The Bristol Sessions: Eleven Days That Launched Country Music

State Street in Bristol runs directly along the state line between Tennessee and Virginia. On one side of the street you are in one state. On the other side you are in another. In late July of nineteen twenty-seven, a talent scout named Ralph Peer set up a portable recording studio in a vacant building on that street and placed an advertisement in the local newspaper offering to record local musicians for the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Over twelve days, from July twenty-fifth through August fifth, Peer recorded about twenty performers and groups. Most of them are footnotes. Two of them changed American music.

The Carter Family, consisting of Alvin Pleasant Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle, came from Maces Spring, Virginia, about twenty-five miles away. They had never recorded before. Their sound was built on close harmonies, on the parlor and church singing of the Scots-Irish mountain communities where they had grown up, and on guitar technique that Maybelle Carter developed to let the melody carry through a chord. Their first recordings, 'Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow' and 'Single Girl, Married Girl,' were simple, precise, and unlike anything that had been commercially recorded before.

Jimmie Rodgers came from Meridian, Mississippi, and had arrived in Bristol after a train journey with his band, only to discover that his band had dissolved the night before the session. He recorded alone. His sound was built on a blue yodel borrowed partly from African American field-hand singing, a technique no country-music singer had commercially recorded. He recorded both 'Sleep, Baby, Sleep' and 'The Soldier's Sweetheart' on the same day, near the end of the sessions.

Music historians call the Bristol Sessions the Big Bang of country music. The Carter Family's harmonies became one founding tradition. Rodgers's blue yodel became the other. Neither had recorded before July of nineteen twenty-seven. Rodgers died of tuberculosis six years later, at thirty-five. The Carter Family's recordings are still in print.