About

The Blue Ridge Music Center celebrates the music and musicians of the Blue Ridge. Established by the U.S. Congress in 1985, the site includes an outdoor amphitheater and indoor interpretive center used to highlight an important strand of American musical culture, which is still alive and thriving in the region.

The site is operated through a partnership between the National Park Service and the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation.

In this region one finds many variations of the ancient fiddle and banjo music of Virginia and North Carolina. This music can be traced to the meeting of the African banjo and the European fiddle in the Tidewater before our nation was created. Here also are found older ballads and religious music that reach deeply into the American past.

Our concert series, performance-talks and museum, The Roots of American Music, traces the history of this music through local artists back to the creation of the music generations ago by persons from Europe and West Africa, and show how it continues to influence many forms of folk and popular music made across America today.