As the Crooked Road Marching String Band headed toward newly inaugurated Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger on Saturday afternoon, a man called out to its members: “What are you going to play?”
Another spectator, a woman, replied in jest, “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain,” then began singing the chorus “in sort of a hillbilly accent,” said band member Tim Thornton of Shawsville.
He and the other couple dozen musicians in the Crooked Road troupe hoped to dispel that sort of stereotype, Thornton said.
“People don’t know and appreciate how important [mountain music culture] is economically to the state, how important it is culturally,” he said.
The group didn’t get much time to represent. While other organizations stopped for a minute of performance in front of Spanberger and the other two newly inaugurated officeholders — Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi and Attorney General Jay Jones — the Crooked Road Marching String Band received instructions to march on through, no stops.
That order inspired a bit of improvisation. Several of the troupe members broke out in a dance while the others played “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss,” a way to make it a show without stopping to put on a show.
It didn’t spoil the experience, said band member Gina Dilg of Radford, who held her fiddle by its neck while she flatfooted a bit with five others from the group.
“I forget that the majority of people in this world don’t really see fiddles and banjos on a regular basis,” Dilg said. “And so just seeing all the looks of joy on everyone’s faces was really cool.”
They joined a bevy of marching ensembles that included the Virginia Military Institute Corps of Cadets, dance teams from Hasang Korean School and the Cultural Center of India, high school marching bands and Norfolk State University’s marching band — which closed with a funky version of Kool & The Gang’s pop chestnut “Celebration.”
The Crooked Road unit, which includes some of the finest old-time and bluegrass musicians in Southwest Virginia, didn’t need time to rehearse, said Tyler Hughes of Big Stone Gap, executive director of The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail. Once he found players whose schedules allowed them to make the event, the rest was simple.
“One of the best aspects I think of the music in Southwest Virginia is how community-oriented it is and how close-knit we all are,” Hughes said in a phone interview last week. “If you play old-time or bluegrass music, you’re seeing each other every weekend at fiddlers’ conventions, and you’re getting together at Galax or seeing each other at places like the Carter Fold and the Floyd Country Store all the time … so it’s actually really easy to be able to put together this group.”
The players came from along the Crooked Road, he said.
“We’re so fortunate to live in a region that’s home to hundreds of incredibly talented musicians and dancers, and what I always like to call cultural caretakers,” Hughes said. “It’s not always easy organizing a big group, but having such a large and deep pool of talent makes it really easy to be able to do this.”
