Editor's Note: This feature originally ran in the Fall-Winter 2018 "Innovate" issue of No Depression. In honor of the 10th anniversary of Radio Bristol's flagship program, "Farm and Fun Time," we've decided to share the story online now. Additionally, during their annual fund drive (June 18-19, 2025), Radio Bristol is releasing a limited-edition vinyl compilation — available only to donors — that features live and previously unreleased performances from artists like Sierra Ferrell, S.G. Goodman, Amy Ray, Willie Watson, and more. Learn more about the record and donate to get it here.
The Birthplace of Country Music Museum opened in the summer of 2014 in the border town of Bristol, where State Street is literally the state line between Tennessee and Virginia. Memorialized by Steve Earle in his bluegrass song “Carrie Brown,” Bristol allows for an outlaw shootout to result in the lyric, “I shot him in Virginia and he died in Tennessee.” More famously, Bristol is the site where RCA Records talent scout Ralph Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, and a host of others in what would eventually become known as The Bristol Sessions. Hoping to capitalize on early success in the emergent market for “hillbilly” recordings, Peer sought a location where musicians could come to him instead of him tracking them down throughout the Appalachian region.
In the 1920s, hillbilly records had made early impressions — like when Peer recorded a few tracks of Fiddlin’ John Carson in Atlanta, selling the 78s back to the local audiences — but until that summer in 1927, there hadn’t been any major recording ventures into the southern Appalachian Mountains. Yet, the artists recorded during those foundational weeks in Bristol went on to become household names, thereby kickstarting an industry that migrated from Bristol to Johnson City and Knoxville, Tennessee, years before settling into Nashville.
Nearly everything that followed in the country music industry would point back to the success and influence of those early Bristol recordings, leading country music scholar Nolan Porterfield to declare them the "Big Bang of Country Music." The Birthplace of Country Music Museum seeks not only to inform visitors about these legendary recording sessions from 1927, but also to showcase the effect they've had, and continue to have on country music through the past century.
