This Old Porch™

Country music came into the American mainstream with the Carter Family, but A.P. Carter relied heavily on African-American blues guitarist Lesley Riddle of Yancey County, N.C. In 1927, Lesley met A.P. in Bristol, Tenn. and helped the Carters collect the songs across Appalachia that would become country music classics. Now Burnsville pays tribute to the blues musician with annual Riddlefest.

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.

Click here to learn more about Jam Session 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.

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.
 

He was known as the “Father Of Country Music” and “The Singing’ Brakeman” because he worked the railroads and was a brakeman for New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad. He was also famous for his yodeling.

According to historians, on April 18, 1927, he and a man named Otis Kuykandall performed on WWNC, Asheville, NC’s first radio station. A few weeks later, he recruited a group from Bristol, Tennessee named the Tenneva Ramblers and secured a weekly slot on WWNC listed as “The Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers.”