Today the “old-time” Virginia music-the forerunner of American country-is still performed not just at legendary venues such as the Carter Family Fold near Hiltons, Virginia, but at Dairy Queens, community centers, coon hunting clubs, barber shops, local rescue squads and VFW halls. The diversity of settlers funneled into the region gave rise to its unique musical style. And, of course, some fled into the mountains, long a refuge for escaped slaves. Some rode on wagons, but many walked-one woman told me the story of her great-grandfather, who as a child hiked with his parents into western Virginia with the family pewter tied in a sack around his waist and his chair on his back. Other pioneers headed west on the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone hacked through the mountains of Kentucky. Then, in the 1700s, settlers came in search of new homes in the South, following the Great Wagon Road from Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Augusta, Georgia. Woodland buffalo and the Indians who hunted them wore the first paths in this part of the world. But the Crooked Road-a state designation originally conceived in 2003-is shaped by several much older routes. 58, a straightforward multilane highway in some spots and a harrowing slalom course in others. The Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail, winds for some 300 miles through the southwest corner of the state, from the Blue Ridge into deeper Appalachia, home to some of the rawest and most arresting sounds around. This music cannot be heard with half an ear-it has 400 years of history behind it, and listening to it properly takes time. A traveler should be sure to leave time to savor another ready-to-levitate biscuit or a melting sunset or a stranger’s drawling tale-and especially, to linger at the mountain banjo-and-fiddle jams that the region is known for. Slow is almost always better in this part of the world, I was learning.
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But instead I proceed at a snail’s pace, windows down, listening to the burble of the creek, the gossip of cicadas in the dense summer woods, and the slosh of a Mason jar full of bona fide moonshine in the back seat-a gift from one of the new friends I met along the road.
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Legend has it that many of Nascar’s original drivers cut their teeth here, and modern stock car design is almost certainly indebted to the “liquor cars” dreamed up in local garages, modified for speed and for hauling brimful loads of “that good old mountain dew,” as the country song goes.Įven now, it is tempting to barrel down Shooting Creek Road, near Floyd, Virginia, the most treacherous racing stretch of all, where the remains of old stills decay beside a rushing stream. The moonshiners of old tore over country roads in 1940 Ford coupes, executing 180-degree “bootleg turns” and using bright lights to blind the revenue officers shooting at their tires. Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains are known for their speed demons.
Impromptu jam sessions, including a gathering at Floyd, Virginia's Country Store, attract musicians and dancers raised on the raw and keening power of mountain music.
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