See this article written by Abigail Tucker for Smithsonian Magazine, September, 2011 about her Crooked Road Music Trail Tour in Southwest, Virginia.

A Musical Tour Along the Crooked Road Grab a partner. Bluegrass and country tunes that tell America's story are all the rage in hilly southern Virginia By Abigail Tucker Photographs by Susana Raab Smithsonian magazine, September 2011 Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/A-Musical-Tour-Along-the-Crooked-Road.html#ixzz1ViS07W5v "Two hundred years later, the country music known as “old-time� belongs to anyone who plays it. On my first Friday night in town, I stopped by the Willis Gap Community Center in Ararat, Virginia, not far from where Diabate had performed, for a jam session. The place was nothing fancy: fluorescent lights, linoleum floors, a snack bar serving hot dogs and hot coffee. A dozen musicians sat in a circle of folding chairs, holding banjos and fiddles but also mandolins, dobros (a type of resonator guitar), basses and other instruments that have been added to the country mix since the Civil War. A small crowd looked on. Each musician selected a favorite tune for the group to play: old-time, gospel or bluegrass, a newer country style related to old-time, but with a bigger, bossier banjo sound. An elderly man with slicked-back hair, a string tie and red roses embroidered on his shirt sang “Way Down in the Blue Ridge Mountains.� A harmonica player blew like a Category 5 hurricane. Even the hot-dog chef briefly escaped the kitchen to belt out “Take Your Burden to the Lord� in a rough-hewn but lovely voice. Flatfoot dancers stomped the rhythm in the center of the room. Most claimed to have acquired the music through their DNA—they felt they’d been born knowing how to tune a banjo. “I guess everybody learned by singing in church,� said singer Mary Dellenback Hill. “None of us had lessons.� Of course, they did have maestro uncles and grandfathers who’d improvise with them for hours, and perhaps fewer distractions than the average American child today. Some of the older musicians performing that night had been born into a world straight out of a country song, where horses still plowed steep hillsides, mothers scalded dandelion greens for dinner and battery-operated radios were the only hope of hearing the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville, because electricity didn’t come to parts of the Blue Ridge until the 1950s. Poverty only increased the children’s intimacy with the music, as some learned to carve their own instruments from local hardwoods, especially red spruce, which gives the best tone. On lazy summer afternoons, fledgling pickers didn’t need a stage to perform—then as now, a front porch or even a pool of shade would do." Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/A-Musical-Tour-Along-the-Crooked-Road.html#ixzz1ViRmgFPQ