![]() Even if you don’t visit during the summer festival season, you’ll still hear great old-time music. Festivals like the Mount Airy Bluegrass & Old-Time Fiddlers Convention, and Madison County’s Bluff Mountain Festival showcase the tradition. Hundreds of musicians in their teens and twenties have joined in the tradition. Today old-time music in Western North Carolina is stronger than ever. Surry County fiddler and banjo player Tommy Jarrell gave a warm welcome to many young people who showed up on his doorstep from all over the world wanting to learn his powerfully rhythmic, bluesy style of music. The traditional music of the Round Peak area (between Mount Airy, North Carolina, and Galax, Virginia) became especially popular among old-time music fans. Field-recordings of Appalachian artists were issued on LPs, and a new pantheon of great North Carolina mountain musicians emerged. ![]() They learned that North Carolina mountain families and communities still played the old tunes and songs. During the wider Folk Revival, young people, many from the urban Northeast, traveled to the South in search of authentic American folk music. It was simply overshadowed when bluegrass burst onto the scene. This era is usually called the old-time music “revival”-though that’s a bit of a misnomer, because, as any mountain musician will tell you, the music never died. Old-time music reached its next peak in the 1960s and ‘70s.
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