Down the Road on the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina

In the Blue Ridge, you can find people gathered on any day of the week to play mountain music. Whether on a front porch or a festival ground, the most basic unit of mountain music is the jam session. Here’s a quick field guide to jam session etiquette, to help you get the most out of your tune time. www.blueridgemusicnc.com/listen-and-learn/jam-etiquette

The hills of Western North Carolina are home to traditional Appalachian music, but the roots of old-time music stretch all over the world, combining the music of the first European settlers in the Appalachians with that of the Africans who came to the new world as slaves, and elements of the musical traditions of the Native Americans. When you hear the blue notes and syncopation that fiddlers like Tommy Jarrell play in tunes like “Black-Eyed Susie,” you can hear that old-time music is a melting pot like no other.

Earl perfected the syncopated style of three-finger banjo picking, known as “Scruggs Style." In 1948 he joined Lester Flatt to form the Foggy Mountain Boys. Their theme to "The Beverly Hillbillies" made the Scruggs style famous worldwide.

Mount Airy was a mecca for old-time music long before Andy Griffith immortalized his hometown as Mayberry on "The Andy Griffith Show." North Carolina's favorite native son, Griffith played tribute to the region's musical traditions, often playing on his show with the Darlings, a real-life musical family.

Celebrated as "the Ministrel of the Appalachians," Bascomb Lamar Lunsford was born in Madison County, N.C. He learned to fashion fiddles from goards at an early age and later mastered the 5-string banjo. A lawyer, teacher, fruit-tree and honey bee promoter by trade, Bascom would record over 300 sides of mountain music from memory for the Library of Congress. Bascom started the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville in 1928, which is now the longest continuing folk festival in the nation.

Etta Baker picked up her rag-time influenced style of fingerpicking at the age of 3 from her father. She became a master of the Piedmont Blues, influencing musicians like Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Etta practiced her two-finger picking style an hour every day in addition to raising nine children with her musician husband. After working 26 years at a Morganton textile mill, she quit at age 60 to become a professional musician, and at 78, she cut her first album. In 1991, she received the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship. Etta Baker died in 2006 at age of 93, but her legacy lives on with a statue at Morganton Municipal Auditorium.

Today, the tradition of ballad singing is alive and well in the North Carolina mountains thanks in part to Sheila Kay Adams, a seventh generation singer. Raised in the community of Sodom in Madison County, Adams learned from her great aunt Dellie Chandler Norton, sitting together and repeating the verses to each other knee-to-knee until the songs were “caught.”

Every April in the North Carolina mountains and foothills, we look forward to MerleFest, an annual gathering of many of the best roots musicians in America. Begun in memory of Doc Watson’s late son Merle, who performed with his father for many years, the festival grew from a one-man show on the back of a flatbed truck to a gathering of 80,000 music lovers on the campus of Wilkesboro Community College.

In the spring of 1927, Jimmie Rodgers moved to Asheville and honed his craft with live performances on local radio station WWNC. A connection with music promoter Bascom Lamar Lunsford may have helped Jimmie secure an audition at the legendary Bristol Sessions that August.