In which Sid and Doris visit the Home of Country Music, drive through Appalachia profonde to charming Art Deco Asheville and the Dixieland Boardinghouse, home of North Carolina’s best known author before marching through Georgia.
In 1927 Ralph Peer, an A&R guy for Victor Recording Company, came to Bristol (a town with the border of VA and TN running down its central street) looking for talent and finding the Carter Family, Ernie Stoneman and Jimmie Rogers. The Museum tells the story of those Bristol recording sessions and the subsequent commercialisation of blues, gospel, country and string bands. In fact Peer and others had recorded similar material before but the new Orthophonic electrical recording made for better sound, and anyway Bristol has made a very engaging museum in an old Federal Truck showroom. It is great, with academic musicians talking you through the techniques they can hear on the recordings in a video entitled Greasy Strings, and comparison recordings with and without Orthophonic improvements. The photographs of the time also show that the polished recording star images were to follow later…
Birthplace of country? Might be debatable, but if you want to hear banjo, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, double bass, harmonica and bones this is a good place to come. Note, not drums. There is a festival in September. Maybe another year, say Sid and Doris who are not proven mortal.
Pausing only to eat apple fritters, apparently a local delicacy although only if you are not already diabetic, we set out for Asheville through back roads Appalachia. Doris takes many pictures of small houses and wreck-crowded yards. It is not what tourists come for but it does give a non-Hollywood view. The country store gives a sense of the territory.
S gets high pass points for Sam’s (sic?) Gap and JGG chugs along.
When we get into Asheville the first stop is the Dixieland boarding house where much of Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ takes place. This is not the Tom Wolfe of The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test or The Right Stuff as we discover after paying for and starting the tour. Our guide is also Tom who shows us the house and tells us about the commercially obsessed Mrs Wolfe who ran the show, in a slow and engaging manner which entirely made up for the very mild disappointment of the Wrong Wolfe.
Thomas published Look Homeward in 1929. The book was a best seller across the US and locally, though banned from the Asheville library because the local characters were too easily identified and unsympathetically painted (especially Eliza Gant based on his mother). He died in 1938 in the boarding house leaving 1,500,000 words of manuscript that his editor turned into more best sellers, reconciling his mother to her loss as she was engaged to star in several lucrative book tours.
Asheville is a target for Sid and Doris because the town went bust in the 1930s and did not commit redevelopment in the 1960s so all the 1920s buildings are still there. Sid was most keen to see the 1928 Grove Arcade, the one of the USA’s first indoor shopping developments (with offices above, though without the 13 floors once planned).
Though the centre of civic and commercial life in NC it was requisitioned in 1942 by the Federal Government for use in military administration. It subsequently became the National Weather Centre’s record office. Miles of files that were not moved until 1995 despite Grove having been registered as an Historic Place. It has now been returned to its lovely self and is part of a newly busy downtown. San Francisco like, but smaller and without the fog.
Sid and Doris have been invited to a ‘60s fancy dress party at the Chesapeake Boat Museum. Asheville has several vintage clothes shops (more expensive than second hand clothes says curmudgeonly Sid) and in Posies for Lulu Doris finds the perfect hippy kaftan.
The plan for Thursday is to drive to Athens at the top of the Ante-Bellum Trail that ends in Macon, GA. We cross the Eastern Continental Divide, which after a short session with Mr Google Doris discovers to be the watershed where rivers flow either to the Gulf of Mexico or to the Atlantic.
Mr G’s location tonight is the Graduate Hotel in Athens – a converted mini-campus which makes a reasonable job of creating a boutique motel, although once again the hotel restaurant is not open.
We have grown fond of the “ice cream lunch” as a way of avoiding eating three large meals a day, but today we rashly attempted a “cookie dough ice cream shop“. The owner is hoping to create a country-wide franchise system. Sid and Doris are Not Sure, and stealthily put the rest of their “strawberry cheesecake vanilla” portion into the bin before sidling out of the shop. It might take a few days before the concept of an ice cream lunch is attractive again.
Central Athens is taken over by the Georgia University Campus. Signs overhead proclaim it to be a No Cruising Zone, and we wonder why they might need to say that? Along the pavements stroll artfully casual girls (and boys). In loud but not very interesting cars drive boys (and girls) who might not be old enough to get a driver’s license in the UK.
It makes for cheerful watching as we eat outside, and it is definitely, definitely not a cruise. [We didn’t take pictures of the many young people in tiny skirts as we aren’t sure it’s correct to do that any more, but please insert cheerleaders of your choice into the foreground of these shots – D.]
