Sam Kimball’s tour of the Birthplace of Country Music Museum was like visiting her granny’s house.“I know all of this,” Kimball said, as she and her husband, Michael, took in the museum’s interactive exhibits and listened to old country songs through headphones. The couple lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and they returned to Bristol for a memorial service to celebrate Sam’s late father’s life, which gave them the chance to visit the museum for the first time.Even though Sam wouldn’t reveal her age, hearing old country songs and seeing pictures of classic country music stars such as Tennessee Ernie Ford and Southwest Virginia’s Carter Family struck a chord in her heart. She was transported back to the 1980s, when her grandmother sang and played music while tending to the grandbabies and taking them to church.“I know all these songs. I was singing them all. ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ … ‘Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb.’ They all came flooding back. I remember being in the church pews as we sang those songs.”She stopped speaking as tears swelled.“They’re good tears,” she said.René Rodgers has heard these kinds of stories many times. As the museum’s head curator, she has a front-row seat to the sentimental impact that old country songs can have on people. “Being a music museum, one of the things that we found is that so many of our visitors have an emotional reaction to the museum, because music is emotional,” Rodgers said during a recent interview inside the museum. “And they will either hear a song that they remember their grandma loved, or they’ll remember that their best friend, who passed away last year, or they themselves will have a song that means something to them, and they’ll tell us those stories.”Bristol, a city that straddles the Virginia and Tennessee border with State Street running right down the middle, has long claimed to be the birthplace of country music. The mountainous region echoes with songs passed down through generations like an heirloom quilt, played by musicians who often learned tunes or how to play instruments directly from other family members and neighbors. In the summer of 1927, Bristol became the center of the country music universe, when Ralph Peer, a music producer and talent scout from New York, came to town hoping to record regional musicians for the Victor Talking Machine Co.What happened during those two weeks is often called the “big bang of country music.” Peer’s recordings of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, the Stonemans and 16 other acts who performed during “The Bristol Sessions” became big sellers nationwide and helped establish rural folk music as a commercial industry.In fact, Congress passed a resolution in 1998 that recognized “the cities of Bristol, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia, as the birthplace of Country Music, a style of music which has enjoyed broad commercial success in the United States and throughout much of the world.”Because of what happened here, Bristol is home to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, a 25-year-old showcase that started in an empty store inside the Bristol Mall and is now housed in a historic building downtown, just hollering distance from where the Bristol Sessions happened.In August, the museum celebrated the 10th anniversary of its downtown home, a two-story, hundred-year-old, 24,000-square-foot brick structure that was once a car dealership. The museum is filled with exhibits, instruments, photographs and recordings that tell not only the story of the 1927 recordings (as well as another session that happened in 1928) but also chronicle the musical legacy of the Virginia and Tennessee hills.“We’re helping to preserve the important music history of Bristol and the surrounding region, making sure that future generations will have access to that story and to the important elements of that story,” said Rodgers, the museum curator who is no relation to Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman” from Meridian, Mississippi, who was a breakout star of the 1928 sessions.The museum attracted about 30,000 visitors in 2023, said Charlene Baker, the museum’s communications manager, which was a significant increase from 2022 as the venue still recovers from visitation declines suffered during the pandemic. Rodgers said that the museum has not yet reached its pre-pandemic admissions peak of about 35,000 set in 2019, but the place is still financially strong and viable.This week, the museum will get a tourism boost when the annual Rhythm & Roots Reunion musical festival spreads across downtown and brings up to 40,000 fans to hear nearly 100 rock, country and roots music acts, headlined by the likes of the Wallflowers, 49 Winchester (local heroes from nearby Castlewood), Sam Bush, Molly Tuttle, the SteelDrivers and Ashley McBryde. The Birthplace of Country Music nonprofit runs both the museum and the festival, as well as Radio Bristol, a network of online and over-the-air radio stations.The museum is one of the major venues along The Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, a state-sponsored initiative that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.“It’s here to stay,” Baker said of the museum’s continued viability downtown.* * *The Birthplace of Country Music Museum recently marked 10 years at its current location in downtown Bristol. The museum encompasses 24,000 square feet of exhibit space and plans to expand into an adjacent building. Photo by Ralph Berrier Jr.Barry Tilden didn’t know anything about Bristol’s musical claims to fame — and he grew up here.Tilden and his wife, Cindy, visited the museum in late August while in town for a 50th high school reunion. Now living in Richland, Washington, Tilden said he attended a few fiddlers conventions as a teenager in Bristol, but he didn’t know the city’s music history until about 2001, which was the same year Rhythm & Roots Reunion began.