A century ago, a record producer from New York City headed into Western North Carolina in search of the sound of Southern Appalachia. Landing in downtown Asheville, Ralph Peer set up a recording space in the former George Vanderbilt Hotel and began work on a series of field recordings that would forever change the course of American music.
“Peer was the producer responsible for releasing the earliest commercial recordings of the genre that came to be known as country music,” said Ted Olson, professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City. “Once Peer identified a market for recordings of ‘hillbilly music,’ he sought out new artists who performed that type of music to record for sale to customers.”
Known as the “Asheville Sessions,” the 1925 recordings by Peer have been mostly unknown to music lovers and historians alike, let alone the general public in Southern Appalachia and beyond. But, with Olson and the help of Rivermont Records, the sessions have finally received their due — something 100 years in the making — with the recent release of the new album “Music from the Land of the Sky: The 1925 Asheville Sessions.”…