Time on the Crooked Road: Isochrony, Meter, and Disruption in Old-Time Country and Bluegrass Music

Abstract

T Virginia Heritage Music Trail, otherwise known as “The Crooked Road,” is a site of cultural preservation and promotion that links important centers of traditional music for the region. Winding through the southwestern part of the state, the trail connects Galax, for example, where the historic Old Fiddlers’ Convention continues to draw some of area’s best old-time and bluegrass musicians, and Bristol, where Ralph Peer recorded country music’s formative “Bristol sessions” in 1927. Traveling between museums, record stores, live performance stages, and informal jam sessions, visitors to the trail engage with the music of Ralph Stanley, the Carter Family, Dock Boggs, and others who have played a defining role in bluegrass and old-time music. It is significant that the Crooked Road has come to symbolize the musical heritage of the region and, in part, the genres of old-time and bluegrass themselves, since the suggestion is that like the trail, the music winds through unique and satisfyingly unpredictable turns. Lacking the standardized homogeneity and commercial influence of a modern interstate, the geographical idiosyncrasies of the local roads comprising the trail can represent distinct points of cultural pride for local residents and authentic sites of discovery for tourists. The organizers of the Virginia Heritage Music Trail chose the name because of this geographical/ musical metaphor: on the one hand, Highway 58, through which much of the trail passes, has long had the title of the “Crooked Road” as its nickname. On the other hand, as Brandi Hart (one of the project coordinators) remarked, a fiddler can “take the crooked road” by “playing a backstep on the instrument” (personal communication, July 2007). This article’s goal is to investigate and provide an explanatory basis for the type of musical phenomenon referenced by this remark. The term “crooked