floyd, back to Galax and out to Marion, dipping down toward Abingdon, and back to Galax again.
With my partner, Ian, his parents and my 2-year-old daughter, Orli, I drove down roads that curve so dramatically that locals joke that you can see your own taillights as you round the bends.
From the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons (the site of Johnny Cash’s last concert) and Clintwood, deep in coal country, to the farms near Floyd, music is still being made on fiddles and banjos, mandolins and guitars, dulcimers and autoharps. Every night you’ll find pick-up jams on front porches, performances in theatres and quartets that pack storefronts, an old courthouse and even a Dairy Queen. In summer the area is awash in festivals, from Dr. Ralph Stanley’s Memorial Day bluegrass festival in the mountains of Coeburn, Virginia, to the venerable Old Fiddlers Convention held every August in Galax.
This region is where old-time and bluegrass were born. Old-time is dance music, simpler and older than bluegrass. Bluegrass is filled with vocal harmonies, many made famous by (relative) newbies like Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. It is suited more for seated audiences than the foot-stomping dance I saw in Fries, which is known as flatfoot. Both genres evolved from tunes brought by Scotch-Irish and German settlers who travelled down the wagon trails from Pennsylvania. They brought dulcimers and fiddles and later picked up the banjo from former slaves.
“It wasn’t real practical to bring a piano or an organ till there was a train,” said David Arnold, a Fries native whose wild white beard reached mid-sternum.
I met him at a jam. It turned out he was the chairman of the Music Heritage Committee at the Grayson County Heritage Foundation in nearby Independence.
Our nights were spent looking for music, but during the day there were farms to explore and hikes to be taken through gorgeous parks. But even there, you’ll find music. For instance, in June, at the Grayson Highlands State Park, home to herds of photogenic wild ponies, the annual Wayne C. Henderson guitar festival draws some of the best guitar players in a region packed with prodigies.
Henderson himself is a local legend. He lives and makes guitars in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village called Rugby (population seven) that’s not officially on the Crooked Road, although his shop is something of a pilgrimage site. I met him at one of those musical nights that seem to happen all the time around there – this one included fellow guitar makers Jimmy Edmonds and Gerald Anderson performing at a community centre in Galax. The event was a fundraiser for a program called JAM (Junior Appalachian Musicians), which aims to get local children involved in their own roots by teaching them to play music and introducing them to regional artists. A kids’ string band called Loose Strings played to thunderous applause.
I had heard that the best place to be on Friday night, to really see that generational mix, was the town of Floyd. So we popped a Wayne Henderson CD into the car stereo and headed up the Crooked Road.
A few hours later we were picking up tickets for the Floyd Country Store Friday Night Jamboree – $5 each – in advance. Then we wandered down the street to Oddfella’s Cantina, a cozy restaurant with mismatched furniture, for salads (a relief after all the barbecue) washed down with local Shooting Creek beer. We skipped dessert to hit the jamboree.
The night began with the bluegrass gospel group Janet Turner & Friends. Tiny and snowy-haired, Turner plays a mean autoharp that pairs well with her sweet, high voice. “When I die, hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away,” she sang.
Orli stood in the footlights, playing an air guitar; she and another toddler each began to dance.
But then, within seconds of the band’s closing note there was a rush for the dance floor. The audience had changed into double tap shoes and left a sea of shoes in their wake. What had started out church-like became a rumble and a roar. The Friday Night Old Time Band had begun. The music picked up, and the number of people in the store doubled, tripled, quadrupled. I swooped Orli up and back, away from the dancing feet. More polished than the dancers at Fries, everyone knew how to flatfoot, and the tap shoes kept the time. A fellow in a T-shirt that read “Still Truckin”’ spun me onto the dance floor. I did my best to keep up, clicking my boots on the floor.
Catching my breath, I wandered back into the store. The room reeked of sweat; dancers were backed up to the ice cream counter. There I met Jackie Martin in pressed Liberty overalls. The music she said, nearly teary, has kept her going through hard times.
“It’s who we are and what we are,” Martin said. “I’m 66 years old and I can still flatfoot!”
In the morning, after stacks of hot cakes, we got on the Blue Ridge Parkway and headed an hour south to the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Virginia-North Carolina border. Run by the National Park Service and the National Council for the Traditional Arts and created by Congress, the Music Center has hiking trails, a marvellous Mid-Day Mountain Music series that runs from May through October and an amphitheatre.
It was created by Joe Wilson, chairman of the National Council of Traditional Arts and author of “A Guide to the Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail,” and designed by Ralph Applebaum, known for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
But there is more history in these parts. An hour and a half from Galax in Marion, just off Highway 81, the town’s main street is darkened by the shadows of empty storefronts. On the edge of town, a Walmart looms. The Lincoln Theatre and the Francis Marion hotel next door are lone standouts in a time of deep economic upheaval. After checking into our neat black-and-white room, we had a bite to eat and ran into the Lincoln for its monthly event, Song of the Mountains, a collaboration between the Lincoln Theater and PBS.
You could spend a whole summer here, I realized, going to jams every night, seeking out sit-down venues like the Fold, and the Lincoln, standing-room-only music sessions in stores, and hiking the trails along New River.
As we drove back home to Washington, I kept thinking of the song playing when we’d left the Fries session that first night.
“Y’all come,” Karen Carr on the upright bass had sung out, channelling Bill Monroe’s country song of that title. “Well, you all come see to us now and then.”
And we promised ourselves that we would.
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