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Southwest Virginia's Crooked Road is an under-the-radar driving trail – with banjo in hand, Zoey Goto discovers old-time music, Appalachian culture and tight-knit communities

- Zoey Goto

Picture the birthplace of country music and your mind may naturally drift to Nashville, where neon-lit honky-tonks hum from noon until night. But travel a few hundred miles further east, into the leafy foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and you'll discover a much older origin story – one that has quietly shaped the soundtrack of America.

I'm here to explore the Crooked Road, a 330-mile heritage music trail weaving through the misty contours of southwest Virginia's Appalachian Mountains. This immersive stretch of Americana links a network of rural small towns via ten major music hubs and over 60 affiliated venues, celebrating everything from front porch jam sessions to boot-stomping community dances, all set to a soundtrack of bluegrass and old-time tunes. Think of the twangy score from the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and you're in the right key.

I've even brought my banjo along for the ride, an instrument mostly resigned to a dusty corner since I first picked it up a decade ago. If anywhere can coax life back into its strings, it's this musical highway, I reason, touching down in Roanoke.

Let's start with the drive, because the Crooked Road lives up to its name. A couple of hours in, and I've begun to lean into the hairpin bends, which twist and turn through a landscape so lush and lyrical it's little wonder this stretch is regularly ranked among America's most scenic routes. Red-rust barns and verdant hills line the roadside as I pull into my first stop: Floyd, a free-spirited hippie town with a population of just 449.