Gathering In The Gap, Big Stone Gap, Virginia

Getting Off the Beaten Path: The Lonesome Pine Leg of the Crooked Road
by Ron Short,
Musician and Native of
Dickenson County, Virginia

There is more than distance that separates the coalfields of southwestern Virginia from the other communities along the Crooked Road Music Trail and that is coal and the mining of coal.

It is a region also steeped in the history of the founding of America and the making of the American frontier identity as characterized by Christopher Gist, Elisha Wallen, Daniel Boone and countless other longhunter/farmers. These hearty Scots/Irish, German and English settlers pushed the boundaries of Colonial America into the lands of the Cherokee and Shawnee and on into the Ohio Valley. Eventually, with the opening of Cumberland Gap to settlers, the settling of the American west soon followed.

But, because of coal, the culture, history and music of Wise, Dickenson and Lee Counties was shaped in a story of industrialization, the conflicts of labor, big money, greed and politics. It is a story of coalminers and their families, gun thugs and scabs, labor unions, coal camps and immigrant laborers from throughout the world.

These conflicting forces created an environment of struggle and drama and the mixing of cultures and races in ways that simply did not occur in the more rural farming communities of the Blue Ridge and nowhere is that difference more notable than in the music from these two regions.

Fiddle tunes, community square dances, and music festivals characterize the music of the Blue Ridge leg of the Crooked Road but it is labor songs, hard-bitten stories of disaster and death, lost love and the Blues that carries the voices of the Lonesome Pine leg. No wonder then that we see the blending of cultures and musical styles to include not only African-American musicians like Carl Martin, (born in Big Stone Gap) Gap), but also Italian and Eastern European voices as well. And with the writings of Dock Boggs, Kate Sturgill, Carter Stanley the very face of American Country Music began to take shape here in the Lonesome Pine.

See more of our site!

WORKSHOPS

CHILDREN'S AREA

Big bands regularly played the dancehalls in coal-camps and at those dances, mountain fiddlers learned to swing their tunes. Marion Sumner, an early fiddle player for Jim and Jesse McReynolds, was one of the finest swing fiddlers in this country.

Dock Boggs regularly played Black "juke-joints" where he fused Anglo ballads with "Blues" licks and tunings on the banjo creating a sound that many years later influenced young, working-class musician Mick Jagger and his band The Rolling Stones.

Carter Stanley took the sorrow of old ballads and fused them with the hard stories of the Depression, the loss of the "homeplace", lost love, hard drinking and hard living and invented the "formula" for Bluegrass and Country songs of today. Ralph Stanley, still playing some 60 years later, refuses to call his music anything but, "Mountain Music."