How The Birthplace Of Country
Music Lost Out To Nashville

The roots are deep and strong. Country music's first stars -- Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family -- both recorded in Bristol as early as 1927. So how come Bristol isn't Nashville?

STORY AND COLOR PHOTOS BY JOE TENNIS

Ralph Peer, a record producer from New York City and a pioneer of recording black folk and blues singers, arrived in Bristol, Va., in 1927 with a goal to advance the fledging "hillbilly" records scene -- initiated just a few months earlier when the the Victor Talking Machine Co. released a single by Delaney, Ark., fiddle player Eck Robertson.

Nobody was calling it "country music." But by 1927, recording engineers for a handful of labels were scrambling to record "hillbilly music," often conducting field recording sessions. Peer -- then working for Victor -- announced he would record local talent in July and August in Bristol.

Choosing Bristol -- a thriving railroad town situated on the Tennessee-Virginia line -- happened as the result of a tip from one of Peer's established recording artists, Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, a former carpenter who grew up in a log cabin in the Virginia mountains near Galax, about 65 miles from Bristol.

For Peer, the important thing in making this trip was to find more talent like Stoneman's. Turns out, Peer would do more than that: He would discover country music's first two stars -- Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Both acts were unknowns when they wandered, seperately, to Bristol that summer.

Recording locally for an engineer like Peer -- instead of saving for a traintrip to a New York City studio -- was an "unheard-of venture," remembers Janette Carter, the youngest of A.P. and Sara Carter's three children.

In later days, Bristol would spawn more stars -- as the hometown of Tennessee Ernie Ford; as the place where pop singer and country songwriter Dave Loggins learned to write songs; and where one of today's new-country stars, Kenny Chesney, first used a recording studio with a pair of musicians who would later join the Grammy-winning bluegrass group Alison Krauss & Union Station.

Still, despite the seeds planted, this industrial town surrounded by mountains -- best known today, perhaps, as the home of the 130,000-seat Bristol Motor Speedway -- shares little, if any, of the country music glory belonging to Music City in Nashville. Much less a country music industry.

"If the Carter Family had done some work here in Bristol that -- in its time -- had achieved success like Alison Krauss and Tennessee Ernie Ford, you may have had a blossoming musical metropolis," guesses Dave Loggins, who grew up in Bristol but now lives near Nashville.

"If that had been the case," Loggins says, "I could still be here."

Picture Peer as the delivery doctor at what Bristol now calls itself -- the Birthplace of Country Music.

Before Peer discovered the Carters and Rodgers in Bristol, "hillbilly music" recordings -- the sounds of fiddle players and performers of string-band music -- existed in what you might simply call country music in embryonic form.

It was Rodgers -- a wild-living former railroad worker from Meridian, Miss. -- who gave country its honky tonk edge.

It was the Carters -- a simple, home-oriented family from rural America -- who provided country music with the roots of carefully crafted compositions, a sense of harmony and Maybelle Carter's widely imitated "chicken-scratch" guitar style.

Peer set up microphones at a vacant hat warehouse at the long-gone Taylor-Christian building on the Tennessee side of State Street. And he recorded a long-list of musicians over a two-week period -- including The Bull Mountain Moonshiners and Henry Whitter.

On August 1, 1927, the first day the Carters recorded with Peer, the trio of musicians barely made it to Bristol: Borrowing Maybelle's husband Eck's car, they had a flat tire on the way.

Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter -- a drifter with all sorts of occupations -- guided the Carter Family trio consisting of himself on vocals, his wife Sara playing autoharp and his sister-in-law Maybelle (also Sara's cousin) playing guitar. The Carter Family's renditions of hymns, old-time Appalachian music -- and, eventually, their original songs -- became a popular local act, performing at schools and churches as early as 1926.

In later years, even as the group scored big hits, like 1928's million-selling "Wildwood Flower," the Carters never ventured far from their Clinch Mountain homes to make appearances. Always dignified in publicity shots -- wearing their Sunday best and holding instruments -- this First Family of Country Music remained intact until 1943, surviving A.P. and Sara's divorce in 1936 and a temporary move to Del Rio, Texas, to star on a radio show in 1938.

Jimmie Rodgers, arriving from Asheville, N.C., near the end of the sessions, on August 4, "didn't have much material ready that was suitable for recording, so we could only make two selections at that time," Peer said during a 1953 interview with reporter Grant Turner in Meridian, Miss.

One, called "Soldier's Sweetheart," was an original ballad written in reference to World War I. The second -- one Rodgers didn't write -- featured the singer's trademark yodel on "Sleep, Baby, Sleep."

Peer remembered Rodgers' recordings as "rather outstandingŠ I thought it would take, so we put it on the market right away. The owners then told us that we made a good guess because that was the top record for some time to come."

On the road since running away to join a medicine show at age 13, Rodgers, then 29, left Bristol kicking and screaming -- as much as the tuberculosis eating his frail body would allow. Eventually regarded as the Father of Country Music, he yodeled his way into America's living rooms on radio and with million-selling records like "Blue Yodel (T For Texas)" and "Brakeman's Blues," until his early death in 1933.

The discovery of Rodgers and the Carters -- who would not meet each other until 1931 -- prompted Peer's return to Bristol for more field sessions in 1928.

But no recording industry grew here.

Today, only one studio, Classic Recording, stands in downtown Bristol. Located at 13 Moore Street, it's about two blocks from the site where Peer first recorded the Carters. And, perhaps ironically, the owners are Carter Family relatives -- including Harold "Bugs" Cornett, a great-nephew of A.P. Carter.

