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

We’re coming to you this week to answer an age-old question: is it a fiddle or a violin? Few folks in Western North Carolina are better equipped to answer that question than master fiddler Roger Howell. At his shop on Banjo Branch just outside of Mars Hill, he has not only recorded more than 600 fiddle tunes for his memory collection, but he also repaired and restored hundreds if not thousands of...

Bobby Hicks is a fiddling icon. His career as a recording artist and performer has spanned more than 7 decades. During this time, Bobby’s style, session work, and touring have helped to define the bluegrass fiddle. We sat down with Bobby to chat about Western North Carolina, his time with Bill Monroe, and much more.

Donna Ray Norton is no stranger to the musical community of Western North Carolina. She’s an 8th generation ballad singer who grew up in the legendary Sodom community of Madison County, a county which folklorist Cecil Sharp likened to “a nest of singing birds.” Her grandfather was Byard Ray, a fiddler and singer who took his style of mountain music across the globe. Her mother, Lena Jean Ray, carr...

Earl Scruggs hailed from Flint Hill in rural Cleveland County. In his decades-long career he helped define bluegrass music as we know it today. The Earl Scruggs Center, in partnership with WNCW, the Tryon International Equestrian Center, and Come Hear North Carolina, will present the inaugural Earl Scruggs Music Festival in September 2022. The Blue Ridge Music Trails paid a visit to the Scruggs Ce...

The 51st Smoky Mountain Folk Festival.  returns to the shores of Lake Junaluska in Haywood County this August. Now in its 6th decade, the festival coincides with a time when communities would gather at harvest time to share music and dance. The festival welcomes an outstanding array of the region’s finest tradition performers including fiddlers, banjo players, string bands, ballad singers, buck da...

If well-constructed and properly cared for, an instrument will outlive generations of musicians that play it. Many of the instruments that have influenced our music still sing long after their owners have gone on. The Southern Appalachian Archives in the Ramsey Center for Appalachian Studies at Mars Hill University hold some of the most well-known instruments from our musical past. Take a listen.

Carl Sandburg dedicated the American Songbag, “To those unknown singers–who made songs–out of love, fun, grief–and to those many other singers–who kept those songs as living things of the heart and mind–out of love, fun, grief.” It is fitting that so many carried on this important work begun by the old troubadour and poet of the people.

The imprint of Western North Carolina’s vibrant musical tradition can be seen and heard time and again as our music has worked its way into the arena of popular culture. From the moment Jed Clampett spotted that bubbling-crude through the current decade, the soundtrack of the mountains and foothills has been the soundtrack for countless television, movie, and radio programs.

The history of Western North Carolina has long been a subject of study for local and international scholars. Many of those efforts have been focused on only a portion of the culture and experience of the region. With its exhibit Jagged Path: The African Diaspora in Western North Carolina in Craft, Music, and Dance, the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, or BRAHM, is working to provide a fuller p...

Originally from Connecticut, Derek moved to Elk Park, NC in the spring of 2022 to continue exploring the singing traditions of the Bare family and the communities throughout Western North Carolina. With his work collecting and sharing these recordings, Derek is helping to shine a light on the stories and songs of a noteworthy community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina

Billy Edd Wheeler came to North Carolina from the coal camp of Highcoal in West Virginia.  As a boy, he began playing guitar and penned his first song “Paper Boy Blues,” about delivering newspapers at 5:30am, at the age of eleven. His archtop Kay guitar was purchased for fourteen dollars out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. He learned three chords from a coal miner and as they say, the rest is hi...

The Asheville music scene is known for its depth of talent, wealth of offerings, and sense of exploration. You might think this music scene has sprung up over the last 20 years during the city’s own renaissance, but Alli Marshall of the Asheville History Walking Tour is here to disabuse you of that notion. The tour winds for a mile and half through downtown Asheville and the musical history covers...

The Happy Valley community lies between Lenoir and Blowing Rock along the Yadkin River. This fertile valley is so scenic and peaceful that early settlers gave it the name “Happy Valley.” The valley was home to General William Lenoir, for whom the Caldwell County seat of Lenoir was named. His home, Fort Defiance, is on the National Register of Historic Places, open regularly to visitors, and also h...

You can hardly hear a set of bluegrass music without hearing a train song. Some are poetic like the Wabash Cannonball. “Listen to the jingle the rumble and the roar, as she glides along the woodland, through the hills and by the shore.”  Some tell tragic tells of trains running out of control.

Bobby McMillon passed away on November 28, 2021. His passing leaves a great void in the traditional music and Appalachian cultural landscape. Throughout the course of his life, Bobby took this awareness he gained from his grandfather’s passing and turned it into a legacy of collecting, performing, and friendships.

David Holt grew up in Garland, Texas.  He says “I grew up in a family of informal storytellers, and there was plenty to tell about our wild and wooly Texas forefathers. Storytelling was just a natural part of family life for me. I never thought about telling stories in public until I began to collect mountain music and came across interesting and unusual anecdotes from mountain folks. I began to u...

Of all the fiddlers in the fiddler-rich region of Western North Carolina, Arvil Freeman was a veritable North Star of Western North Carolina fiddling and traditional music as a whole. Arvil is likely the most heard “in-person” fiddler  and likely the most influential. On October 21, 2021, Western North Carolina lost fiddling legend Arvil Freeman.

Across Western North Carolina, people looking to learn to play an instrument or musicians looking to step up their game can enjoy many opportunities to learn in immersive settings. Many camps offer week-long packages of music instruction, food, and lodging. The whole package provides a chance for the musician to spend a week completely focused on the music. How great is that?

The English folksong “The Cuckoo,” often sung as a round or canon, celebrated the arrival of summer recalling the sights and sounds of English barnyards and meadows. Some scholars consider the song a parody and possibly too coarse for polite society. The manuscript in which it is preserved was copied between 1261 and 1264. The song evolved into a more poetic form and became part of the English fol...

The Bascom Lamar Lunsford Mountain Music Festival is the only one that Lunsford allowed to carry his name. In 1928, Lunsford started the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville as part of the annual Rhododendron Festival. The festival was such a hit that the local newspaper declared it should be an annual event. The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival is the oldest continuing festival in the na...

Do you know the legend of Tom Dooley? Do you know he was a real person and lived in Western North Carolina? Do you know he was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang? The ballad “Tom Dooley”, originally recorded by Frank Proffitt in the 1930’s or 1940’s became a nationwide success in 1958 when The Kingston Trio released their recording of the song.

Everybody and everything has a story. What is her story, what is his story?  Did you ever wonder about the cautionary messages in the fairy tales?  Folklorists will tell you that story plays a very important role in human culture. Stories were used to preserve history, to teach the young important cultural lessons, and to provide entertainment.

As soon as the crops are canned, frozen and laid by for the fall, communities in Western North Carolina gather to sing shaped-notes from the Christian Harmony songbook. Now, over 129 years since the first shaped-notes were sung in the Dutch Cove, singers still gather to heist a tune and enjoy the riches of a D.O.G.

Step It Up & Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music was released by David Menconi in 2020. Taking its title from one of the signature songs of Durham blues artist Blind Boy Fuller, the book explores the musical history of the state and examines the impact North Carolina music has had on the rest of the world. Menconi writes that North Carolina “has only rarely been home to the biggest s...

Dance is an essential part of the musical traditions of Western North Carolina. Dancing and music go hand-in-hand, and for many years, dances with live music were a central meeting point for communities. One dance team that has been a fixture in Western North Carolina for almost 50 years is the Green Grass Cloggers. Clogging is a distinct form of dancing that borrows from the step dancing of the B...