Folk fans, start your engines. This year, the Richmond Folk Festival is racing to Bristol.
“There’s more than just history going on in Bristol,” says Katy Clune, the director of the Virginia Folklife Program, and Virginia’s official state folklorist. “It’s a vibrant city with a lot of history but it also has a lot of community commitment to local arts and culture.”
Clune says that the Virginia Folklife Area at this year’s folk festival will concentrate on the Southwest Virginia border city known for being “the birthplace of country music” as well as a NASCAR destination place. “But we’ll also celebrate the new traditions and the thriving arts and music scene happening there today.”
“What’s happening in Bristol is not always in what we think of as traditional Appalachian art forms,” adds Jon Lohman, the director of the Center For Cultural Vibrancy, which co-sponsors the Virginia stage with the Virginia Folklife Program. “Bristol is an important place historically, but it’s also a dynamic region with a lot of youthful energy right now.”
Little Bristol in RVA
Straddling the Virginia-Tennessee line, Bristol is the place where music producer Ralph Peer set up shop in 1927 and captured seminal songs by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest Stoneman and other iconic performers from the region. The U.S. Congress proclaimed Bristol “the birthplace of country music” in 1998 and, in 2014, a state-of-the-art, Smithsonian-affiliated museum with that name was opened downtown.
This year, the Virginia Folklife area will turn into a Little Bristol, with the city’s artisans displaying skills in instrument repair and building, basket making and weaving, photography, cast-iron skillet restoring, toy making, even fashion design. Representatives from The Birthplace of Country Music Museum, working with the folk festival for the first time, will also hold a symposium on “Women and Old-time Music.”
“These are artists and institutions who have been nominated by the community, chosen by their peers in the greater Bristol region,” Clune says, explaining that the city was recently identified as an anchor community by the cultural nonprofit, Central Appalachia Living Traditions, an initiative of Mid-Atlantic Arts, which invested $75,000 in the area’s most prominent musicians and craftspeople. “The awardees of these Greater Bristol folk and culture fellowships will be front and center at the festival.”
The Virginia Stage will feature the city’s music with a special Sunday showcase called “New Sounds of Bristol,” hosted by the executive director of The Crooked Road Music Trail, multi-instrumentalist Tyler Hughes. The display of up-and-coming Bristol talent will include Appalachian dulcimer player Roxanne McDaniel, banjoist Pierceton Hobbs, mandolin/guitar specialist Jackson Cunningham, singer-songwriter KT Vandyke, and the hip-hop performer geonovah, from Big Stone Gap.
Closing out Saturday night on the Virginia stage will be a homage to old time country radio, “Farm and Fun Time,” which has become a popular program on Radio Bristol, the low-power station that transmits from the city’s Birthplace of Country Museum. Farm and Fun Time is also taped for monthly broadcast on local public television and recently won wider national syndication on PBS. “Think of it sort of like ‘Prairie Home Companion,’” says Lohman. “Or the Old Dominion Barn Dance.”
The show is hosted by Radio Bristol program director Kris Truelsen and his house band Bill and the Belles, and is a throwback to a legendary radio show with the same name that broadcast in the ’40s and ’50’s from Bristol’s WCYB; the revamped show has hosted everyone from Ralph Stanley (who played on the original with the Stanley Brothers) to Del McCoury to the Mavericks.
Old time specialist Elizabeth LaPrelle, together with her Virginia Folklife Apprentice Elsa Howell, will perform Appalachian ballads as part of Richmond’s Farm and Fun Time episode, while multi-instrumentalist and dancer Linda Lay will also be featured. “The music we have here [in Bristol] isn’t just music that is looking backward,” says host Truelsen. “There are a lot of really amazing musicians who are in the tradition and outside the tradition who are helping to keep the dialogue and narrative of this region’s music and pushing it to the here and now.”
Car culture and Petersburg soul
“The Virginia stage won’t just be about Bristol,” Lohman says, pointing to the return of Richmond’s Legendary Ingramettes, whose impassioned, frenzied performances have closed down the stage for years on Sunday. The gospel troupe will also participate in a vocal workshop with the Virgin Island-based Stanley Jacobs and Ten Sleepless Nights, one of this year’s main stage RFF artists.
The stage will also see returnees like bluegrass whiz Martha Spencer and the Wonderland Band, from Whitetop Mountain, Loudoun County shape-shifter Danny Knicely (performing with Chinese dulcimer master Chao Tien) and, after a long absence, Grayson County guitarist and master luthier Wayne Henderson. Piedmont blues guitarist Gail Caesar and honky-tonkers the Wild Ponies are also slated, as is Sherman Holmes, ex-Holmes Brothers, who will perform with gospel singer and pianist Cora Harvey Armstrong, harmonica player Andrew Alli, multi-instrumentalist Jared Pool and vocalist Almeta Ingram-Miller of the Ingramettes.
Perhaps the most exciting addition is the Sunday appearance of Petersburg soul singer Rodney Stith. “We’ve never had anything like him,” says Lohman, adding that Stith will be bringing his big band to the show. “We’re thrilled to bring our soul music traditions to the Virginia stage.”
And, of course, because of the Bristol Motor Speedway, the fourth-largest sports stadium in the U.S., car culture will be front and center. Two generations of the Fleenor Family of Bristol, longtime area auto racers, will be on hand to rev up the engine of a vintage rear-engine dragster and talk Bristol racing history.
Clune wants visitors to come away from the Folklife Area with a better sense of their own backyard. “For people coming to the Richmond Folk Festival, you get to experience sounds from all over the country and the world,” the state folklorist says, “but here in the Folklife Area, you can always count on experiencing a really unique part of Virginia that maybe you didn’t know. And I think these artists are really going to surprise people.”
Clune and Lohman are happy for another new development at the Virginia Folklife Area: Beer.
“We’ll have our own beer sales this year,” Lohman says. “I think people will like that.” Are the curators worried that this will mean overcrowding at the gateway to the festival? “It won’t be a problem,” laughs Clune. “I’m excited by the prospect of all of the people coming out.”
For more on the Virginia Folklife Area’s musical offerings, go to the Richmond Folk Fest website. For more on the offerings at the Folk Demonstration area, go to https://www.richmondfolkfestival.org/virginia-folklife-demonstrations
Style Weekly contributing writer Don Harrison is a volunteer member of the Richmond Folk Festival local programming committee.
