Off The Beaten Path

History – His-story -Her-story; When you learn the history / his-story / her-story of a place, your sense of connection deepens considerably. History warms the heart.

A guide to Asheville and Western North Carolina’s unique world-class music and cultural history. Discover over a century of the region’s most remarkable musical and cultural treasures. Use our tour maps to find a world of cultural and musical influences from this  uniquely rich region of the USA. Places that reflect the best the Appalachian Blue Ridge has to offer our new residents and visitors.

The high French Broad Valley is where one of the world’s oldest rivers river in the world begins just northwest of the Eastern Continental Divide near the northwest border of South Carolina. They spill from a 50-foot waterfall called Courthouse Falls at the terminus of Courthouse Creek near Balsam Grove. Then, it flows north to merge with the  Clinch, then the Tennessee River around Knoxville.  From there, it flows over to the Mississippi, and like the river, the culture of WNC flows out to the world. The European settlers of the region lived a hardscrabble life, mostly self-sufficient in the hills and hollers. The most common of the settlers were from northern Europe, Ireland, Scotland, and England. Music was how they entertained and communicated. According to historian Cecil Sharp Smith, who wrote “I found myself for the first time in my life in a community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a practice as speaking.

——Cecil Sharp, 1916

When mass communication happened to the world in the early 1920s, radio programs were transmitted out of  WWNC, the highest radio station on the East Coast, broadcasting local music that was heard in near and far away places. With the addition of 100-foot towers above the Flatiron building, the signal could hit the ionosphere and was heard as far away as Australia. In the days before FM became widespread, WWNC AM was sometimes one of the most popular stations in the United States, with an Arbitron share of over 40 percent of the listening audience, sometimes as high as 50 percent. In the late 1920s, both Jimmie Rodgers and Doc Watson had live shows on the station, helping cement their vernacular music into the listener’s understanding and appreciation of the music of the region.  Folk, Bluegrass, Americana, and Country music are deeply influenced and derived from the music of this region.