Move over, Nashville
Country music fans know Nashville. But the “big bang” for the genre happened 500 kilometres east in a city better known by NASCAR fans.
Bristol, where the main street literally divides Tennessee and Virginia, gets credit as the birthplace of country music because it’s the first place its songs were recorded by the likes of the original Carter Family — A.P. Carter, his wife Sara and sister-inlaw Maybelle — who brought traditional Appalachian songs from the porch to the studio in 1927 at the urging of producer Ralph Peer, who had arrived in town with portable recording equipment.
Filmmaker Ken Burns acknowledges the Bristol sessions in the first episode of his new 16-hour PBS series documenting American country music.
A fan myself, my travels previously have taken me to Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee’s third point in a triangle of county music. This journey begins at the modern Birthplace of Country Music. The museum is actually across the street in Bristol, Va.
The tour begins with a 10-minute movie about the Bristol sessions during which 19 acts recorded 76 songs popular in the hills and hollers of Appalachia with titles such as Bury Me Under the Weeping Willows and Cold Penitentiary Blues. Authors of the traditional songs were unknown, so Peer copyrighted them.
The Birthplace of Country Music, opened in 2014 and an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, leads visitors through myriad listening stations, electronic visuals and artifacts tracing the Bristol sessions and other highlights of the region’s musical history on two storeys and covering 2,230 square metres.
Bristol’s other country music claims to fame include being the hometown of megastar Tennessee Ernie Ford and, on the darker side, the likely final public sighting of Hank Williams when he stopped at the local Burger Bar, before he died in his car in 1953.
While Detroit is known for Motown, New Orleans for jazz, and the Mississippi Delta for the blues, Bristol has not yet received its due.
Local officials and the State of Tennessee believe that’s about to change with Burns’s Country Music documentary. In fact, Tennessee helped fund it after seeing the effect on visits to Civil War sites after a previous Burns project.