From the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Coalfields region, southwest Virginia has long sustained a strong musical legacy through historic and contemporary venues, musicians, and fretted instrument makers, with old time mountain music, bluegrass, and gospel passed down through musical families and celebrated through museums, festivals, concerts, radio shows, and jam sessions along The Crooked Road. In 1800, when the nation's population was two million, 10,000 people passed each year through Abingdon on their way south, southwest, and to the heartland, making it the first, busiest, and most important of America's frontier towns, and one-fourth of all Americans have an ancestor who came here, most of them on foot. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, native son Robert Porterfield created Barter Theatre there, now the State Theatre of Virginia. Abingdon also stands within a region where much of America's music was invented by combining English, German, Scots-Irish, and African elements into sounds shaped by a Virginia experience, preserved by musical communities that included the Chestnut Grove Quartet and Hobart Smith, and today the town also offers cultural attractions such as the William King Regional Arts Center, the Virginia Highlands Festival, crafts outlets, and the Virginia Creeper Trail.