“I had never heard Bristol was the birthplace,” said Tilden, who saw mentions of the Bristol Sessions at the sprawling Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in the early 2000s.“I had been to fiddlers conventions out in the country, and some other informal gatherings, but I didn’t listen to country music until later,” he said. “Now, I want to circle back around here to make sure I didn’t miss anything [in the museum]. It’s very impressive.”Cindy Tilden did know many of the acts and performers in the exhibits, having grown up in Statesville, North Carolina, in a household where country music was often played and sung, once again demonstrating that solid connection between music and family.“My mother was a huge fan of the Carters when I was growing up,” she said. “This is just a great museum.”Rodgers said that the museum has nearly 10,000 items in its collection, with only a fraction displayed at any given time. The museum is now raising money to expand next door into an empty building that could give it another 16,000 square feet of exhibit space, she said.Currently, a new exhibit called “Songwriter Musician” showcases the photographs of Ed Rode, whose portraits and candid pictures of Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Taylor Swift, Doc Watson, Keb Mo, Jelly Roll and dozens of other famous performers are on display through Dec. 31.The museum currently showcases vintage instruments, which include a 1928 Martin guitar that was owned by Jimmie Rodgers, whose crooning, yodeling style made him the archetype for male country singers who followed. An exhibit showcases a banjo once owned by bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs, as well as another banjo played by Ralph Stanley, the bluegrass legend from Dickenson County who rose to fame alongside his brother, Carter.The museum doesn’t just house vestiges of music history; many exhibits include interactive features that allow visitors to not only listen to recordings, but to use a digital mixing board to control the volume of each instrument and voice. A soundproof recording booth offers the chance to sing along with contemporary versions of old songs recorded during the Bristol Sessions. Numerous touchscreens and headphones afford visitors the chance to hear original recordings, such as Rodgers’ famous yodel during “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” or the barreling locomotive-style harmonica of El Watson’s “Narrow Gauge Blues.”A visit to the museum begins with the short introductory film, “Bound to Bristol,” narrated by John Carter Cash, the son of music legends Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. June’s mother, Maybelle Carter, played guitar and sang with her brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Alvin Pleasant “A.P.” and Sara Carter, during the Bristol Sessions, birthing a musical family legacy that continues today. Johnny Cash once described the Bristol Sessions as “the single most important event in the history of country music.”The exhibits include a collection of recording devices and record players, machines that play old 78 rpm records and even recordings made on wax cylinders designed by Thomas Edison. Other exhibits describe the importance of local radio stations in spreading country music to the masses, and the ways in which churches and workplaces such as mills, farms and railroads influenced the music.“I would argue that you don’t need to be a country music fan to be interested in what’s in our museum,” said Rodgers, the curator, “because of the history and the technology that went along with it. You don’t need to love the music to think the story is interesting.”* * *René Rodgers, head curator of the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, gives a brief tour of the “Songwriter Musician” special exhibit of photographs on display through Dec. 31. Photo by Ralph Berrier Jr.To be clear, country musicians were making records before the Bristol Sessions.Texas fiddler Alexander “Eck” Roberston made what is considered the first country record in 1922, when he and accompanist Henry Gilliland journeyed to New York City to record a few old fiddle tunes for the Victor Talking Machine Co., the ancestor of what became RCA Records. Southwest Virginia artists such as Ernest “Pop” Stoneman and Henry Whitter, both from the Grayson County mill town of Fries, had made records. However, performers had to travel to New York to record, which limited the chances for many rural performers to make records.In 1923, Peer, the record producer and talent scout, was persuaded to travel to Atlanta to record Fiddlin’ John Carson, a 55-year-old fiddler and singer who cut versions of old-timey numbers “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow.” Peer later described Carson’s recordings as “awful” (in fact, he called them “pluperfect awful,” which means really, really awful), but a funny thing happened: The record’s 500 copies sold out within weeks. A market existed for this kind of rural, folksy, “hillbilly music,” as it would be called.Stoneman convinced Peer to bring his recording gear to the Appalachian Mountains, where musicians and performers flourished like rhododendron. Peer settled on Bristol because it was a decent-sized city surrounded by countryside and it had good rail service. From July 25 until Aug. 5, 1927, Peer, his wife, Anita, and a pair of engineers set up a makeshift recording studio inside the Taylor-Christian Hat Co. on the Tennessee side of State Street. Then they waited for performers to show up.Newspaper advertisements informed