
The Historic Asheville Sessions Project Information Session
The Historic Asheville Sessions Project Information Session
Thursday, Aug. 15 | 5 to 7 p.m.
Citizen Vinyl, Asheville, N.C.
The Blue Ridge Music Center and North Carolina Arts Foundation invite the public to learn about the Historic Asheville Sessions project, which presents, interprets, and celebrates recordings made by OKeh General Phonograph Corporation in Western North Carolina in the summer of 1925.
These sessions were the first performances of traditional music from the Southern Appalachians documented for commercial sale to a broader American audience. This event accelerated the evolution of American vernacular and homemade music into the emerging genre of country music, which is now known around the globe. Despite its historical importance, the OKeh recordings made in Asheville have never been reissued and the impacts of this event have never been publicly explored and presented. In fact, few North Carolinians are aware of this significant event.
The information session will feature presentations about the project and the significance of the sessions by Ted Olson, cultural historian, record producer, author, and professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, and Wayne Martin, executive director of the North Carolina Arts Foundation. Guests will also hear a sampling of the songs recorded at the sessions.
Admission is free of charge.
History of the Historic Asheville Sessions
In August 1925, a team from the New York-based OKeh General Phonograph Corporation, a commercial label created to profit from the burgeoning market for 78 rpm records, traveled to Asheville and set up a portable studio in the new George Vanderbilt Hotel on Haywood Street. Ralph Peer, artist and repertoire director, chose the musicians to record over the 10-day session. Peer had broken ground with OKeh in 1920 by supervising the recording of blues and jazz and was now turning his attention to rural traditional music. Peer relied on local newspapers and word of mouth to attract fiddlers, banjo pickers, guitarists, autoharp players, and singers who could perform the dance tunes, ballads, love songs, blues, and gospel music from the region. Musicians from Western North Carolina responded to the call for auditions. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, well known in and around Asheville as a performer and promoter of traditional mountain music, recorded two folk songs from his vast repertoire. James Dedrick Harris, recognized by many as the premier fiddler of his generation, played his showpiece, The Cackling Hen, and J.D. Weaver of Polk County fiddled Hog Drivers and Arkansas Traveler. Ernest Helton picked Royal Clog on the banjo using a three-fingered style that is the predecessor of the technique developed by Earl Scruggs.
Hopeful musicians also came from further afield. Fisher Hendley, a banjo player and radio performer from North Carolina’s Piedmont, successfully auditioned for Peer. Singer Kelly Harrell traveled from the mill village of Fieldale, Va., to follow up on his inaugural recordings from earlier that year in New York. Ernest Stoneman, best known later in his career as the patriarch of the musical Stoneman family, came from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to sing and play harmonica and autoharp. Stoneman’s Grayson County neighbor, Wade Ward, still today regarded as an iconic clawhammer banjo player, journeyed to Asheville to make his first recordings. Emmett Miller from Macon, Georgia performed the song Lovesick Blues, which later inspired Country star Hank Williams to make it his signature song. When the OKeh team packed up and returned to New York, they had 60 wax masters of performances that showed the world the creative talent of the Southern Appalachians and beyond. The Asheville sessions took place two years before the historic Bristol sessions in Tennessee, also overseen by Ralph Peer, that have often been called the “Big Bang” of country music. Clearly, what Peer heard in Asheville in 1925 inspired him to revisit the Appalachian region to look for additional musicians whose artistry resonated with grassroots America. If there had never been an Asheville field session, the trajectory of popular music in the 20th century may have traced a different arc.
Ted Olson is a professor in the Department of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University and a cultural historian, record producer, editor, poet, photographer, and musician. The author or editor of numerous books, he has published articles, essays, encyclopedia entries, poems, creative nonfiction pieces, reviews, and oral histories in literary and scholarly anthologies and periodicals. For many years he has taught classes exploring Appalachia’s complex cultural history. Currently, he serves as book series editor for the Charles K. Wolfe Music Series (University of Tennessee Press). He and Tony Russell have collaborated on three books included in box sets released by Germany’s Bear Family Records (the Bristol Sessions 1927-1928, the Johnson City Sessions, 1928-1929, and the Knoxville Sessions, 1929-1930).
Wayne Martin, executive director of the North Carolina Arts Foundation, led the team that created Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina in 2003, which was used to advocate for the creation of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area. Martin recorded many outstanding traditional musicians of western North Carolina, including guitarist Etta Baker of Morganton and Madison County ballad singers Doug and Jack Wallin. He collaborated with Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s daughter, Jo Herron, to produce a documentary CD for Smithsonian Folkways that presents Lunsford’s performances of songs and tunes from his “memory collection.” The North Carolina Arts Foundation engages the private sector for the purpose of regional and statewide arts development with a focus on arts education, including programs that teach young people the music traditions of their home communities.