f78 Bristol Fashioned
Not this Bristol, that Bristol, Tennessee, where 1927 sessions that discovered Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family happened. Tim Chipping visits the museum that marks the ‘big bang’.
J
ohnny Cash called it “the most important event in the history of country music.” Others have described it as “the big bang” from which the entire industry
grew. The 1927 Victor Talking Machine Company recording sessions held in the twin cities of Bristol, Tennessee and Bris- tol, Virginia (the state line runs down the middle of the main road) are the stuff of legend. And like most legends, it ain’t necessarily so.
But if you really want to know how and why nineteen so-called hillbilly acts travelled from across Appalachia to be commercialised by the self-mythologising Ralph Peer and his state-of-the-art studio equipment, then you need to follow in their footsteps. Among the largely unchanged office blocks and warehouses, where The Carter Family, Ernest Stoneman, Jimmie Rodgers, El Watson and their fel- low pilgrims sang and played, is an ultra- modern museum that not only tells the true story of that seminal year, examining its historical context and cultural signifi- cance but also, rather wonderfully, treats those musical traditions as the beating heart of the community.
I hadn’t planned to visit Bristol’s Birth- place Of Country Music Museum, back in March. What I thought I was doing was going on a road trip with Anna Roberts- Gevalt, from the Big Ears festival in Knoxville (where Anna & Elizabeth had been performing) to Brooklyn, via the Blue Ridge Mountain cabin where Alan Lomax first recorded the singing of Texas Glad- den, now home to her granddaughter Vicki. And we did do that. But when Anna realised we could take a slight detour to a significant landmark in traditional music history, we did that too. And I got to see a real live groundhog on the way.
When we arrived, the museum was hosting a temporary exhibition of Cecil Sharp’s Appalachian photographs, on loan from the EFDSS. No matter how far you go on holiday you always meet someone you know. Anna also bumped into an old friend in the shape of local musician Kris Truelsen. Surrounded by storyboards, video screens, old phonographs and guitars, and
we play a lot of regional music that spans the decades, so you can tune in and hear a lot of country music from the 1920s and 1930s, but also you’ll hear a lot of con- temporary artists who are helping to pre- serve the traditions of our musical culture here. We have some really amazing DJs, not only professional musicians, but we have scholars of country music and histori- ans who have been working in and focus- ing on country music studies forever. So you’re really getting an inside perspective of the significance of what the music here means and the large impact that it’s had in the greater world.”
“T
the interactive exhibits that make up The Birthplace Of Country Music Museum, is Radio Bristol, a working radio station pro- grammed and run by Kris. He has what may be one of the best jobs in the world.
“It started out that we were going to have solely a radio exhibit within the museum,” explains Kris some months after he showed us around his place of work. “And we thought, you know, we have the equipment donated to us, why not turn it into an actual community radio station and not only tell the history of Bristol through radio, but help to build a plat- form for underrepresented artists. So with that in mind, I started a Kickstarter cam- paign and got the community of Bristol and the Tri-Cities behind the project and raised over $100,000 initially. And about a year and a half later the station was alive.”
The museum itself opened in 2014 with the radio station beginning its broad- casts a year later. As well as their FM chan- nels, the station can be heard online and through the Radio Bristol app, meaning it now has listeners in over 140 countries. If you’re a regular fRoots reader your ears will be in heaven.
“One of the main things that we want to tell is the idea of the diversity of what country music truly represents, that often a lot of people aren’t aware of. There’s such a cross-pollination of culture and musics that came to develop what we know as country music, but that story isn’t told today. You have the influence of Native American music, of Border music, Tejanos music… You have Cajun music and of course Scots Irish music, African Ameri- can blues… All these things coming together to create different styles of coun- try music, and that’s really what we want to tell our listeners. It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s no reason for us to have these boundaries that we do today because this is a really diverse music and always has been, and that deserves to be celebrated.’”
Also in undeniably enviable employ- ment is Rene Rodgers, the Head Curator of the Birthplace of Country Music Museum. I asked Rene if she could summarise how the museum came into being.
“The importance of the story of the 1927 Bristol Sessions and the impact of this region’s music heritage has long been recognised. The Birthplace of Country Music Alliance was formed in Bristol in 1994 to preserve and promote this her- itage. BCMA worked with Tennessee and Virginia representatives to get Bristol recognised by the US Congress as the
he goal for us is when people tune in to Radio Bristol we want them to hear Central Appalachia. We are unique in that
Photo: Neil Staples
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