-[Female voice over] Nestled in the remote corner of southwest Virginia, this region captivates with its rugged landscapes, natural wonders, cultural attractions and outward ventures.

Experiences you'll only find in the heart of Appalachia.

Adventure guides available at heart of appalachia.com ♪ ♪ ♪ -[Male Narrator] Floyd Virginia, it's a one stop light town with a reputation for preserving and promoting old time music at places like the historic Floyd Country Store, now owned by Dylan and Heather Lock, who have poured their hearts into continuing the traditions of Appalachia by giving folks a place to play, sing, dance and learn at the historic Country Store.

-Well, the way I think about old time music is just the music that sort of has been played around the Blue Ridge Mountains and a lot of parts of the US, but I think about it as Southwest Virginia and sort of the Eastern Shore board, you know, I think about old time music as, like the first, rather the first music that was being played in the mountains here with fiddle and banjos, and-- I think the biggest determination for me is about, music played in community.

But I think of all time music as sort of celebratory music and not so performance-based.

So I think about it as music played for dancers and for sort of a fun celebration of life, as opposed to performance music.

I think what makes a jam interesting, I think there's a lot of layers to that.

First of all, I think that humans playing music, I think is a really fascinating thing.

I think it's one of the more interesting and fascinating things that humans do.

I think there's, like, layers of this instrument that's made with wood and wires and the tones you can get out of it, and where the wood comes from, and all that.

And then, you know, so you just start with that as a pretty fascinating thing, then playing it is really difficult and takes a lot of time and effort and energy and care.

And then you do that with other humans in a jam, and it just brings this incredible sense of community and collaboration and togetherness and all of those things about the instrument and the sounds and the people and the tunes and where they came from.

And it's just a big swirling sort of set of details and information and emotions, and it's just really awesome.

-[Narrator] Old Time jams can be found all over the region.

They're a combination of performance, learning, experience and community.

When we see it here at the store, of course, when we do our jams here at the store, they're done in a circle, you know, where everyone's facing each other.

And I think another, sort of, like beautiful, hidden, awesome thing about jams is the way humans are facing into one another.

It is like--a friend of mine, sort of, she's a hip hop scholar, and she thinks about it as the cipher, the circle, 360 degrees.

It's the dinner table, it's the drum circle, it's the board meeting room.

It's anywhere where humans are facing into each other, where they're really like, present with each other.

So that's a jam, an old time jam, a bluegrass jam, a music jam where it's a circle and you're facing each other.

I think it provides an opportunity for humans to connect with each other in a more meaningful and deep way.

So that's what we love about our jams here at the Floyd Country Store.

[applauds] -[Narrator] Jim Lloyd of Rural Retreat is a one man Encyclopedia of information on old time music, and he takes his role as musicologist and a teacher of youth very seriously, especially when he talks about the roots of old time music in America.

-Well, it was a tremendous influence on us, because everywhere you went in the 1700s, there was a fiddle player, whether it was an inn or a pub, hotel, church hanging there was fiddle player.

[chuckles] Then, like I say, more and more people started coming out.

The banjo became more adopted.

Music was everywhere in these mountains, because that was their entertainment.

I mean, it was social functions, church dances.

Some churches allowed dances, some of them didn't, but the square dances were a big social event.

People really looked forward to that because they worked so hard.

There weren't a lot of recreation.

-[Narrator] Old time music has never been stagnant.

It's always evolving.

The contributions of enslaved people have been well documented, but Europeans were also influenced by Native Americans as the cultures collided in the New World.

-I think that there was a tremendous impact on the vocals, the style, styles of vocals changed with the Native Americans.

And the dance, a lot of the steps that the Indians were using kind of got transferred.

The Europeans showed them stuff.

It's always an exchange.

It's always back and forth.

But each generation, the music grew into something different with addition of instruments.

So you had fiddle, then you had fiddle and banjo.

You had a dulcimer, which was a Scottish and German thing, so Jews' harps.

Then you didn't see many guitars in the mountains till the first ones through here came up with the railroads in 1850s so all of a sudden you had this stringed instrument that was going to become the king later, up till then, that was fiddle.

But each edition instrument took us further down the road.

Then when recordings started taking place and radio, you had a huge impact.

So before that, you had regional styles that were just particular here and across the mountain would be slightly different.

But the Medicine Show guys would travel, so the doctor would come into a town, and he'd say, "I need four musicians."

So, you know, musicians could make money back then [laughter] because they were playing in the pubs and stuff like that.

So a good fiddler, he didn't have to work in the field.

He could sit around and play, play fiddle.

So the doctor would hire these guys, and they might go five or 600 miles away from home, and then the doctor would need some more people.

So there was a transfer of tunes with the old crew and the new crew, and the old crew would come home with these other songs, and it would be something that hadn't been heard here.

So after radio got started, all of a sudden, the new tunes were there, and people started copying styles.

So at the-- one of the early fiddlers was a guy named Arthur Smith.

So all of a sudden, Arthur Smith played a Tennessee region style of Longbow Fiddlin that people in Grayson County, Virginia had heard.

