By Lauren Stepp
In August 1925, the George Vanderbilt Hotel in downtown Asheville became an unlikely epicenter of American music history.
That summer, producer Ralph Peer and a team from the OKeh Record Company hauled in a portable acoustic-horn setup—a bulky contraption designed to capture sound on wax discs. For 10 days, fiddlers, banjo players, guitarists and singers streamed through the hotel doors, eager to test themselves before the horn.
Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Photo courtesy of Explore Asheville
The result? Roughly 60 recordings that represent the first commercial music ever captured in these hills.
“It was radical at the time,” says Ted Olson, GRAMMY-nominated professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. “Peer was going into the mountains to find musicians near where they lived, as opposed to requiring them to leave the mountains to record in lowland cities.”
The sessions reflected Asheville’s booming cultural climate of the 1920s. The city was a magnet for tourists, artists and entrepreneurs, and that diversity echoed in the recordings. The repertoire ranged from fiddle tunes and banjo showpieces to gospel, ballads, blues and even vaudeville numbers.
Notable artists included Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who cut two tracks from his deep repertoire; J.D. Harris, a fiddler renowned for “The Cackling Hen”; and Ernest Helton, whose three-finger banjo picking anticipated the style later made famous by Earl Scruggs.
“It was a booming environment, economically and culturally,” Olson explains. “Asheville was a tourism mecca, and people—whether local or coming from the outside to vacation in the Land of the Sky—wanted to hear different types of music. It was just an open-minded environment.”
The original 78-rpm discs, cut acoustically rather than electrically, had limited dynamic range and were nearly lost to obscurity. But this year, a century later, they have been reborn.
Music from Land of the Sky: The 1925 Asheville Sessions, a newly released album by Rivermont Records, restores 28 of the recordings using rare original discs sourced from collectors worldwide. GRAMMY-nominated engineer Bryan Wright handled the meticulous restoration, while Olson and veteran music historian Tony Russell provided liner notes.
“Acoustically recorded discs didn’t capture the full extent of the original soundscape,” Olson says. “They were dramatically reduced in their reproduction of the musical experience. What Bryan Wright has done is remarkable. The end result is that people can hear the performances, really for the first time, as close to the original as we possibly can.”
Two years after the Asheville recordings, Peer would set up his equipment again—this time in Bristol, Virginia. Those 1927 sessions, which introduced the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers to the world, became known as the “Big Bang of Country Music.” But Asheville came first.
“The Asheville sessions were definitely pioneering,” Olson says. “They deserve full inclusion in any discussion of the history of country music.”
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Asheville Sessions, the city will host concerts, lectures and community celebrations from Thursday, November 6, through Sunday, November 9. For schedules, tickets and details, visit ExploreAsheville.com/Historic-Asheville-Sessions.
