Country music as a commercial entity began with the Carter Family, and their descendants—both actual and artistic—are still influential today. The Carter Family hailed from the Clinch region in Virginia. A. P. Carter learned to play the fiddle in his youth, and absorbed the traditional, old-time music of the region which, due to its relative isolation, was largely comprised of English folk songs that were not greatly influenced by other types of American popular music. A. P. also sang with a gospel quartet, but wanderlust struck, and he traveled for a time before returning to Virginia, where he met his wife Sara. She was also musical, playing the autoharp and singing in a group. After they were married in 1915 A. P. and Sara began performing at dances, church socials, and other local events. Eventually Sara's cousin Maybelle, a superb guitar player, joined them, and they performed as the Carter Family.
Ralph Peer, a distributor for Victor Records, recorded the first "country music" record —two sides by Fiddlin' John Carson, a local fiddle champion—at the request of Polk Brockman, who owned a record shop in Atlanta. To Peer's astonishment, Brockman sold the entire lot of five hundred records in a few days. The event convinced Victor executives that there was a market for "old-time" music. The label sent Peer to major cities in the south to find new acts, and at his first stop in Bristol, Tennessee, he got wind of the Carter Family. Their first records sold well, and he signed them to a long-term contract in 1928.
The Carter Family quickly became national stars. They recorded a number of local favorites that are now considered the core repertoire of country and folk music, including "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Wabash Cannonball," and "Wildwood Flower." They also performed white gospel songs, including "Can the Circle Be Unbroken." They were popular both before and after the Depression, but eventually broke up in 1943.
The legacies of the Carter Family are many. When A. P. had exhausted his repertoire he traveled the mountains in Virginia and Tennessee with guitarist Leslie Riddle, collecting folk songs from older residents; these efforts probably preserved a number of songs that would otherwise have been lost. Maybelle Carter's idiosyncratic style of alternating between picking the melody line of a song and strumming the chords is the foundation of bluegrass guitar technique. After the Carter Family dissolved Maybelle formed a new group, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, with her daughters Anita, Helen, and June. Anita and June went on to successful solo careers, the latter with her husband, Johnny Cash. A. P. and Sara's daughter Janelle founded the Carter Family Memorial Music Center in Virginia, a rural arts organization devoted to the preservation of old-time and bluegrass music and rural dance styles.
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The Hutchinson Family Singers, Charles Tindley, Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers
Must Haves:
 "Wildwood Flower"
"Wabash Cannonball"
"Keep on the Sunny Side"
"John Hardy was a Desperate Little Man"
Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez
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