Lots to catch up on this week.

To start, I had a couple River City Magazine articles published this month, and I thought I’d share the links and say a little about them. The first one is the result of my two-day Crooked Road trip, which I mentioned in a recent CD Monday post.

The Crooked Road initiative — linking the pieces of musical history that are spread out across the western part of the state — strikes me as profoundly good and worthwhile. I love the idea that, one day, Virginia will be seen as a tourist destination more for its musical tradition than for its military one. Maybe that’s optimistic, but visiting places like the Floyd Country Store and the Carter Family Fold made me want to believe. It also made me proud to be from Virginia. I’d love to get back out to that part of the state sometime soon.

Thanks again to Andrew Cothern and Virginia Tourism for the invitation and for doing such a great job with this initiative, and to Doug Nunnally for making the mix CDs that accompanied the drives between landmarks.

Click here to read the article over at Richmond Navigator’s site — or pick up a hard copy at one of these locations — and scroll down to check out the Hillbilly Gypsies, the group we saw at the Carter Family Fold that Saturday night. (This video is from a different show, but they do a damn fine “Pretty Polly.”)

Hillbilly Gypsies — “Pretty Polly” [Spotify/iTunes]