America's commercial country music began in a cotton mill in Fries in 1923, when mill hand Henry Whitter traveled to New York and recorded the hit "The Wreck of the Old '97." In 1924, a second mill hand, Ernest V. Stoneman, went north to record, and within months they were followed by two bands assembled by singer Kelly Harrell and banjoist John Rector, the Hill Billies. By 1926, these four mill hands had recordings issued on ten major labels. In 1935, a brilliant and influential mill band, the Patton Brothers, was assembled with fiddler Glen Neaves, brothers Bill and Everett Patton, and their half-brother, three-finger banjoist Raymond Swinney, and this group evolved into Neaves' Grayson County Boys, whose first recordings came in 1941 for the Library of Congress. Other Fries musicians included the Zeedees, oldtime banjoist and fiddler Glenn Pap Smith, innovative bluegrass banjoist Jimmy Arnold, and ballad singer Evelyn Farmer. The mill stood on the bank of the New River from 1901 until 2005.