That summer in 1927 commercial country music was barely four years old. It was a bawling infant, though, and the record sales of people like Fiddlin' John Carson, Uncle Dave Macon, Vernon Dalhart, Riley Puckett, and Charlie Poole had shown the big New York record companies that there was something to this "Southern" music. Finding new performers who could do this kind of music was another thing; they didn't hang around the big studios in New York or Chicago, and as early as 1924 companies like Okeh and Columbia had sent recording expeditions into the wilds of Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana in search of new talents. Pioneering this new technique of on-location recording was a 35 year old man named Ralph Peer. A native of Kansas City, Peer had grown up with the record industry, and in 1923 had traveled to Atlanta for Okeh to record the famous efforts of Fiddlin' John Carson that set off the old-time music boom. Late in 1925, Peer had quit Okeh, and offered his services to the Victor Talking Machine Company, whose success with Vernon Dalhart's million selling "Wreck of the Old 97" had whetted their appetite for this sort of music. "I had what they wanted." Peer recalled later. "They couldn't get into the hillbilly business and I knew how to do it." By January 1927 the company was outfitting Peer with the latest electrical recording equipment, produced by Western Electric, and asking him to take Victor into the field.

The ground rules were simple: Peer would go into a Southern town or city, locate local talent, and record them on the spot for $50 a selection plus royalties of about 2 1/2 cents per side. He would look for gospel music, blues, and hillbilly music, and would network through local contacts like Victor dealers, music store owners, and radio station operators. An early trip in February and March 1927 yielded mostly blues and gospel, so in June he set out by himself to line up another round of sessions. Savannah and Charlotte soon fell into line, but the third choice was not so easy. Peer finally settled on Bristol, a bustling small city whose main street formed the state line between Virginia and Tennessee. Flanked on the South by Johnson City and on the West by Kingsport, Bristol was part of an early urban area known as Tri-Cities, which in the 1920's boasted a collective population of over 32,000 - making it the largest urban area in the Appalachians eclipsing even Asheville It was a natural base for Peer. He told a local newspaper when he arrived there with his recording crew: "In no section of the South have the pre-war melodies and old mountaineer songs been better preserved than in the mountains of all Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, experts declare, and it was primarily for this reason that the Victor Company chose Bristol as its operating base."

There were other reasons for choosing Bristol. Scouts from three other record companies had had, or had scheduled, auditions in the town that year, and local newspapers and civic clubs were proud and supportive of old-time music. The local Victor dealer, Cecil McLister was a keen-eyed talent scout himself. As early as June, he had put Peer in touch with a nearby group called the Carson Family. Other Bristol musicians had already made their mark in radio and records and from vaudeville, and 140 area bands, the Johnson Brothers and the Stoneman Family, had been to New York to record for Peer. They were invited to hunt up more talents from their friends and relatives. In almost every way Bristol was a natural place to start Victor's greatest talent search.

Accompanied by his wife, Anita, and two engineers named Echbars and Lynch Peer returned to Bristol July 21 with a carload of portable recording equipment. They leased a former furniture store at 408 State Street ( the street there was the state line) and began to prepare the second and third floors for recording; they hung blankets on the wall, built a tower for the pulley that would drive the recording turntable and a platform for singers to stand on. Contrary to many popular histories, Peer was not reduced to simply fishing for talent; his first week was pretty much already booked up with established local stars such as the Stonemans, the Johnson Brothers, and the singer Blind Alfred Road. But he needed people to fill in his second week. A small ad appeared in the Sunday paper announcing that the Victor Company would have a recording machine in Bristol for ten days, but this hadn't generated much response. On the third day of the session, July 27, Peer invited a writer for the local paper to watch Ernest Stoneman and Eck Dunford record "Skip to Ma Lou." The result was a major front-page story in that evening's NEWS BULLETIN. "The synchronizing is perfect," wrote the reporter. "Ernest Stoneman playing the guitar, the young matron (Mrs. Stoneman) the violin, and a young mountaineer the banjo and mouth harp. Bodies swaying, feet beating a perfect rhythm, it is calculated to go over big when offered to the public."

But to many people, the most interesting part of the story was the last paragraph. Where it was revealed that Stoneman got $100 a day for his services, and that his sideman got $25 a day--and that Stoneman, a carpenter form nearby Galax, had received $3600 in royalties the previous year. "This worked like dynamite recalled Peer. "The very next day I was deluged with long-distance calls from surrounding mountain region. Groups of singers who had not visited Bristol during their entire lifetime arrived by bus, horse and buggy, trains or on foot." In a matter of hours, Peer had gone from famine to feast, and soon he found himself having to add night sessions to accommodate the new talent. During his stay in Bristol, Peer would eventually record 76 performances by 19 different groups. They would include old pop and vaudeville songs, traditional mountain ballads and songs, fiddle and banjo tunes; gospel songs alone counted for almost half the output.

By Charles Wolfe,
from liner notes of The Bristol Sessions (Country Music Foundation, 1987)