Bristol Sessions Nights Night 4: Mountain Songs

Long before 1927, the songs were already here. Ballads carried across the ocean from Scotland and Ireland, kept alive for generations in the hollers of Southern Appalachia, passed from porch to porch by people who never wrote a note of it down. When the recording machines finally came to Bristol, farmers, millhands, and preachers walked down out of the hills and sang what their grandparents had taught them. The mountains had been holding those songs the whole time.

We're spending the next year honoring that legacy.

Bristol Sessions Nights is a 12-night songwriter series running monthly through the 2027 centennial of the original Bristol Sessions. One stage. Real songwriters. The stories behind every song.

This is Night 4: Mountain Songs. A night for the ballads, bluegrass, and old-time sounds born on Appalachian front porches, tracing the line from the deep hollers of 1927 to the artists keeping the tradition alive…