Classic is the place where Kenny Chesney -- a recent chart-topping country singer from Luttrell, Tenn. -- first recorded music, in 1990, "with a bluegrass flavor," remembers former owner Bandy Browlee.

Chesney sold 1,000 copies of his nine songs on cassettes while he was a student at East Tennessee State University in nearby Johnson City. And someday, Chesney says, those Bristol sessions could see a national release.

"That would reflect my beginning," he says.

In Middle Tennessee, where Chesney and other country stars of his generation now regularly make records, the success of the live radio show "The Grand Ole Opry" -- on the air since 1925 -- eventually lured the country music recording industry to Nashville, not Bristol.

Beginning in 1937, however, one Bristol radio station would launch the career of another star -- this one destined to become Bristol's brightest.

His name was Ernest Jennings Ford. And he grew up attending Bristol's Anderson Street Methodist Church, playing trombone in the Bristol Tennessee High School Band.

At 1223 Anderson Street -- in a working class neighborhood two blocks from the car lots, restaurants and shops of Bristol's busy State Street -- stands his humble birthplace, a simple white house where Ford lived until age six.

While still a teenager, Ford became an announcer at WOPI-AM's State Street studios. Leaving Bristol for California, soon after a stint in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Ford's radio career on the CBS and ABC radio networks would lead to a singing career spanning country, rockabilly, gospel and pop records.

Then known as Tennessee Ernie Ford, his 1955 hit, "Sixteen Tons," would eventually sell 20 million copies and help Ford land his own TV show and lifelong status as an internationally-known celebrity with a penchant for homespun humor.

All along, he saluted Bristol as his hometown.

"That was a big deal -- that he was from Bristol," says Dave Loggins. "If anything, Tennessee Ernie Ford would make somebody like me feel like it was possible."

Born in nearby Mountain City, Tenn., on November 10, 1947, Loggins moved to Bristol at age eight. By the 1950s, while Ford made headlines, little mention was then made of the Carters, Loggins says.

"Their music, a time or two, just about died out," Janette Carter concedes. "Then, when Daddy died, that's when they realized what it was -- what it was about."

That was 1960 -- about the time folk music began creeping into pop culture. Musicians noted the Carter sound as not only a cornerstone of country music but also the roots of bluegrass and an influence in folk.

In those years of the early '60s, the folk sounds of Bob Dylan and Donovan began influencing the teen-aged Loggins, who graduated Bristol Virginia High School in 1965. Loggins strummed a guitar he bought at a shop on Bristol's State Street and studied how songs were written.

But he didn't consider music a career option. For a while, Loggins worked as a drafter while attending East Tennessee State University.

Quitting college, Loggins took off for Nashville to live with his brother. One of the first songs he wrote, "Pieces of April," became his career breakthrough when later recorded by Three Dog Night.

Still wanting to make a name for himself as a performer, Loggins turned his music career in another direction. In 1972, he toured with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band -- including stops at clubs in Boston, Denver and Los Angeles. Loggins combined that road experience into "Please Come to Boston," a folksy song he recorded in 1973 on Epic Records. A huge pop hit, it told the story of a "rambling boy" who wouldn't settle down and won Loggins a Grammy nomination.

After a series of albums on the Vanguard and Epic record labels in the 1970s, Loggins turned back to songwriting -- and hit paydirt in the 1980s when songs he wrote or co-wrote, including "Roll On, 18 Wheeler," "She and I" and "40 Hour Week," became standards for country superstars Alabama.

As a performer, Loggins -- with singer Anne Murray -- later won the Country Music Association's Vocal Duo of the Year Award in 1985 for "Nobody Loves Me Like You Do." As a writer or co-writer, his songs -- including Wynonna's "She Is His Only Need" and Restless Heart's "Fast Moving Train" -- have earned Loggins not only a place in the Nashville Songwriters Association International's Hall of Fame but also a track record of 20 number-one hits.

While Loggins does not trace his own influences directly to the Carters, a latter-day version of the Carter Family did record one of his songs, "My Father's Fiddle."

"That's the only connection we have," he laughs. "That might be a little ironic -- that they liked my song."

Back in Bristol, where Loggins' mother Pauline still resides, the city's version of Mount Rushmore is a billboard-size wall mural -- artist Tim White's interpretation of the 1927 recording sessions on the side of the Lark Amusements building on State Street. Boldly, the mural proclaims "BRISTOL, TENN-VA./BIRTHPLACE/COUNTRY MUSIC" and depicts the faces of Peer, the Carter Family and the Stonemans plus Jimmie Rodgers giving a double thumbs-up salute.

Tuesday nights in the summertime, groups -- some amateurs, some professionals -- gather to play free shows at the mural, practicing old-time bluegrass and Appalachian music.

Also on State Street, about three blocks away, stands the Paramount Center for the Arts, a 756-seat theater -- built as a movie house in 1931 by the Paramount Pictures Co. -- and later restored and reopened in 1991 with a gala celebration featuring Tennessee Ernie Ford performing at his last hometown show before his death in Reston, Va., that same year.

Ford is remembered here: A granite star -- dedicated in late 1996 -- bears his name as a permanent part of the sidewalk fronting the Paramount.

The Carters, Stonemans and Rodgers are remembered here, too: The Paramount is now often used for concerts sponsored by the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance, a group dedicated to toasting Bristol's place in music history. A 1997 show, celebrating the 70th anniversary of Peer's Bristol sessions, starred members of the Carter and Stoneman families.

Outside, on State Street, the flashing lights of the Paramount marquee stands about a block from the city's mansize Country Music Monument. For Bristol -- and the modern country music world -- that monument marks the spot where it all began, when a man named Ralph Peer came to these mountains looking for music in the 1920s.