The Crooked Road’s Mountains of Music Homecoming is a nine-day festival staged in nineteen counties and four cities across Southwest Virginia. Events range from Barter Theatre performances to canoe and snorkeling trips to tours of an alpaca farm. But at its heart, the Homecoming is about music.
The Mountains of Music Homecoming begins with a pair of concerts featuring music legends and ends nine days and thirty-two concerts later. The venues range from Breaks Interstate Park on the Virginia-Kentucky line to Harvester Performance Center in Rocky Mount. While people taking in the festival may have to do a lot of traveling, Jack Hinshelwood, executive director of the Crooked Road, says many of the performers will be staying – or returning – home.
“Some of the artists who are performing are performing right in their home – you know, it is a homecoming, after all – so they’re performing right in their home area where they first heard the music that they play and love.”
One of those artists is Ronnie Stoneman, the youngest member of the musical Stoneman Family. She will be at the Rex Theater in Galax with two other bands. Stoneman may have gained her greatest fame as a performer on Hee Haw, but she was singing and playing banjo and telling jokes with her family long before that. Her father, Pop Stoneman, had the first hillbilly record to sell a million copies.
“He was hugely influential in that early period when rural music and rural artists were first starting to get attention and to be recorded and so forth. Pop Stoneman had made trips to New York to record and ultimately, was responsible for convincing Ralph Peer to come to Bristol and have the 1927 Bristol sessions that became known as the big bang of country music.”
Jesse McReynolds’ grandfather, Charlie McReynolds, was among the performers at the Bristol session. Jim and Jesse McReynolds were one of the brother duos who turned family harmonies and mountain-rooted music into a successful recording career. Jim died in 2002, but Jesse is celebrating 51 years as a member of the Grand Ole Opry. The brothers received a National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997. That’s the highest award the nation has for traditional artists. McReynolds will share the stage at the Carter Family Fold with two other National Heritage Fellowship recipients: guitar maker and player Wayne Henderson and Frank Newsome. Newsome lines out hymns – a call and response style of singing with roots in the primitive Baptist church.
“People describe it as raising hackles on your neck or making your hair stand on end. He’s a remarkable artist in that regard and keeps alive a very important tradition for this region.”
Not every performer at the Mountains of Music Homecoming will really be coming home.
“Every year, we want to feature or present artists from somebody else’s unique musical heritage. I think that gives us all a chance to learn about other unique heritage music forms and types and in so doing can only raise our appreciation from what we have, what’s right in our own back yard. This first year, we have this incredibly dynamic group that comes from the Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada tradition.”
The band is called Coig and, according to Hinshelwood, they’re a versatile group.
“They kind of do it all: fiery fiddling; pretty amazing Cape Breton step dance; and singing in both Gaelic and English.”
The Mountains of Music Homecoming runs June 12 through June 20. Clickhere for more information.
