High on a Mountain: Pennsylvania’s Legacy of Country Music

Country music had grassroots origins in Pennsylvania. This photograph by Ben Shahn for the Resettlement Administration was taken at Westmoreland Homesteads, a model subsistence community created through a New Deal program for laid-off coal workers. Here a young resident plays guitar and mouth organ, 1937.
Library of Congress

In 1607 Great Britain commenced the establishment of two colonial plantations. One of these was Jamestown in Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America. The other was much closer to home.

The Ulster plantation was formed in the nine northern counties of Ireland. The goal of the colony was, in part, to extend British and Anglican hegemony over the Catholic and Gaelic-speaking Irish. The British had been trying to subdue their Irish neighbors since Norman times but had been unsuccessful in extending their rule much beyond Dublin. Lands in the plantation were deeded primarily to British and Scottish noble families, and Protestant settlers were recruited from the Western Isles of Scotland and from the Lowlands below the River Clyde. Unlike their British patrons who were Anglican, these Scots were Presbyterian. Like their Irish neighbors, they were Celtic people with many of the same traditions and a related Gaelic dialect, but they did not share Ireland’s Catholic faith.

Scots immigration to Ulster grew in the early 17th century, but violence erupted regularly with the Irish. The economy ebbed and flowed with the vagaries of trade between the American colonies, the Caribbean and Europe, and ruinous recessions occurred. The landlords continually raised rents on their tenants. Life in the colony became increasingly difficult and tenuous, particularly for poor families. As the 18th century began, many Ulster Scots began to look for greener pastures in North America.

But there were challenges there, too. Many of the English colonies in America favored Anglican settlers and actively discriminated against people of other faiths. Maryland was a Catholic colony and Massachusetts was Puritan. By and large there was only one truly welcoming destination for them in the British colonies.

When William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1681, he did so as a member of a persecuted Quaker religious minority. The pacifist founder wrote religious tolerance into the original Frame of Government in 1682 and the Charter of Privileges in 1701, guaranteeing equality and tolerance for all monotheists. It was this religious tolerance and the promise of farmland and property free of landlords and rents that drew the Ulster Scots to the ports of Wilmington and Philadelphia. By 1706 Pennsylvania was the primary destination for the immigrants we know as Scots Irish. In the ensuing century, several hundred thousand of them came to Pennsylvania, and they may have represented as much as a third of the colony’s population by the 1770s. Many Pennsylvania families trace their lineage to these immigrants from Ulster. While some of the earliest Scots Irish immigrants settled in and around Philadelphia, the bulk of these newly arrived families pointed themselves westward to the Conestoga and Cumberland valleys and toward the long ridges of the Appalachians.

Along with their families and often meager resources and worldly possessions, the Scots Irish brought many facets of their heritage with them into the Appalachian wilderness. Every settlement had its kirk and presbytery, and their early towns were founded around these churches. Those settlements were named for the places they had left behind in Ulster and the names still dot the Pennsylvania landscape: Derry, Londonderry, Tyrone, Armagh, Donegal, Antrim, Sligo and many others. They brought important skills, crafts and industries with them ranging from weaving and distilling to milling and gunsmithing. They also brought a rich and ancient musical tradition to their new home in Pennsylvania, and it may be their most lasting and important legacy.

The traditional Celtic music of Ulster and the rest of Ireland, as well as Scotland, Wales and Brittany, underpins much of America’s popular musical heritage. It’s linked deeply to traditions of Gaelic poetry, storytelling and lively dances, and it was performed at cèilidhs, traditional house parties where families gathered for celebrations of weddings, harvests, and important holidays and occasions. The songs ranged from slow airs and laments to rollicking jigs and reels and were strongly regional in flavor. Instruments included bagpipes large and small, harps, hand and frame drums like the bodhran, flutes and whistles, and especially the fiddle. Many of these instruments were small, light and eminently portable and went with their owners deep  into the mountainous borderlands of western Pennsylvania, then south into the Virginia, Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama highlands. It was in the mountains that the music began to change into something new and completely American.