So then you had people trying to play like him and Earl Scruggs completely dominated banjo when he started.

Everybody wanted to sound like Earl Scruggs.

So the older style playing, the older fiddler styles and the claw hammer got left behind on that one.

-[Narrator] Even before the Carter family recorded their landmark session at the Bristol Hotel in 1927, family bands have always been at the forefront of old time music.

One could argue that you could draw a straight line from the Carter family to the Jackson Five and the Osmonds in the 70s.

One family that's continuing that tradition is the Wilkersons.

They perform as the Biscuit Eaters.

We caught up with them in Fries Virginia, near the North Carolina border, to record them singing their version of Cripple Creek.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I'm going up to Cripple Creek ♪ ♪ to see what them girls had to eat ♪ ♪ Ain't so much that Billy fell against the wall ♪ ♪ Too much moves was the cause of it all ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, goin' on the run ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek t' have a little fun ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, goin in a whirl ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek t' see my girl ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Cripple Creek's wide and Cripple Creek's deep ♪ ♪ I'll wade ole Cripple Creek before I sleep ♪ ♪ Roll my breeches to my knees ♪ ♪ I'll wade ole Cripple Creek when I please ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, goin' on the run ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek t' have a little fun ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, goin in a whirl ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek t' see my girl ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, goin' on the run ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek t' have a little fun ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, goin in a whirl ♪ ♪ Goin' up t' Cripple Creek t' see my girl ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -[Narrator] Like all music, old time music has the power to bring people together, which is at the heart of the Floyd Country Store and the handmade music school, where people come from far and wide to learn traditional tunes.

-It gives us hope and kind of a crazy world that there is the possibility of togetherness, and even if we have differences, you know, sort of using art as civic repair, it's the term that got used by a poet at--on an NPR Interview who came in here and participated in square dance.

That was the term that she used, was art as civic repair.

So using, in our case, music and dance traditions to, sort of like, heal us and connect us and repair some of the damage that's done by media and news and, you know, the 24 hour news cycle and all of that.

It just, you know, I feel like I-- when people come in here, that washes away, and there's a moment where they connect.

And so that's my favorite thing about it.

♪ ♪ ♪ Old time music here in this part of Southwest Virginia would have been the music that would have been played at the end of a long day.

They'd be working hard on the farm, and then they'd get together and probably drink a little bit and play some music and dance.

And, you know, it's all they had to do, right?

Because they didn't have TVs and they didn't have radios and so they played music and dance together, you know.

And I think our Friday Night Jamboree is that, it's just once a week, you know.

And we do it throughout the week too.

But basically, it's our Friday night.

It's our chance to sort of unwind from a long work week and gather and sort of check in, be like, "Hey, how was your week?

Everything good?"

You know, and get out on the dance floor and release that pressure, if there's pressure, or, you know, whatever it needs to be for someone, whether it's, you know, adding more happiness, or whether it's escaping from something that's hard.

It's here for all of us.

And for 40 years, people have been gathering here doing that, which is like astounding to me.

It's just, it's an incredible thing.

Again, not very many of those places where people have gathered to do the same thing as a community for that long, something always goes wrong with it, you know?

And so I have a lot of respect and owe a lot of gratitude to the previous owners.

Because here I am in my-- me and my wife, in our phase of it, being able to do what we're doing, because people started it, kept it going and handed it over to us, to, you know, to care take to, you know, the be--be the stewards of now.

So the Friday Nite Jamboree is just-- and people come from all over the world, you know, it's just an awesome thing.

It's--we're proud of it.

The locals are proud of it.

It's something that we are happy to share and grateful that people come every week and join us.

-[Narrator] Just down the road from Floyd, near the North Carolina border, is the town of independence.

It's home to Lloyd's Barbershop, where Jim hosts jam sessions with kids who are continuing the traditions of old time music.

It's also home to Junior Appalachian musicians, a nonprofit serving several southern states and providing an opportunity for kids to play this timeless music.

-I've said this in front of before, but this one of the best groups I've ever had, and I've been teaching for 39 years now.

I started when I was two.

[laughs] Let's try Bear Tracks then.

♪ High on the mountain tell me what you see ♪ ♪ Bear tracks, bear tracks lookin' back at me ♪ ♪ Better get your rifle boy before it's too late ♪ ♪ Cause the bear's got a little pig ♪ ♪ and headed through the gate ♪ ♪ He's big around the middle and he's broad across the rump ♪ ♪ Runnin' ninety miles an hour takin' thirty feet a jump ♪ ♪ Ain't never been caught, he ain't never been treed ♪ ♪ And some folks say he look a lot like me ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -How long we've been together now?

We've been--two years?

Is it about right?

And Charlotte literally has been playing a matter of weeks, so she's just now getting used to it.

And Rose only been at the base for about a little over a year now.

He's done remarkably well too.

Ernie is the one that's got the problems.

[laughs] ♪ ♪ ♪ Guitar was still relatively new to Appalachia when the recordings were happening in 20s, so I'm not so sure a lot of people knew the chords, they really didn't understand.

