While the rest of America was roaring to jazz during the ’20s, in a small corner of the South, where back roads snake through early-morning mist and porches are used for melody-making as much as sitting in rocking chairs, another form of music was quietly taking root. In the heart of southern Appalachia, at the convergence of northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, a set of early recording sessions, conducted by a New York City record producer over two epoch-making weeks in the summer of 1927, would catapult the careers of the Carter Family from Virginia, the “first family of country music,” and the Mississippi singer and songwriter Jimmie Rodgers, who would become known as “the father of country music.”

The recordings would become an inflection point in the history of what we now refer to as country music. And though musicologists may take issue with the assigning of its origin to any one time or place, the famous Bristol Sessions of 1927 were influential enough to be widely referred to as the “big bang” of country music, a topic that the documentarian Ken Burns is taking a broad look at in an upcoming series on PBS.

In April, I headed east of Nashville to the place where those early sessions were recorded, and where the music they gave birth to are celebrated: the Tri-Cities of Kingsport, Johnson City and Bristol, which is a two-state town straddling the border of Tennessee and Virginia. In 1998, Congress named Bristol the “Birthplace of Country Music.” Sixteen years later, the Virginia side built the 24,000-square-foot Birthplace of Country Music Museum, a sleek Smithsonian Institution affiliate and part of the nonprofit Birthplace of Country Music organization, which, during the third week of September, hosts the Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion, one of the largest assemblages of country music, Americana, roots and bluegrass in the United States.