As the Scots Irish moved south and west, they encountered many other kinds of immigrants from many parts of the world. As Celtic musicians heard and played with musicians of African, Spanish, German and Acadian origins, musical ideas, instrumentation, song structures and tunings evolved. The fiddle was paired with African banjos, Spanish guitars or Italian mandolins. The sound evolved through the 18th and 19th centuries on back porches and in churches, saloons and dance halls in all the Appalachian states, in the Ozarks, and as far west as Texas. It came to be called old timey or mountain music or, more dismissively, hillbilly music. By the 1930s, with the arrival of recorded music and “barn dance” radio broadcasts like the Grand Ole Opry (starting in 1925), the term “country music” came into wider use, especially in east Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, and it stuck. By the 1940s the root-stock carried from Ulster to 18th-century Pennsylvania had blossomed into one of the world’s most popular musical genres. From its earliest stars to the present day, many of country’s best-known and most talented practitioners could trace their ancestry back to Scots Irish immigrants, including the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton.

Today, country music is thought of as a Southern genre, but the musicians who created it came first to Pennsylvania, where the music remains alive and well. Pennsylvania’s contribution to country continued through the 20th century and right to the present day. Nowhere has that contribution been more consequential than in the booming voice of “America’s Guitar.”

Martin archivist Jason Ahner holds Jimmie Rodgers’ custom OOO-45 guitar, with mother of pearl inlay for Rodgers’ name on the fingerboard and “Blue Yodel” on the headstock.
Guitar, C. F. Martin & Co. Collection / Photo, PHMC

America’s Guitar

Jason Ahner might just have the best job in the world of music. He is the company archivist at C. F. Martin & Co. of Nazareth in Pennsylvania’s Northampton County. In this capacity, he is responsible for the company’s extensive collection of paper records, images, tools, memorabilia and instruments that stretches back to Martin’s founding in 1833. It is difficult to overestimate the historical significance of this collection. Martin is the most famous and arguably the best large-scale maker of quality guitars in the United States — and has been for a long time. The history of Martin is woven through the history of American vernacular music, especially country music.

The archive is housed in a climate-controlled room at the Martin factory that also contains Jason’s small office. My visit with him began with a discussion about Martin’s role in country music history. That discussion was punctuated with short jaunts into the archive shelves to retrieve some truly astonishing documents and images. I asked Jason how far back Martin’s association with country went.

Rodgers had “thanks” painted on the reverse side of the guitar large enough to be read by his audiences when he flipped it.
Guitar, C. F. Martin & Co. Collection / Photo, PHMC

“Maybe the beginning of Martin’s connection with country music starts with Jimmie Rodgers.” Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman,” was a popular musician who hailed from Mississippi. His style and musical choices were greatly influenced by a youth spent working in various railroad jobs with his father and brother. While working on the railroad, he was exposed to African American blues and call-and-response field chants, Cajun music, and songs of Mexican and Texas cowboys and railroad workers. These mixed and rich influences led to a bluesy and idiosyncratic style that often featured his trademark yodeling (another one of his nicknames was the “Blue Yodeler”). He was also known in some quarters as the “Father of Country Music.” His short recording career, which began in the late 1920s, enshrined him as one of country’s finest songwriters and performers.

Prior to the 1920s the bulk of Martin’s production had been classical models, but as they lost business to Spanish manufacturers, they began to concentrate more on steel-string guitars for performers outside the classical repertoire. Sometime in the mid-1920s Jimmy Rodgers got his hands on one of Martin’s 2-17 model steel-string mahogany guitars. He loved it, and he wrote to owner C. F. Martin III to tell him so. Before too long that correspondence led to a special instrument. In 1928 Martin delivered a brand-new custom OOO-45 to Rodgers. His name was inlaid in mother of pearl on the fingerboard. Rodgers later had a sign painter letter the word “THANKS” in large block letters on the guitar’s back so he could flip it around at the end of his performances and express his gratitude to his fans. This modification likely horrified the luthiers at Martin, but it certainly made the instrument even more distinctive. The long collaboration between country musicians and Martin guitars had begun.

A variety of Martin guitars represent the Golden Era, 1930–45, at the Martin Guitar Museum in Nazareth. Photo, PHMC

Jason produced the original correspondence from Rodgers to Martin from his archive shelves, all of it on the letter-head of various hotels along the road where Rodgers plied his trade as a working musician. There were also letters from “Mother” Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family, Gene Autry, and countless other famous and obscure early and mid-20th-century country musicians discussing the details of newly ordered or custom instruments and thanking the company for the quality of their service and craftsmanship.

