They call it Poor Valley but that s the last notion you would get about the place if you kept your ears open. Especially on Saturday night. Then, around six o-clock, people start out from the hollows and hills and drive along Route 614 in the southwestern tip of Virginia, a road that winds through the valley s farms, crossing and recrossing the north fork of the Holston River like two blacksnakes in love. They converge on a nondescript twin-gabled store three miles up the river from Hiltons a store where no one has sold groceries for years. By seven o-clock, mountain people of all ages, college students and a professor or two have formed into small groups leaning against the cars and pickups next to the store.
Someone takes a quiet lick on a guitar.
Here and there is some soft, spontaneous singing in the dusk. Half an hour later, some 200 people have moved inside, to sit on wooden auditorium chairs that were obviously salvaged from an old school, and a woman with brown wavy hair is standing on the small wooden stage wearing a long dress and cradling an autoharp. She is Janette Carter, youngest daughter of the late A.P. Carter, and this is A.P. s grocery store. Everyone in the room knows what that means. On the stage, the night I was there, Janette mentioned the imported talent that would perform the Red Clay Ramblers, a young group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who spent eight months providing the music for Diamond Studs , an Off-Broadway musical about Jesse James.