Step Into 100 Years of Asheville’s Sound

In August 1925, a portable recording studio took over a suite in the brand‑new George Vanderbilt Hotel in downtown Asheville. For ten days, legendary producer Ralph Peer invited fiddlers, banjo players, singers, and dance bands from across the region to step up to the acoustic recording horn and cut their songs directly to wax.

The result? The first commercial recordings ever made in Appalachia—an on‑location experiment that captured the region’s ballads, fiddle tunes, gospel, blues, and vaudeville inside a single hotel room. If the 1927 Bristol Sessions that came two years later are remembered as the “Big Bang of Country Music,” the Asheville Sessions lit the fuse. They proved the mountains were full of music the world needed to hear, and they set the stage for the explosion of American roots music that followed.