Southwest Virginia's Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, runs from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Coalfields region through the Appalachian Mountains and connects historic and contemporary music venues, musicians, and fretted instrument makers in a region that, because of historical isolation, preserved strong musical traditions through families and community. Old time mountain music, bluegrass, and gospel are heard year-round in venues, festivals, weekly concerts, radio shows, jam sessions, and museums devoted to the area's musical heritage. In Bristol, the Victor Talking Machine Company sent a portable studio in 1927, and music publisher Ralph Peer advertised for traditional musicians to make recordings in the Bristol Sessions, whose test pressings included mountain string bands, gospel singers, blues artists, and vaudeville performers; among the best sellers were recordings by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. In the 1940s and 1950s, the live radio broadcast Farm and Fun Time, originating on a Bristol station and heard in five states, was linked to the development of bluegrass music, featuring performers including the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, Jim and Jesse, Mac Wiseman, and the especially popular Curly King and the Tennessee Hilltoppers, led by local singer Cecil Crusenberry, who used King as a stage name. This musical history is preserved by the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance near State Street, where Virginia and Tennessee meet in the middle of the street; State Street also has hosted a weekly jam session at the Star Barbershop for the past 50 years and is home to the Paramount Center for Arts, a historic theater presenting cultural events and performances.