When we left Jason’s office and the archive and made our way into Martin’s small but impressive museum and exhibit area, the history and influence Martin has had on country music’s past and present became even more evident. The exhibits trace the evolution of the various models the company has produced in its 170-plus years in business. They also feature original and reproduction instruments that belonged to some of America’s most important and popular musicians including Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.

Elvis Presley’s 1950s leather-covered Martin Dreadnought, used in the Sun Records recordings.
Guitar, C. F. Martin & Co. Collection / Photo, PHMC

The museum exhibits spotlight many innovations that appear in almost all modern acoustic guitars, innovations that began life in the Martin factory. None would be as important as the development of large, deep-bodied guitars in the 1930s. Originally built for Oliver Ditson Co. after World War I, the dreadnaught, or D series, guitars were produced under Martin’s own trademark after 1931. Named as they were for battleship-class warships, dreadnaught guitars have a deep, clear, booming voice that is probably the first thing most musicians think of when they describe a typical “Martin sound.” Their popularity exploded when Bill Monroe and a few other musicians in the 1940s pioneered a fast, clear and highly stylized acoustic variant of country that came to be known as “bluegrass,” after the fabled horse country of Kentucky. Bluegrass bands featured stage performers gathered around single microphones and rotating up to the mike for blistering virtuoso solos. These bands always included resonator banjos that could drown out most other instruments. The Martin D-18s, D-28s, D-35s and D-45s could more than hold their own in bluegrass ensembles, and they became known as “banjo killers.” Martin dreadnaughts and other models found their way into the hands of many of country’s most important and talented guitar players, such as Lester Flatt, Norman Blake, Doc Watson, Clarence White, Tony Rice and countless other pickers who played the Grand Ole Opry and are enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Martin remains the instrument of choice for many modern country, bluegrass, alt-country and Americana musicians from the Avett Brothers to Jason Isbelle to Sturgill Simpson.

Near the end of our tour through the museum collections, Jason placed one of the very first 2-17 model guitars built in the early 1920s in my hands and said, “Here! Play it.” I was utterly terrified, but he assured me the priceless instrument was in good condition, well taken care of, and like all great instruments needed to be played. I sat down and ran some of the strings up and down the neck and then cycled through the chords of a song. The little guitar hummed. The bass strings thumped with surprising authority, the high strings were clear and sweet as spring water. The action was forgiving to even my fumbling fingers. For a moment I was lost in the music and in the sound of this iconic part of Pennsylvania’s and America’s musical heritage. For a little while, time stood still. The beating heart of country may be in Nashville or Austin, but its voice is in Nazareth.

Shows at Sunset Park featured some of the biggest names in country music in the second half of the 20th century.
Courtesy of the Waltman Family

Every Sunday Afternoon

Between 1940 and 1995 residents of southeastern Pennsylvania, northeastern Maryland, and Delaware who wanted to hear the very best country and bluegrass musicians in the world did not have to make the pilgrimage to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Instead, every Sunday from spring through fall, they simply piled into the family car or pickup and made their way to a farm outside of Jennersville in Chester County. Here they forked over a modest admission fee (10 cents in the 1940s, 10 bucks in the 1990s) and sat on folding chairs and on boards spanned across cinder-block supports to watch the likes of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Hank Williams, Merle Travis, Kitty Wells, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Ernest Tubb, Loretta Lynn, the Louvin Brothers, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Randy Travis and many other members of country music royalty play their hearts out at Sunset Park. So important was this regional venue that many of these luminaries played the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville on Saturday night, piled into a waiting bus when the show ended, and drove all night to get to Chester County in time for their slot at Sunset. The story of how one of country’s premier venues appeared and thrived in a Pennsylvania cow pasture is rooted in the vision of a farmer and country music fan and in the mid-20th-century return of some of Ulster’s children to the place where they first entered the New World.

“Uncle” Roy Waltman was a dairy farmer, and he founded the venue on 11 acres of his property in 1940. He had motivations both financial and personal. The Depression had pushed him and many other Pennsylvania farmers to the limit, and Waltman was casting about for a source of additional income. Country music was enjoying a surge in popularity, and some regional outdoor fair venues were starting to attract crowds, as were similar venues in Texas, Virginia and many other places. Waltman was a big fan of the music and, with no real background in promotion but lots of enthusiasm, set out to try to bring country music to Jennersville. He had local carpenters build a substantial covered sound stage in a wooded corner of his land, complete with dressing rooms. He worked with Philadelphia promotors to book acts and to advertise, and he opened the gates and hoped for the best.

