country-music-museum

Birthplace of Country Music Museum opens in Virginia... or is it Tennessee

Bristol

While the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was setting up their new Beyonce exhibit, a new music museum was celebrating its opening weekend down in Bristol…

Bristol straddles the Tennessee-Virginia state line. It is quaint and leisurely, a small town, according to geography and population. Yet to those who know the story, Bristol is enormous.

“Nashville is like a child to Bristol,” says Jim Lauderdale, a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter who performed Saturday night at an outdoor stage on Bristol’s Virginia side.

Nashville is the state capital, it is a tourist mecca, and it scrapes the sky. But it would not be or do these things were it not for producer Ralph Peer’s recording sessions in Bristol, which took place between July 25 and Aug. 5, 1927. [WBIR]

Read more about the town, the museum and openiung weekend at WBIR. NPR also has a feature.

Now you can add the Birthplace of Country Music Museum to the places you need to stop on your next road trip to TN (along with Third Man Records, Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, Dollywood and Graceland).