Los Lobos member Cesar Rosas looked out over the Piedmont Street Stage crowd at Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion on Friday night. He pointed toward the restaurant just past stage left, where a sign spelled “Tacos” in large letters.
Such a sign made the band feel welcome, he said, smiling.
Bandmate David Hidalgo, gesturing toward the sign with the restaurant’s name, Mas Tequilas, added, “I could live here.”
It was the Los Angeles roots rock and blues band’s first time in the Tennessee/Virginia border-straddling Bristol, “a beautiful city,” Rosas said.
It’s only grown more so, and more alive, in the 25 years since Bristol Rhythm & Roots started. Both sides of downtown Bristol, depleted by mall culture in the late 20th century, were recovering when the festival began its history. These days, State Street and its environs are busy year-round, not just during one big September weekend.
The festival has not reported an attendance figure for this year, but in recent years has reported about 45,000 at the three-day event.
Birthplace of Country Music Executive Director Melissa Roberts said that the festival, the Birthplace of Country Music museum and 100.1 FM WBCM, Radio Bristol, have all contributed to downtown’s resurgence, but it has really been a community effort. Roberts noted that Karen Hester, owner of gift and home decor shop Cranberry Lane and The Southern Churn ice cream and candy shop, fought for downtown long before revitalization came.
It’s Roberts’ second year in charge of the nonprofit that umbrellas all three of those organizations. The Camden, New Jersey, native moved to Bristol during her high school years, with parents who are from the region. She had most recently run two regional nonprofits: Symphony of the Mountains in Kingsport, Tennessee, and family and population health organization Appalachian Promise Alliance, on Bristol’s Tennessee side.
When she came to live here in the late 1980s, she saw “a lot of closed up places and not really anything happening,” she said. “You look at it today and you can go down there just about any time and see people walking and shopping.”
The Sessions Hotel, on the Virginia side, and Bristol Hotel, in Tennessee, opened in recent years and are “gorgeous” places offering stays that overlook downtown, she said.
“So there’s a lot more going on downtown than there used to be, and we’re honored to be one part of that,” Roberts said.
Riding out the decades
Blakley-Mitchell Co. clothing store has been part of State Street Virginia’s 500 block since 1933, with the same ownership for 50 years, said store employee Rodger Williams, who has worked there for a dozen of them.
Williams, 64, grew up in the area and remembers the pre-mall years, when both sides of the street were filled with clothing shops, jewelers and department stores. Then came the long decline.
“There was a time that you could have come in downtown Bristol and probably bought at least 10 buildings with $100,000,” he said. “And now you have flats that are going for a million dollars or more.”
Blakley-Mitchell thrived through all of the eras with high-quality menswear and customer service that kept folks coming back, he said. As Bristol Rhythm & Roots has grown, the store has extended its Friday and Saturday hours to well after dark, and it has developed a client base that stretches well beyond Tennessee and Virginia, he said.
“You can’t rest on your laurels, because much of our clientele has passed on,” Williams said. “We’ve had the fathers and the grandfathers and the grandsons and great-grandsons still coming here. But we’re always looking to expand.”
Rhythm & Roots weekend “is one of the avenues that helps, because we’re meeting new people. We have customers from over in the Carolinas, I had folks who bought some things from Georgia yesterday.”
Some of them return during every festival.
“They know what we have. They like what we have,” he said. “They’ll come in here during this time of year to shop with us, take things back, or have us ship them.”
Selling music to a built-in audience of fans
A few doors down from Blakley-Mitchell, Cheap Thrill Records doesn’t have quite the lengthy State Street history, but owner Wyatt Lilly likes the decision he made to set up shop here.
Lilly had two West Virginia stores, one in Princeton that he opened in 1995 and one in Beckley that he launched four years later. After some friends encouraged him to check out Bristol, he noticed that the music-centric downtown, with its iconic sign that says “Bristol Va Tenn A Good Place to Live,” was lacking a business like his.
“If you’ve ever been down here when it’s not Rhythm & Roots, it’s just a totally charming downtown,” Lilly said. “The Virginia flags on one side, the Tennessee flags on the other. You got the big sign. Very walkable, you know, and just small enough to get that small town charm.
“But then you have some big-city stuff, too, like the theaters and festivals, and you’ve got really fine dining down here, different shops. I just kept thinking to myself, you know, if somebody else opens up a record store on State Street, I’m going to hate them. I really should do it. Just take the leap.”
He closed the Beckley store in favor of Bristol.
“And it’s a bit of a drive for me. It’s about an hour and 35 minutes because we’re still living in West Virginia,” Lilly said. “But it’s doable, you know? It’s worth it.”
It’s Cheap Thrills’ fifth Rhythm & Roots Reunion.
“People have really embraced us down here,” he said. “This is kind of a music town, the legacy and history, the Birthplace of Country Music and all that kind of thing, the theaters and all the live music around here. We filled a niche and just were blended right into part of the community.”
Record Store Day, an every-April event, brings the biggest business to Cheap Thrills. But festival weekend delivers thousands of music fans, walking on State Street. Lilly’s shop, a short trot from multiple outdoor stages, including State Street with its “Good Place to Live” sign in the background, is on great real estate, he said.
“And that’s one reason we decided to take the plunge and move here,” he said.
Most other weekends are solid, too. Day-trippers attending theater or a concert at the Paramount Bristol stop in. So do Hard Rock Casino denizens. So do Birthplace of Country Music Museum visitors.
“We have people literally from all over the world that come to this museum,” he said. “We have groups from Northern Europe and groups from Japan and things like that, and of course, they don’t come all the way here just for the museum, but they make it a part of whatever they’re doing.”
Lilly said he has become a sort of “cheerleader” for downtown Bristol. Roberts, the Birthplace of Country Music director, said she expects plenty more from around the world next year, when the festival celebrates 100 years since the recordings called the Bristol Sessions, which produced the first records from Country Music Hall of Fame members The Carter Family, from Hiltons, and Jimmie Rodgers, from Meridian, Mississippi.
“We as Appalachians are storytellers,” she said. “And we do a great job of setting those stories to music.”
