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. Jeff Whitworth of AVL Fest, the Grey Eagle, and other live music venues, and Richard Emmett, Program Director of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation’s Blue Ridge Music Center, join Martin Anderson in a discussion of the classic recordings on the newly released Music from the Land of the Sky: The 1925 Asheville Sessions, and this week’s panel sessions and concerts in Asheville. Further info can be found here: https://www.exploreasheville.com/sites/default/files/2025-10/Asheville%20Sessions%20Schedule.pdf
Tuesday at 11am: A Preview of The Asheville Sessions, November 6-9
