Up to the Mountain, Again

Talk about “Can the circle be unbroken?” As we mark the 75th anniversary of the legendary Bristol sessions, Americans are once again becoming acquainted, if only for the moment, with the tragicomic strains of old-time country music. And how marvelously fitting it is that perhaps the prime beneficiary of this rekindled romance is Ralph Stanley. Barnstorming this summer with the Down From the Mountain tour, Stanley has just turned 75 himself and was born not 30 miles, as the hawk flies, from Maces Spring, Va.—the Clinch Mountain home from which the Carter Family set out, bound for Bristol, in a borrowed Model-A Ford three quarters of a century ago this weekend.

The phrase “down from the mountain” refers, generally, to the rural-to-urban exodus that powered commercial country music from the beginning. But if the phrase conjures any specific journey, it’s the Carters’ trip to town in the summer of 1927. In Bristol, a bustling Appalachian community that straddles the Tennessee and Virginia border, the Carters met Ralph Peer, an artist and repertoire man for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Peer had been communicating with the family patriarch, A.P. Carter, since the spring, and he’d scheduled appointments with several other area acts, including fiddle player Blind Alfred Reed, a populist proselytizer eager to make a living with his music, and autoharp innovator Ernest “Pop” Stoneman.

Other mostly unknown regional musicians came to try their luck—the future “Singing Brakeman,” Jimmie Rodgers, among them—lured in part by a story Peer had placed in the paper that revealed Stoneman was earning thousands of dollars a year in royalties. During the last week of July and the first week of August, Peer recorded 19 acts that today offer a revealing and influential time capsule of pre-Depression era country music. Standouts included the stirring gospel balladry of big-voiced Alfred G. Karnes, the state-of-the-art picking of the Tenneva Ramblers (who’d just prompted Rodgers to embark on a solo career by kicking him out of the band), the stark and startling country-blues of Kentuckian B.F. Shelton and the muscular Southern gospel harmonies of the Alcoa Quartet. The Bristol sessions were, legend has it, the birth of modern country music.

Indeed, when people inquire today of country’s future, the Bristol sessions are normally cited as the original link in the chain. Yet Peer’s expedition was hardly country music’s Big Bang. By the time Rodgers, “the Father of Country Music,” showed up in Bristol, Pop Stoneman had released more than 100 sides—not a few of them for Peer. Many of the developments traced to the sessions didn’t so much emerge at Bristol as gain momentum there. The subordination of the stringband by vocalists (much as the MC would later supersede the DJ in hip-hop) was likely inevitable by the time Peer scored big with Rodgers and the Carters, as was the increasingly celebrity-driven culture that made them stars. Likewise, Peer’s profit-driven brainstorm—“the business of recording copyrights”—was one he’d already divined before his Bristol “discoveries” set him down the road to riches.

In other words, reputation aside, the Bristol sessions may not be “the single most important event in the history of country music” (as Johnny Cash, hardly a disinterested observer, once proclaimed). Equally persuasive cases could be made for Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1923 Atlanta recordings, which resulted in country’s first commercial release (“The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”) and tipped off Peer to the hillbilly market in the first place. Or for Elvis Presley’s explosive first session at Sun, which initiated a chain reaction that reverberates yet on country radio. Or even for the Carters’ follow-up date in Camden, N.J., where the trio cut both “Wildwood Flower” and “Keep on the Sunny Side”—each a classic-to-be and each popular enough to crack the era’s pop charts. Peer’s famous two weeks have overshadowed other deserving chapters of the country music story, a development that historian Charles Wolfe refers to as “The Bristol Syndrome.”

None of which is to suggest that the Bristol sessions weren’t extremely important, only that their relevance for contemporary musicians and fans is mostly symbolic. The Bristol sessions remain a rich and perpetually inspiring repository of country music’s core values. Its musical values, certainly, but even more essential may be many of the meanings and ideas, to paint with far too broad a brush, that the musicians at Bristol brought with them when they came down from their respective mountains. A belief in powers greater than ourselves, for one thing—or, put another way, a humility born of an intimacy with life’s built-in limitations; a deep awareness (as the Carters would later sing) that life forever arrives with two sides—one dark and stormy, the other bright and sunny; and a uniquely Southern, working-class desire to remain aligned with one’s people and place, combined with a universal passion to forge a better life. (As soon as A.P. and Sara Carter received their first big royalty check, they bought a new house farther down the mountain—and in town, what there was of it.)