Sunday at 4pm, during This Old Porch: A Preview of The 1925 Asheville Okeh Sessions and Upcoming Events, November 6-9

In August 1925, a portable recording studio took over a suite in the brand‑new George Vanderbilt Hotel in downtown Asheville. For ten days, legendary producer Ralph Peer invited fiddlers, banjo players, singers, and dance bands from across the region to step up to the acoustic recording horn and cut their songs directly to wax. The result? The first commercial recordings ever made in Appalachia—an on‑location experiment that captured the region’s ballads, fiddle tunes, gospel, blues, and vaudeville inside a single hotel room. If the 1927 Bristol Sessions that came two years later are remembered as the “Big Bang of Country Music,” the Asheville Sessions lit the fuse. Now comes a 4-day event in Asheville commemorating those sessions. Fiddler Wayne Martin is part of the team that is reissuing recordings from the Historic Asheville Sessions of 1925 -- the newly released Music from the Land of the Sky: The 1925 Asheville Sessions -- and organizing the public celebration to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this important event. He’ll join Carol Rifkin on Sunday afternoon to talk about it all. More info here: https://www.exploreasheville.com/historic-asheville-sessions