Early acts included vaudeville performers, wrestlers, acrobats, jugglers and sideshow attractions, but music was always the draw. There were lots of local and regional bands but also big-name headliners right from the start. Tex Ritter was there early on, and Hank Snow’s U.S. premier show was at Sunset Park, not in Nashville. There were other contemporary outdoor park country music venues in the region like Gloryland in Delaware, New River Ranch in Maryland, and C-Bar-C, Musselman’s Grove, Valley View Park, and Ravine Park in Pennsylvania, but none of them ever rivaled the facilities and the lineups that appeared at Sunset Park. Performers played three shows Sunday afternoon and evening, and the crowds poured in. The reason they did owed much to regional migration patterns in the mid-20th century.

Founder and proprietor of Sunset Park, Uncle Roy Waltman, seated, with the house band, the North Carolina Ridge Runners, circa 1944. Courtesy of the Waltman Family

The 1940s and ’50s saw massive migrations of rural Southerners, black and white, northward for economic opportunities in midwestern and northeastern factories. Part of this migration saw many white families from the mountains and coal fields of Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia travel the “Hillbilly Highway” to Detroit, Chicago and the Upper Midwest. A lesser known but substantial branch of that highway led to Baltimore, Delaware, and southeastern and southcentral Pennsylvania, where there were steel mills, ports, munitions factories and other industries actively hiring workers. Baltimore and its environs developed a bluegrass and country music scene in the 1950s and ’60s that was lively and popular thanks to these new arrivals. This was a population that was hungry for the music they grew up listening to on back porches and local roadhouses and on radio broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry, National Barn Dance, and Louisiana Hayride. When their musical heroes began to appear at Sunset Park, they flocked there in droves. In an interesting historical twist, many of these mid-20th-century migrants could trace their family lineages back to Northern Ireland, and those that settled in Pennsylvania were returning to the very place their ancestors pioneered in the 18th century.

Lawrence Waltman, second generation owner of Sunset Park, with Dolly Parton, who debuted her legendary song “Coat of Many Colors” there.
Courtesy of the Waltman Family

Historic and even transcendent events occurred at Sunset Park more than a few times. Mandolinist David Grisman met Jerry Garcia (founding member of the Grateful Dead) in the parking lot at a Bill Monroe show in 1964. This was the first step in a collaboration that eventually led to Old & In the Way, one of the premier “newgrass” ensembles of the 1970s, and to many other musical projects between the two virtuoso musicians. Dolly Parton debuted her song “Coat of Many Colors” at the park in the mid-1960s, singing and playing alone with her guitar and leaving a stunned and appreciative crowd in tears when she finished.

Sunset Park could claim at least one home-grown musician as a real country music superstar. Among the families that migrated to the region were the Campbells from Lansing, North Carolina. Traditionally storekeepers, they opened a general store in Rising Sun, Maryland, just across the Pennsylvania border. Among their 13 children was a daughter Ola, a gifted guitarist and banjo player and one of the greatest songwriters and performers in bluegrass and old-time music history. Ola Belle Reed and her brother Alex Campbell headlined the North Carolina Ridge Runners, the house band at Sunset Park for 26 years. Her long tenure at Sunset introduced many fans and musicians to her original songs and her classic interpretations of old standards, and many famous musicians from Marty Stuart to Del McCoury to Tim O’Brian went on to record her songs and include them in setlists at performances across the country. She became a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986 and remained an enduring and beloved figure in country and bluegrass music until her death in 2002.

When Roy Waltman died in 1957, his son Lawrence and daughter-in-law Hazel took over operation of the park. It remained a venue where country and bluegrass music could be performed and heard in its purest form, free of the symphonic strings and heavily engineered arrangements so common in Nashville recordings in the middle and late 20th century. Every Sunday it was just the musicians, their instruments and the fans: raw, unadorned and beautiful. Sunset Park finally closed in 1995 as regional interest in country music faded and development pressure in Chester County ratcheted up. Lawrence Waltman passed away at the age of 100 in 2018. He lived to see the park commemorated with a Pennsylvania Historical Marker by the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission in April of that year.

