After, I headed west, retracing my path up Shooting Creek Road in a rush to spend time on the Appalachian Trail, which I’d hiked from Georgia to Maine six years earlier. That you can spend your day in some of the country’s most beautiful landscapes and still make it to a show or jam by nightfall is one of the underrated features of the Crooked Road.

In the town of Marion, the Wayne C. Henderson School of Appalachian Arts, named for the legendary guitar maker who famously built one of Eric Clapton’s guitars, was hosting a Monday-night jam. Born in Grayson County in 1947, Henderson is such an area icon that a painting of him covers one side of the Skyline National Bank in Independence. This old schoolhouse has been turned into a community hub and arts center. In a former first-grade classroom, I found a dozen people seated in a circle, one person at a time selecting the next song that everyone else then played. Dropping his fiddle to his knee, Jim King, the de facto leader, looked my way and nodded, welcoming a stranger with a smile. His wife, Gert, sat to his right, checking the tuning on her banjo. A bassist stood behind her, another fiddler in turn at his side.

On the drive over, I’d been listening to a set of Smithsonian Folkways recordings by Uncle Wade Ward, a banjo and fiddle player from Independence. He’s been dead for half a century, but his mural remains on a wall there. In those sessions from the early ’60s, he talked about a buoyant fiddle number called “Arkansas Traveler,” one of those “wonderful old tunes…about to fade away.” I’d been at the jam an hour, the sinking sun shining through a bottle of Mountain Dew on the windowsill, when someone asked, “How ’bout we try ‘Arkansas Traveler’?” A young guitarist cued the chords on his iPad, and the fiddle began sawing. Sure, it was wobbly and ragged. It had not, however, faded away.

My last day along the Crooked Road was a rainy Tuesday, and I spent it shuttling between museums. I’d driven through Virginia coal country and McClure, the town where pioneering singer Ralph Stanley was born, then raced two hours southeast to Bristol, getting to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum just before it closed. I teared up when I saw the back of Jimmie Rodgers’s guitar, which read simply “THANKS” in enormous gold letters. It was a note of gratitude to an audience he had likely never imagined when he died from tuberculosis in 1933.

There is only a parking lot now at 408 State Street, right where Bristol splits across Tennessee and Virginia. In July 1927, though, it was home to the Taylor-Christian Hat Company, a building big enough for an ad hoc recording studio set up by the Victor Talking Machine Company. For a few days that summer, musicians rolled in from the surrounding countryside to cut their songs. There was the Carter Family, Ernest Stoneman, and Blind Alfred Reed, all pillars of what has since been called the Big Bang of Country Music. It was that moment, a century ago, when these hardscrabble acoustic sounds began their journey to becoming global exports, when the songs that had once seeped out of these hills began to rush out and form the foundation of country music. It was the moment that made this region’s music famous.

CHARLESTON, WV — The West Virginia Governor’s Highway Safety Program (GHSP) and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) are reminding drivers that speeding has legal consequences. As part of the Speeding Slows You Down high-visibility enforcement campaign, drivers will see more law enforcement on the roads. West Virginia’s mobilization runs from July 6 through July 31, 2026.

This campaign is designed to underscore the grave consequences of speeding and urge motorists to reduce their speed. This mobilization emphasizes the commitment of law enforcement to curb speeding behaviors and raise public awareness regarding the increased presence of officers on our nation’s roads during this mobilization period.

Speeding-related fatalities affect communities nationwide every year. In 2024, there were 11,288 speed-related traffic fatalities, accounting for 29% of all traffic fatalities. Young drivers have a higher chance of being involved in speeding-related crashes. In 2024, 39% of male drivers and 20% of female drivers in the 15- to 20-year-old age group involved in fatal traffic crashes were speeding.

In West Virginia, in 2024, speeding-related fatalities decreased 8% from the previous year, from 85 to 78. Our ultimate goal is zero fatalities, which points toward the importance of campaigns like this.

“Speeders don’t just put themselves in danger of serious injuries and death, they put other road users, including passengers, pedestrians, and bicyclists, at risk as well. We are asking drivers to please slow down; our goal is to save lives, and we’re putting all drivers on alert. The posted speed limit is the law. No excuses,” said Jack McNeely, GHSP Director.

The consequences of speeding can lead to a costly ticket, potential jail time, or worse, a crash resulting in injuries or death.

For more information on speeding, visit NHTSA.gov/Speeding.

For more information about the West Virginia Governor’s Highway Safety Program, visit highwaysafety.wv.gov or call 304-926-2509.