Current Gallery Exhibits
New gallery exhibitions, installed each spring, showcase regional folk music, crafts, customs, material culture, and/or folk art. The BRI also loans out selected exhibitions to organizations with suitable exhibit space.

Opening May 10, 2008

Crooked Road Royalty
and
Musical Styles Along the Crooked Road

Crooked Road Royalty

Southwest Virginia has a centuries-old ear for music, with singers and pickers seemingly around every bend in the Crooked Road.  Yet even today these musicians all play in the shadows of four Crooked Road legends:

The Hill Billies--The Galax string band musicians who became master performers and along the way gave a name to an entire genre of commercial music, captured the national vaudeville stage, sold thousands of recordings, and performed for the President.

The Stoneman Family--The Carroll County string band family with members still performing after six decades, over 200 recordings, 30 different stage names, and a load of hardships.  In 2008 Ernest Stoneman, the family patriarch, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. 

The Carter Family--The Scott County masters of mountain sentimental and gospel songs who dominated country music through the Great Depression era.  The Carter Family sound is instantly identifiable, and their songs are known by American roots music fans around the world. 

The Stanley Brothers--The Dickenson County duo who mixed their coalfield roots with bluegrass in the first days of the genre and rose to the top of the charts.  Sixty years later the film Oh Brother Where Art Thou has introduced a new generation of fans to the Stanley Brothers. 

With still images and vintage film footage Crooked Road Royalty explores how these musical powerhouses used their artistry and ambition to shape American country music, making Southwest Virginia’s musical heritage the nation’s musical heritage. 

Musical Styles Along the Crooked Road

From old-time dance tunes to unaccompanied Primitive Baptist singing, numerous forms of music have flourished in the mountains of western Virginia.  Musical Styles Along the Crooked Road highlights the region’s rich musical traditions with photos, video clips, and essays. 

Visitors explore the traditions for which the highlands are best known today--fiddle-and-banjo tunes, bluegrass, ballads of lost love and death, sentimental mountain songs, and old-time gospel.  Yet Musical Styles Along the Crooked Road also showcases lesser known genres--blues, work songs, etc.--that have lost much of their presence in mountain life.  Included, too, are the newer traditions, such as high-energy electrified gospel singing.    
 

Crooked Road Royalty and Musical Styles Along the Crooked Road have been produced for the Crooked Road Music Trail by Ferrum College’s Blue Ridge Institute & Museum with funding from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification & Community Revitalization Commission.

The BRI galleries are open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., year-round. The galleries are also open Sundays, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., mid-May through mid-August. Admission is free.

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