There’s a shopping center and retirement community where the park once stood, but Sunset’s legacy persists in memory, in photographs and recordings, and in Pennsylvania’s country music heritage, which includes a number of homegrown performers. Among those musicians is a York County native who is considered bluegrass royalty.

Del McCoury on stage, 2019.
Photo, PHMC

High on a Mountain

Pennsylvania has produced its share of home-grown country and bluegrass musicians. They range from obscure or modestly well-known performers like yodeling queen Rosalie Allen of Old Forge and mandolin wizard Butch Baldassari of Scranton to household names like Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel and the great guitar player David Bromberg, both born in Philadelphia. But without a doubt the most famous living Pennsylvania country musician is bluegrass legend Delano Floyd “Del” McCoury.

Del’s clear, sweet tenor is the quintessential “high and lonesome” sound that bluegrass is built on. He sang and played banjo in a variety of bands in Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1950s, became a member of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys in the early ’60s, and struck out on his own thereafter. Today, Del’s rhythm guitar helps drive the Del McCoury Band that includes Del, now 80, his sons Ronnie on mandolin and Rob on banjo, fiddle player Jason Carter, and bassist Alan Bartram. The band is renowned for its deeply traditional approach to bluegrass, its integration of nontraditional material, and its startling and wonderful collaborations with musicians from many other genres. The band and its members have racked up numerous awards and accolades since they formed in 1992, and Del has been inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

For 12 years, Del and his sons have hosted the Delfest music festival in Cumberland, Maryland, on Memorial Day weekend. The festival has grown into one of the premier bluegrass, Americana, alt-country and old-time musical gatherings in the nation, with more than 30,000 people attending to watch dozens of bands and performers on three stages over the course of its three days. On the day before the 2019 festival began, I sat across a picnic table from Del McCoury to talk about his family and his musical roots in Pennsylvania.

I asked him about his birthplace, and I noticed that his soft brogue still reflects the southern highlands where his family came from. “York County is where I was born. My two sisters and my brother were born down there [in North Carolina].”

The McCourys were part of the Great Migration from the southern mountains to the lower Susquehanna Valley and upper Chesapeake. The family name and related variants, such as McCorry, McCorley and MacCoury, are common in the Scottish islands and Ireland. In 1938 Del’s parents, Grover and Hazel McCoury, moved from a farm near Bakersville in the Roan Mountain area of North Carolina to York County with their three children looking for work. They added three more children in Pennsylvania, including Del. “Daddy bought a farm in Spring Grove, that’s where I was born.” His father sold the farm when the war broke out, was trained as a machinist, and went to work at a naval munitions plant in York, buying a new 90-acre farm for $1,700 after the war. “That farm was in Paradise Township, and I mostly grew up there.” Del had a farm kid’s childhood, and after he married and began a family in the early 1960s, he went to work in the timber industry for his wife  Jean’s family.

The Del McCoury Band hits a high note—from left to right, Ronnie McCoury on mandolin, Jason Carter on fiddle, Alan Bartram on bass, and Del on guitar.
Photo, PHMC

Music was always a part of his life. His mother was a musician and his older brother, Grover Jr., was an important early influence. “My older brother died about two years ago, and he’s the one that taught me how to play the guitar.” Del came to the banjo from hearing Earl Scruggs on records and on the radio and became proficient with the instrument in his late teens and early 20s. He began getting paid gigs as a working musician in the evenings and on weekends, mostly as a banjo player. This led to a stint in Nashville playing guitar and singing with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys in 1963 and ’64.

Afterward, Del struck out on his own, traveling first to California, then back to Pennsylvania, and fronting his own band, the Dixie Pals. It was at this time that he met Ola Belle Reed and Alex Campbell. “Ola Belle asked me if she could play me some songs she’d written, and she did right there at a picnic table at Sunset Park.” Del visited Ola Belle and Alex in Rising Sun with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and left with a number of tunes that are still in his repertoire. Among them was one of Del’s first big hits and the title song for his second album on Rounder Records, “High on a Mountain,” a tune that still seems tailor-made for his distinctive and plaintive tenor.

