Music From The Land Of The Sky: 1925 / Various

In the late summer of 1925, pioneering producer Ralph Peer directed a series of recording sessions atop the George Vanderbilt Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina that would become the stuff of legend. They were the first commercial recordings ever made in Appalachia and included several influential "old-time" musicians (Wade Ward, Ernest V. Stoneman, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Kelly Harrell, and Henry Whitter) alongside regional prize-winning fiddlers, banjo players, harmonica soloists, and even visiting vaudeville and pop performers like Emmett Miller and the Carolina Club Orchestra. The immensely entertaining and historically important records they produced include mountain ballads, folk tunes, ragtime instrumentals, novelties, and more; and yet, these recordings have been overlooked for a century because of their extreme rarity and technological limitations. Peer would go on to direct the famed 1927 Bristol Sessions, widely considered the "Big Bang of Country Music" - but these 1925 Asheville recordings lit the fuse. The long-play 84-minute CD includes 28 complete selections, meticulously restored from the original discs with no artificial enhancements, and a 128-page hardback book by renowned scholars Ted Olson and Tony Russell, telling in detail the fascinating story of the 1925 Asheville Sessions with dozens of rare photographs, a complete discography, song lyrics, color reproductions of all original labels, and biographies of all session participants. Also available as a vinyl 2-LP set.