While wife Amy and I were still living and working out of the National Capital Region of Washington, DC,was on assignment in Germany when I ran into a young American soldier in Ramstein Air Force Base with a Southwestern Virginia accent.

He turned out to be from the Galax area and while he talked, I mentioned that I had lived in Floyd County while in high school but left in 1965. He said he loved to go to the Friday Night Jamboree in Floyd in the 1980s. I didn’t even know about the Jamboree then but talked to my mother in the late 1990s about it and she gave me some info. We decided it was time to visit Floyd and did so over the Labor Day weekend in 2002, got in touch with Alzora Wood, who managed the store for the then owner, North Carolina lawyer Mike Brough, and set up to film the Jamboree.

I shoot a lot of footage and Amy helped with photography but the weather dampended the music outside, so we decided to return later to get some outside images. Because of too many assignments that kept me on the road, we did not get back until the Labor Day weekend of 2003.

Mike and former owner Hubert Robertson gave us good interviews and we put the footage together. The Discovery Channel was doing a weeklong set of videos on American music and they used out Jamboree footage.

When we left the Washington area in 2004, I began to spend a lot of time at the Jamboree and have shot many hours of footage at the Jamboree and the music culture of The Crooked Road, but this 2003 documentary, shot before widescreen, is still my favorite of the Jamboree. It is as originally presented in 2003. It was sold, for a while, at The Country Store, on either VHS videotape or DVD.