As it happens, Del’s story is also part of the Martin guitar story. He’s a Martin signature artist. “I have a bunch of ’em, mostly D-28s and a D-18.” There are two special edition Martin Del McCoury namesake models. Del’s reputation as a fine storyteller is certainly well-founded, and the subject of guitars brought up a great one. Upon switching to guitar when he joined Bill Monroe’s band, Monroe handed him a 1939 Martin D-28. Bill had bought the guitar because he tended to hire young, talented musicians to play in his band, in part because he didn’t have to pay them very much. These young men usually couldn’t afford a quality instrument, so Monroe provided one. Before Del, the guitar had been played by a string of iconic bluegrass performers including Lester Flatt, Clyde Moody and Jimmy Martin. When Del left Monroe’s band, his place was taken by Peter Rowan, then a young and rowdy 23-year-old. “Well, Peter took that guitar to a party, and when he left the party he forgot about it!” When Rowan realized his mistake and rushed back to the party, the guitar was gone. “Nobody’s seen it since!” said Del. Bill Monroe had a reputation as a stern and demanding band leader with a real temper. One can only imagine his reaction to this unwelcome bit of news.

Del McCoury performs with his sons Ronnie on mandolin and Rob on banjo.
Photo, PHMC

Del raised his family in York County. As his boys grew up and became accomplished musicians in their own right, they joined their father on stage. The band’s popularity grew, and their talent and work ethic were undeniable. In the early 1990s they took a big gamble and made the move to Nashville, and the rest is bluegrass history.

Shady Grove

It’s a cold and dank midwinter night, but it’s warm by the woodstove in the back room of the old log house in Cumberland County. There are eight or nine musicians seated around the trestle table and 20 or so guests at the potluck, listening and enjoying the evening. Scott Matlock, the fiddle player, calls a tune in A minor. Scott, a brilliant musician, is playing in a furious tempo, and it takes a bar or so for the rest of us, a collection of guitars, mandolins, banjos and harmonicas, to catch up and find our places in harmony. “Shady Grove,” a song that has roots in 16th-century Britain, swirls through the house in quick step.

Peaches in the summertime,
Apples in the fall.
If I can’t get the gal I love,
Don’t want no gal at all.

It’s magical, poignant, completely absorbing. Everyone in this room is from central Pennsylvania, and most of us have ancestors in places like Ulster, Aberdeenshire, Kerry and Cork. The song is in our DNA and is part of our birthright. This music blossomed and its many branches grew throughout the Appalachians and the Southeast. But the deepest root is right here. Around this table, we are keeping something important alive in the place where it began. We could play all night.

For More Information

Pennsylvania’s role in country and bluegrass history is documented in Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr’s Wayfaring Strangers (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), which follows the journey of the Scots and their music to Ulster and eventually America, where in Appalachia their ballads and tunes mixed with the music of other native and immigrant groups to become country music.

The story of C. F. Martin & Co. and their product is comprehensively recounted in Richard Johnston and Dick Boak’s Martin Guitars: A History (Hal Leonard Corp., 2008). A companion volume, Martin Guitars: A Technical Reference (Hal Leonard Corp, 2009), offers photographs and general information on the guitars, from woods to bodies, necks, headstocks and bridges, as well as the company’s electric guitars, mandolins and ukuleles.

C. F. Martin & Co. is located at 510 Sycamore Street in Nazareth, Northampton County. Guided tours begin in the Visitors Center and move through the factory, following the guitarmaking process from rough lumber to finished guitar. The adjacent Martin Guitar Museum exhibits more than 170 guitars crafted through six generations, in addition to ukuleles and mandolins, tools, and ephemera. For information on hours, tours and events, visit martinguitar.com.

Sunset Park’s star attraction is the subject of Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line by Henry Glassie, Clifford R. Murphy and Douglas Dowling Peach (Dust-to-Digital, 2015), which also includes two CDs of her influential music.

News and tour dates for the Del McCoury Band can be found at delmccouryband.com.

Joe Baker is an archaeologist, writer and editor. His previous articles for Pennsylvania Heritage were “Backcast: Pennsylvania’s Legacy of Split-Cane Fly Rods” (Spring 2019) and “Castanea … From Blight to Backcross Breeding: Restoring the American Chestnut in Pennsylvania” (Fall 2017).