Last night was the best time I’ve had with my clothes on in I don’t remember when. Anne and I, along with our friends Suzanne Capone and Bill Perry, attended The Crooked Road Tour: The Roots of American Music (and how hillbillies helped invent it) at the historic Lincoln Theater in Marion, Virginia.

The 12-stop, 12-musician tour was organized by folklorist Joe Wilson,

to promote the grand opening, May 27, of the Roots of American Music exhibit at the Blue Ridge Music Center. The tour began May 10th in Pulaski and finishes this Sunday, May 22nd, at the Franklin County High School Auditorium in Rocky Mount. Tonight’s performance is at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, and tomorrow night at the Floyd Country Store in Floyd. All performances begin at 7:00 pm, and tickets are only $10.

The show opened with an ancient acapella ballad from Molly Slemp, a teenager raised in the Wise County coal fields, whose ethereal voice transports you to another time. Dale Jett, A.P. Carter’s grandson, led a singalong gospel tune to close the show. What happened in between can only be described as magical.

The 3 hour concert has so many elements to it that it’s almost impossible to describe. It is part musical history, part American history, and it featured musical pairings that are historic in and of themselves. The show tells how immigrants from Ulster in Northern Ireland and the Rhine Valley in Germany followed the Great Trail south from Philadelphia and came together around 1720 with English settlers and African freedmen and slaves from Eastern Virginia following the Wilderness Road to settle Southwest Virginia, bringing with them their instruments and songs that formed the basis of the first truly American music. Bluegrass, country, and American folk music are the offspring of the music born right here. As last night’s concert proved, some of its greatest living practitioners walk among us every day, including Wytheville’s own Leigh Beamer, a 15-year-old student sitting in a classroom at George Wythe High School right now as I write this.

Burl Rhea is an underground coal miner whose people have toiled in the mines of Russell County for almost two hundred years. His worn face is etched with the history of the strife between miners and operators. In addition to playing drop thumb banjo, Burl put on several rousing exhibitions of flat foot dancing. One of the more humorous moments last night occurred when Burl came on stage holding hands with Cheick Diabate. Burl flatfooted and Cheick danced some tribal steps that, from the audience, looked virtually the same.

If you have a chance to attend one of the last three performances, don’t miss it. Musical history is being made.