Asheville celebrates its pioneering place in music history 100 years after the earliest commercial recordings in Appalachia were made there

Cover art for "Music from the Land of the Sky." The album features recordings from Kelly Harrell, Jim Couch, and Wade Ward, among others. (Images and photos courtesy of Rivermont Records.)

By Ted Olson  

In the aftermath of the September 2024 flooding caused by Hurricane Helene, one thing was clear: Ashevillians, whether natives, longtime residents, or recent arrivals, collectively praised their city’s stunning mountain landscape and rich cultural legacy, including a distinctive music heritage. A year after Helene, officials representing the City of Asheville alongside a small team of music scholars and promoters collaborated on telling a story heretofore untold — one placing Asheville at the vanguard of a cultural revolution. 

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In early November 2025, the city is hosting a four-day celebration to mark the centenary of the first commercial recordings ever made in Appalachia. Indeed, those were among the earliest recordings of the genre later called country music, and Asheville was the first location selected specifically for recording a community of musicians who represented a variety — though not the full diversity — of hill country music during the pre-Depression Era. (As it happened, no women or Black musicians were recorded during those sessions.) 

Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973) was a musician and folklorist from Mars Hill, North Carolina. His song, "Fate of Santa Barbara" is featured as Track 20 on "Music from the Land of the Sky."

Those 1925 recordings owed their existence to the entrepreneurial spirit of Ralph Peer (1892-1960), at the time an A&R producer for OKeh Records. Peer selected Asheville as the locale in which commercial recordings of vernacular music could be made by musicians based in and near the western North Carolina Blue Ridge. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a lawyer/musician living just outside Asheville, likely recommended that location to Peer, who, as a Midwestern native based in New York City, was unfamiliar with Appalachia. (Lunsford had met Peer when recording for OKeh in Atlanta the previous year.) Peer sought to release 78 RPM discs of Appalachian music into the emerging “hillbilly” music market, and Asheville offered the circumstances necessary for this recording endeavor to succeed. In 1925, numerous vernacular Appalachian musicians lived nearby, and Asheville — a tourism mecca since the early 19th century — was comparatively easy to access and provided lodging for visiting musicians.  

Fisher Hendley (1891-1963) had a career spanning nearly three decades. Hendley was multitalented – his occupations included banjoist, singer, promoter, bandleader, and radio personality.

Not initially a champion of the music of Southern whites, Peer had reputedly called the first commercial recording he had made of that music — Fiddlin’ John Carson’s two sides recorded in Atlanta during June 1923 — as “pluperfect awful” (though Peer may have been referring to the poor audio quality of that disc rather than the performance itself). But by the Summer of 1925, Peer had recognized (through the popularity of recordings he and others had produced) that the “hillbilly” genre was commercially lucrative. Hence, in August 1925 he and engineer Charles L. Hibbard and field scout G. B. Jeffers traveled to this city dubbed “The Land of the Sky” to set up a temporary recording studio in the newly built George Vanderbilt Hotel. (The city received its nickname in 1875 when Frances Fisher Tiernan published a novel titled The Land of the Sky celebrating the town’s beautiful natural setting.) Hibbard and Jeffers were seeking out traditional musicians capable of making records that would bear the sounds and styles of authentic hill country music. 

Asheville's Vanderbilt Hotel in the 1920s.

Asheville has long been one of Appalachia’s major music scenes. According to journalist Nick Tosches, the city was “one of the principal and most profitable of stops on the minstrel-show circuit. It was in Asheville on Sept. 11, 1915, that the Al G. Field troupe had its best day of business since its founding in 1886: 4,000 paid admission for two shows at the City Auditorium.” Narratives about the city’s music history, though, have overlooked the 1925 Asheville sessions. Instead, those narratives have tended to focus on two other institutions that originated in the 1920s. The first was radio station WWNC (“Wonderful Western North Carolina”), which began broadcasting in February 1927. Between April and June 1927, that station aired performances by an as-yet-unknown Jimmie Rodgers (in early August 1927, Rodgers recorded for the 1927 Bristol sessions; months later, he became a national star). The second institution was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, founded in 1928 by Lunsford. The annual festival has been held in the city ever since, the longest continually offered music festival in the United States.  

Henry Whitter (1892-1941) recorded with Okeh Records from 1923 to 1926. After meeting G.B. Grayson at a fiddler's convention in Mountain City, Tennessee, the bluegrass duo Grayson & Whitter was formed.

Those who the OKeh team recorded in Asheville included several influential “old-time” musicians (Lunsford, of course, but also Kelly Harrell, Ernest V. Stoneman, Wade Ward, and Henry Whitter) alongside fiddlers, banjo players, harmonica soloists, as well as vaudeville performer Emmett Miller and a jazz ensemble known as the Carolina Club Orchestra. All told, those artists waxed recordings of songs, traditional ballads, instrumentals, and jazz pieces.  

Highlights of the November 2025 celebration include four days of lectures and concerts in Asheville and the reissuing of the lion’s share of those 1925 recordings collected, curated, and painstakingly remastered for a new album titled Music from the Land of the Sky, released by Rivermont Records. Making those recordings available again after a century of neglect was a challenge traceable to their rarity and to technological limitations. (Those discs were recorded by means of the older acoustical system of sound capture and thus possessed sonically limited soundscapes.) 

Ernest (left) and Osey Helton (right), both playing their signature instruments. The Helton brothers grew up in Buncombe County, North Carolina. Osey learned to fiddle from a formerly enslaved man who worked at his father's whiskey distillery.

If the 1925 Asheville sessions become a central part of the city’s legacy story, it is because those recordings, individually and collectively, evoke the unquenchable spirit of Asheville and Appalachia during a brief period of unprecedented prosperity that preceded a half-century of economic decline (from the Depression into the 1980s). It is timely, then, that this album reanimates recordings long overlooked but worthy to be heard and celebrated — within Asheville and beyond. Music from the Land of the Sky illustrates that Asheville can legitimately claim a pioneering role in shaping the identity of various music genres, including country music, old-time music, bluegrass music, and pop music.  

Now that these recordings have been reintroduced and reinterpreted, Asheville’s role in shaping the genre perimeters of country music is on full display. Indeed, the Asheville sessions might be viewed as a kind of trial run for Peer in his quest to organize location sessions for the recording and marketing of country music. Two years later, Peer — working at that point for Victor Records — set up another location recording session in Bristol, Tennessee.  

"Peg and Awl" by Kelly Harrell. Click the picture above to hear the song.

If the 1927 Bristol sessions have been considered in some quarters as “the Big Bang of country music” and Bristol as “the birthplace of country music,” then how should we assess these Asheville recordings, made two years earlier by the same A&R record producer and featuring some of the same artists as would record in Bristol? Do the Bristol slogans need to be revised to reflect awareness of this newly unearthed chapter in the country music origin story? Whatever the outcome of scholarly debate regarding the relative significance of the 1925 Asheville sessions, these recordings document the time and place when various folk musicians came together from across Appalachia to share their musical talents and repertoire with a record company’s representatives and, by extension, with the broader public. Whether or not they realized it, those musicians were helping to create the then-brand-new commercial music genre known today as country music. Accordingly,they deserve our attention and respect for the music they recorded in a modern hotel during Asheville’s initial boomtime a century ago. 

In September 1925, while packing up OKeh’s equipment after 10 days of recording sessions, Peer and his team apparently told a local journalist that they were “high in their praise of Asheville” and that “their visit to the city has been most pleasant.” 

Ted Olson is a professor of Appalachian Studies and Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music Studies at East Tennessee State University.