folks that the record company would pay $50 per song, which brought musicians flowing from the countryside. People came to Bristol by bus, train, automobile and even horse-drawn buggies to audition for Peer.By the end of the two weeks, 19 acts had recorded 76 songs. The Carters and Jimmie Rodgers were among the last acts to record, and Peer knew immediately he had hits on his hands. The Carters arrived from nearby Scott County, delayed by flat tires suffered along the rutted roads. Maybelle was 18 years old and eight months pregnant as she picked guitar and sang. When Peer heard Sara’s voice rise above the rest of the trio, “I knew it was going to be wonderful,” he later said.The Carters would go on to make and sell many records, move to Texas to perform on the radio, and endure years of personal strife and relationship drama to become the first family of country music. Peer himself started his own publishing company, which would license songs, pay royalties and help establish the business model for the recording industry. His company, Peermusic, is still in business and is owned and managed by his descendants.Even if country music and hillbilly performers already existed before 1927, Bristol is at least the birthplace of the country music business.Because performers came from counties and towns throughout the mountains, even drawing people from Floyd and Bedford counties, the Bristol Sessions were significant for the entire Southwest Virginia region, said Tyler Hughes, the Crooked Road’s executive director.“Families from the coalfields to the eastern part of Southwest Virginia all came to Bristol,” Hughes said. “It’s not just Bristol that can adopt the ‘birthplace of country music’ title. The entire Southwest Virginia region can carry that mantle.”Little attention was paid to Bristol’s music history for decades, until bluegrass musician, performer and artist Tim White painted a large mural that honored the Carters, Rodgers and the Stonemans along State Street in 1986. Later, White (currently the host of “Song of the Mountains,” the bluegrass concert show from the Lincoln Theatre in Marion that airs on PBS stations) and others formed the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance, which helped shepherd the congressional resolution in 1998 that officially sanctioned Bristol as the site of country’s big bang. A year later, the museum opened in the mall.The museum partnered with the Smithsonian Institute, which helped it grow and obtain artifacts. The alliance later split, with one group taking over the museum and eventually making the move downtown. Tennessee businessman and developer Steve Johnson donated the current museum building to the group, and it took nearly a decade before the $11 million project opened its doors in 2014.By then, the museum, Rhythm & Roots and Radio Bristol had merged beneath the Birthplace of Country Music umbrella.The museum’s annual operating budget is right at $1 million, Rodgers said, with paid admissions providing just 27% of operating income. According to the most recent tax filings available online from 2022, the Birthplace of Country Music nonprofit spends about $2.6 million annually, which includes nearly $1.4 million dedicated to the festival.The museum’s current “Bristol Sessions Super Raffle VI” offers $250,000 in prizes, which include cars, campers, motorcycles, Italian vacations and other valuable merchandise at a cost of $100 per raffle ticket. The museum also attracts school groups, and its educational outreach programs train teachers in how to integrate the museum and its mission into lesson plans.The museum was hit hard by the pandemic, Rodgers said, which came just months after Ken Burns’ “Country Music” PBS documentary had boosted visits to the museum.“We’ve been slowly building back up,” Rodgers said. “We’re getting bus tours again. We’re getting more school groups again. 2023 was a good year.”Data that shows the museum’s impact on local tourism and the economy is difficult to come by. The last economic impact report that measured Rhythm & Roots Reunion’s effects came in 2015 and reported that the festival brought $16 million annually to the region. The Crooked Road is planning its own economic impact report for the entire route from Franklin County through coal country, said Hughes, the executive director.“The writing is on the wall about the economic opportunity brought by taking advantage of the culture in our region,” Hughes said.Anecdotally, the music culture has spawned some visible impacts. Two independent hotels have opened downtown, The Bristol Hotel, which is right next door to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, and The Sessions Hotel, which includes music-themed rooms and accommodations.As Rhythm & Roots Reunion plays out for the 23rd time (the 2020 event was canceled during the pandemic), downtown Bristol just feels different, said Baker, the communications manager who grew up in Bristol, Tennessee, and who worked for the festival in its early years.“I can tell you that when the Rhythm & Roots Reunion started in 2001, at that time most of the buildings downtown were either empty or in disrepair,” Baker said. “Mall culture had driven everybody out of downtown. The music festival was able to draw people downtown and show the community members a music culture they didn’t know existed. It created a music tourism market that wasn’t here.”Still, the museum makes as much of an emotional impact as economic impact, Rodgers said.“It goes beyond the usual purpose of a museum which is to engage your mind,” she said. “It’s a place to come to engage your emotions and engage your memories.”The post For quarter-century, Bristol museum has helped visitors remember country music’s roots — and their own appeared first on Cardinal News.