Mountain Range

The symmetry is perfect -- so poetic it could've been scripted. In July 1927, the Carter Family headed down from its mountain to record for the first time. In the rear- view mirror of its borrowed Model-A Ford was Poor Valley, the rugged stretch of Virginia the group would later immortalize in "My Clinch Mountain Home." Ahead, barely fifteen miles away as the crow flies but a full day's drive on steep and winding roads, was the bustling Virginia/Tennessee border town of Bristol.

There, the Carters had a date with Kansas City-born Ralph Peer, an ambitious artist-and-repertoire man for New York's Victor Talking Machine Company. As it turned out, they had a date with history, too. Peer's Carter Family recordings, along with sides he cut for Ernest Stoneman, Blind Alfred Reed, Jimmie Rodgers and others, are now recalled as the Bristol Sessions, an event routinely billed (albeit somewhat erroneously) as the birth of modern country music.

How fitting, as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of those fabled sessions, that the Down From the Mountain show is barnstorming America. The bluegrass and old-time-music revue, which stops at Starlight Theatre on Tuesday, August 13, is hosted by Rodney Crowell and features such notable country performers as Patty Loveless, Ricky Skaggs, the Del McCoury Band, Emmylou Harris, and Alison Krauss and Union Station. The real star of the show, though, is recent Grammy-winner Ralph Stanley, himself a native of the Clinch Mountains. In fact, Stanley was born just thirty miles north of the Carters' old home place -- exactly 75 years ago.

Country music, more than other commercial genres, has always been deeply attached to its past. Lately, devotees have had even more reason to look back. The Down From the Mountain tour is, after all, merely one byproduct of the O Brother, Where Art Thou?phenomenon. The Coen brothers' winking, Southern rendering of Homer's The Odysseywas only modestly successful in theaters. Yet the movie's soundtrack -- composed primarily of Depression-era blues, African-American gospel, chain-gang chants and lots and lots of bluegrass -- has sold six million copies.

Indeed, O Brother is now shorthand for something of an old-time-music revival -- one that's been predictably ignored by mainstream country radio but that's evident enough if you frequent any book, music or video chain store. There's Songcatcher, a movie about a folklorist who ventures up the mountain in search of what bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe would later term (rather disingenuously, as far as his own music was concerned) "the ancient tones." There's also Songcatcher, an album of contemporary recordings inspired by the film. Mark Zwonitzer's Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?, a lively new biography of the Carter Family, has just been published, as has Bill C. Malone's Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class, another essential offering from country music's pre-eminent historian. And Treasury of Bluegrass -- a two-disc TV offer from Time-Life that provides an excellent overview of the genre -- recently climbed all the way to No. 30 on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart.

Down From the Mountain -- the Nashville concert that served as O Brother's musical coming out party as well as the documentary film made of that performance, plus its accompanying soundtrack and now the follow-up tour -- has made the most of the trend. Indeed, O Brother and Down From the Mountain have become marketing appeals as seductive to some as Starbucks or Britney are to others -- sepia-toned brand names for those weary of today's regularly superficial and needlessly noisy pop music. More to the point, they're a 21st-century campaign to profit from seemingly simpler times -- a particularly easy sell in an age when folks will forever remember where they were, as Alan Jackson sings, when the world stopped turning.

Noting the inevitable sales pitch isn't a criticism, either. The music of the touring Down From the Mountain musicians is almost uniformly excellent. The Del McCoury Band, for instance, is as propulsive a bluegrass band as currently exists. On her 2001 album Mountain Soul, the Kentucky-born Patty Loveless proved that in addition to being the finest straight-up female country singer of her generation, she's a devastating bluegrass vocalist. And, though Ralph Stanley's artistic peak is a good quarter century behind him, his bracing hog-call tenor and mournful, Old Regular Baptist-bred phrasing already mark him as one of America's greatest singers. For God's sake, if you've never seen Ralph Stanley, go.

Still, the much-deserved attention now being lavished on the acoustic, prerock music of white Southerners almost always fails to make a key distinction. For most 21st-century fans, the phrase down from the mountain is entirely nostalgic; yet for those mountaineers who actually did the descending, the trip was anything but backward-looking. The phrase recalls a quintessentially American experience, evoking as it does the last century's mass migrations from country to city, and from the South to the North and West, by folks seeking to forge brighter futures.

Just a generation or two ago in some cases, Southerners abandoned homes in the Ozarks for work in the stockyards of Omaha, Chicago and Kansas City, or for aerospace jobs in Wichita or California. Those in the Appalachians or the Deep South, on the other hand, were more likely to head for Pennsylvania steel mills or Michigan auto plants. They traveled anywhere they could land decent-paying work -- a financial security and material comfort sought by musicians as much as anyone. Before becoming "the Father of Bluegrass," Bill Monroe left Kentucky to work in a Chicago oil refinery. In the early '50s, Ralph and Carter Stanley quit music altogether for a time, preferring steady paychecks from a Ford assembly line in "Dee-troit City" (to quote Bobby Bare's 1963 crossover hit).