So instead of going to minor, they would use the major, which is all they knew, or they might have just liked the sound of it, I don't know.

♪ ♪ ♪ Lot of times this stuff laying around in here is good, too.

That guitar she was just playing out of the late 40s.

It gets--it gives them a chance to play some of the older, you know... ♪ ♪ ♪ -[Narrator] Fiddlers Conventions are events where musicians from all over come together to jam and compete.

And for almost 90 years, Galax has been home to one of the best, playing on the main stage there is like a rite of passage for many young musicians.

Producer Sadie Pettit went to the 2024 Fiddlers Convention to document the magic.

-[Saddie VO] It's a gathering steeped in tradition, and being there felt like stepping into a living, breathing celebration of music and community.

[audience cheering] -[Woman] Oh yeah, bravo!

The convention got its start back in the spring of 1935.

A few members of the newly formed Moose Lodge number 733, came up with the idea as a way to raise funds and gain a little publicity.

In a newspaper article from the time, they wrote that the event was dedicated to keeping alive the memories and sentiments of days gone by, and making it possible for people of today to hear and enjoy the tunes of yesterday.

And I'd say they've more than succeeded in keeping that spirit alive.

♪ ♪ ♪ In the early days, most contestants came from Carroll, Grayson and nearby counties in Virginia and North Carolina.

Performers and bands show up from all over, big cities, college campuses and just about anywhere that old time music is loved and played.

Some come to compete, others just to soak it all in.

It's not just about the music.

Though, that's certainly the centerpiece.

It's about being part of something that feels bigger.

It's about sharing the love for folk and country music, for history and for the simple joy of being together.

When I was walking around the grounds, I could feel the happiness and excitement in the air.

Music poured out from every direction, with bands playing under tents scattered across the venue.

You could let your ear and your heart guide you wandering toward the melodies that pulled you in.

♪ ♪ ♪ There was a strong sense of camaraderie everywhere you looked, people laughing, swapping stories and just soaking up the atmosphere.

Rows of RVs and campers stretched out across the grounds, each with its own makeshift front yard adorned with coolers, grills and chairs.

It was a place where strangers became friends and friends became like family.

All gathered together on a warm, August afternoon to create memories that would last a lifetime.

Being there wasn't just an experience.

It felt like being part of a story that's been told for nearly a century and will continue to be written in the years to come.

-[Narrator] To an outsider, it may seem like mountain music is simply rooted in the traditions of Europeans who arrived here in the 18th century.

But there's a lot more to it than that.

-I think there's a misunderstanding in how diverse old time String Band music is.

So this is music that isn't necessarily a white form of music.

This is a music that was played by Blacks.

There's a lot of the-- there's a lot of the dance figures and things like that come from Native Americans, circle, dancing in circles, and all of that.

And is Native American, a lot of the dance calls and figures that happen on the floor come from Europe, France, British Isles.

The instruments come from all over the world.

The banjo is African.

Bird in the cage, which is a common square dance call, it's African.

There's like-- and dancing in a way where you would move your upper body and move your arms around as African-American.

So this is a music, a dance and a community that's influenced and inspired by people from all around the world.

And I think it's important for people to understand that.

It's much deeper than hillbilly music, right?

And when you pull back the, you know, the curtain, and you dig into that, it's fascinating.

And I think people would really enjoy learning more about its history, and also sort of undoing some of the negative history, the whitewashing, the sort of race records, and the fact that we took a moment in time and decided White people were going to like this, and Black people were going to like this.

If we--and that there's people out there that are undoing that history and starting to tell the story the way it is.

And that, as we move forward, is going to unfold and create beautiful opportunities for people to connect and understand music and all of its glory and not be like, "Well, that's this kind of music, and that's this kind of music."

It just doesn't work that way.

So we're excited about the future.

Old time, old timey.

We joke about what's old timey, but those values back then are still like the way you want to build a community, you know.

You know, I've been to Nashville, and there's a lot of real and incredible music there, but and kind of, in a way, when things get sort of built up so big, some of it starts to feel commercial and sort of delivered to the consumer in a way that they can take it in to a tourist.

And I'm proud of this little town for not really doing that.

We just sort of hold it and keep it the same and keep it authentic and keep it real.

There's nothing, at least, to our-- to the best of our ability, I'm sure, you know, we would have some critics out there, but to the best of our ability, I know in my heart and my wife as well that our goal is to keep it just real, what the people have always wanted it to be, and to try and keep the food good and the experiences, honest and sincere.

And there's no like promotion that is about some sort of like experience that's like made to entertain you.

It's just we're proud of our community, and we do a thing where we play music and dance and gather and like good food and like beautiful mountains.

And if you're into that, come hang out with us, you know.

And if you're not, it's cool, you know, we'll be here doing it anyway.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -[Female voice over] Nestled in the remote corner of southwest Virginia, this region captivates with its rugged landscapes, natural wonders, cultural attractions and outdoor adventures, experiences you'll only find in the heart of Appalachia.

Adventure guides available at heart of appalachia.com.