Carroll County has produced traditional musicians for generations, with legendary musical families including the Stonemans, Meyers, Meltons, and Edmonds living there since the late colonial period. The Coal Creek area has yielded many talented musicians and continues to do so. Ernest V. ‘Pop’ Stoneman was the first musician from Carroll County to make commercial recordings in New York in 1924, and his song ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’ became very popular and is still recorded by contemporary bands. Tony Alderman of Carroll County was a founding member of The Hill Billies, the 1920s radio and vaudeville band that gave hillbilly music its name; the band was the subject of the first country music film in 1928 and was marketed with Al Jolson’s film ‘The Singing Fool.’ Dorothy Quesenberry Rorick of Dugspur, a fiddler, banjoist, and singer, was a fixture at area fiddlers conventions for a generation. Carroll County also has many weekly jam sessions and other live performances and is home to the Blue Ridge Music Center, a museum and performance venue at milepost 213 of the Blue Ridge Parkway. A March 1912 shootout at the Carroll County Courthouse in Hillsville that resulted in five deaths inspired two ballads about Floyd and Claude Allen, and the event is interpreted at the Carroll County Historical Museum in the historic courthouse. The county is also part of The Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, a route through southwest Virginia’s historic and contemporary music venues, musicians, and instrument makers where old time mountain music, bluegrass, and gospel continue through festivals, concerts, radio shows, jam sessions, and museums.