Country music uses a perfect synergy between people, places and things to create art that defines the folklore of an entire nation. And there is perhaps no better way to examine this notion than by visiting Bristol, Va., and Bristol, Tenn.
Because the wages of dynamic commercial booms and the digital age have drastically altered Nashville, Tenn., and Austin, Texas, they differ from the cozy, 46-square-mile Virginia/Tennessee border city of Bristol, country music’s ancestral hometown. Unlike the two modern metropolises, Bristol hasn’t fundamentally changed much, topographically and real estate-wise, since the advent of the genre at the end of the 1920s.