Bristol Sessions, July 1927: The Big Bang of Country Music

Bristol sits on the Tennessee-Virginia state line. The boundary runs down the middle of State Street, so that a person walking along the sidewalk on the east side is in Virginia and a person on the west side is in Tennessee. In late July of nineteen twenty-seven, a talent scout for Victor Records named Ralph Peer set up recording equipment in a building on State Street and began auditioning local musicians.

The sessions ran from July twenty-fifth through August fifth. Peer had done sessions like this before in other cities, capturing regional musical traditions for the phonograph market. What happened in Bristol that summer turned out to be different. Over those twelve days, he recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family for the first time, along with a number of other performers.

The Carter Family, from the Virginia side of the mountains, sang in close harmony and recorded songs that would circulate for decades. Jimmie Rodgers, from Mississippi, came in on the Tennessee side on August fourth, after the Carter Family had already recorded. He was paid fifty dollars for each side he recorded. He recorded two sides. One of them was a song called the Soldier's Sweetheart. The other would eventually become the template for what he called the blue yodel, a form he would develop and record in variations for the next six years.

Those six years were all he had. Rodgers had tuberculosis, and he knew it, and he recorded as fast as he could, traveling to studios and making session after session while his health held. He died in May of nineteen thirty-three in New York City, thirty-five years old, two days after completing his final recording session. He had enough energy to get to the studio but not enough to make it home.

What Peer captured in Bristol in those twelve days is now called the Big Bang of Country Music. The two acts he recorded there established the commercial form that Nashville would spend the next hundred years refining and selling to the world.