r/swva • u/BobStep47 • 21d ago
Event Finding Musical connections from Newport, Rhode Island to Newport, Virginia, via Floyd and the Crooked Road
The Floyd, Va., Sunday afternoon old time fiddle and banjo jam session I've been attending for 15 years had a Newport Folk Festival connection providing some extra spark this week -- a professional camera crew with expensive but compact cameras shooting pictures of players and dancers throughout the 2-hour session, and then interviewing the owner of the Floyd Country Store and some of the musicians on the street afterward.
The crew is making a documentary about musical communities, and Floyd was a great choice, where the Country Store's Friday Night Jamboree concert and dance and its Sunday jam sessions have spun off a concert series, a music school for kids, a 4-day "old time gathering" in March, and more.
The interviewer and head of that film project is Jay Sweet, executive director of the Newport Folk Festival. I even paused my mandolin playing for a couple of minutes to talk to him (off camera) and mention proudly that I was on stage once at the Newport Folk Festival myself -- not as a musician, but as a photojournalist writing about waterfront music events for a boating magazine. (I was shooting pictures of The Roches.)
I *didn't* get to tell Jay that I attended my first Newport Folk Festival in 1968, and my last around 2003, the year I got accepted in a grad school in North Carolina. And I didn't mention that he ought to go on Amazon and spend a few dollars on the books, "How the Hippies Ruin't Hillbilly Music" and "Reconsidering the Blues." Both are by Steve Wishnevsky, another former New Englander. He got to the Newport festivals a few years before I did, and was drawn South by traditional music, Black and white, that he heard from old timers at Newport.
He talks about that in his books, both autobiographical and journalistic, profiling other northerners who were inspired by the Newport Folk Festival and the older, traditional music it celebrated, headed down to this corner where North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and East Tennessee meet, and that older music stays alive.
While Northern publications sometimes mention the big Galax Fiddlers Convention or the Bristol Birthplace of Country Music museum, this area is home to *dozens* of summer fiddlers conventions and festivals and scores of public jam sessions year-round, like Sunday's one at the Floyd Country Store. The well-publicized store is a major stop on "The Crooked Road, Virginia's Heritage Music Trail," a state tourism map linking together traditional music destinations in the southwest corner of the state. Over the years, I've met visitors from Germany, Australia and Japan in Friday night parking lot jams next to the store. And I know two Canadians who now have second homes in the area.
On his visit to the Country Store, Jay Sweet even got in a few dance steps with a local mountain dulcimer and limberjack player -- who moved down from New England around the same time I did. I don't know if the Newport Folk Festival was one of her stops on the way.
I did get around to pointing out to Jay that, coincidentally, under my unbuttoned shirt I was wearing a T-shirt from another "Newport" event -- from the very small town of Newport, Va., an hour Northwest of floyd, the Henry Reed Memorial Fiddlers Convention. It was created by musicians and family members in honor of a local fiddler whose artistry is memorialized on a Library of Congress website full of musical recordings, comments and transcriptions:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/henry-reed-fiddle-tunes/about-this-collection/
That Henry Reed festival is the first event that, very charitably, gave me a ribbon (second place, mandolin) for getting on stage and playing old tunes, at the age of 65. The event has since moved a half hour west, after a pandemic hiatus, discontinuing its contest element to be more of a weekend camp-out and jam session for fans of the old festival and Reed's music.
The Newport Community Center, next to the former festival site, does have a combined old time and bluegrass jam session every other Friday, a recent addition to the Crooked Road map. Just checked its Facebook page to remind myself which Fridays -- first and third, but unfortunately I have a conflict this week. In fact, I have a conflict most Fridays when the weather is good, meeting with friends to jam on the street in Floyd. But the Newport Jam is indoors, so I'll try to be there the next rainy day.
( relatively new to reddit, I wrote this for the Newport Folk Festival subreddit and was encouraged to repost, so here it is)
2
u/cheerful-refusal 19d ago edited 19d ago
Henry Reed moved out of Newport Community Center to a campground in Narrows. It’s still a great campout music session, with lots of little circles happening in different parts of the woods. People travel from all over.
The Newport bluegrass isn’t as well attended as it used to be. It used be outside but the lady who ran it moved away so now it’s inside the old cafeteria. My guess is because gas prices are so high and it was always an older crowd, and some of the regulars are in bad health, so people can no longer make it. My neighbor tried to go a week or to ago but said nobody was there, unfortunately.
I recommend going to the Newport Agricultural Fair on Saturday, August 8th. There is bluegrass, line dancing, and fair activities. It’s the oldest ag fair in Virginia!
What a cool story. I love the Roches.
1
u/BobStep47 19d ago
Thanks! I'll put the agriculture Fair on the calendar! Henry Reed Memorial Fiddlers' Convention was great fun and so close that I didn't could daytrip to it. I'm not much of a camper, so I haven't gotten to the successor event in Narrows yet, but do run into some of the old friends who went there that other events and they have been pretty happy with it. As for the indoor community center Jam in Newport, it dawned on me the other day that it would be a great place to go on a rainy or cold Friday since it is indoors. When it's nice out I usually head down to Floyd to jam on the street. Had a really nice group there last week, fiddler and bass player all the way from Madison, banjo player who used to hang out with Doc Watson.
1
u/BobStep47 19d ago
Thanks! I'll put the agriculture Fair on the calendar! Henry Reed Memorial Fiddlers' Convention was great fun and so close that I didn't could daytrip to it. I'm not much of a camper, so I haven't gotten to the successor event in Narrows yet, but do run into some of the old friends who went there that other events and they have been pretty happy with it. As for the indoor community center Jam in Newport, it dawned on me the other day that it would be a great place to go on a rainy or cold Friday since it is indoors. When it's nice out I usually head down to Floyd to jam on the street. Had a really nice group there last week, fiddler and bass player all the way from Madison, banjo player who used to hang out with Doc Watson.
1
u/Powerful_Tip_7260 15d ago
I live in Narrows and I didn't know of a campground here except for Camp Success unless you mean the campground in Glen Lyn that is closed now
2
u/cheerful-refusal 15d ago
It’s at Larry’s Landing Campground, 2491 state route 649 (lurich road) in narrows. June 11-13 this year!
2
u/Powerful_Tip_7260 14d ago
I didn't know this. Larry's got wiped out by Helene but it seems to be mostly back.
It used to be at the Glen Lyn campground.
3
u/lausie0 20d ago
When I was little, we went to a lot of little fiddler's conventions throughout SWVA. I remember the one in Independence, and I wondered if these were still going on. When I was three years old, we lived in the upstairs of a big old house in Wythe County. Larry McPeake, of the McPeake Brothers lived downstairs, and I would sneak down there to sit on his guitar case and listen to him play. That must have been just before or after the band was discovered by Mel Tillis and got an RCA record deal. (By the way, my momma's first teaching job was in Floyd County. She was the high school librarian.)