A Mule-and-Wagon Freight Hauler Became the Opry’s First Star. Rutherford County Still Throws Him a Party.

Before he was a star, David Harrison Macon hauled freight. He ran a mule-and-wagon operation out of the Kittrell community, east of Murfreesboro, moving other people's goods along Rutherford County roads and entertaining himself with a banjo. He did not become a professional musician until he was well into middle age, which is a fact worth sitting with in a business that now treats twenty-six as a late start.

In 1925 he became one of the first genuine superstars of the Grand Ole Opry. The banjo he had been playing for his own amusement turned out to be the sound a brand-new radio audience wanted.

He is buried in this county, and every year the county throws him a party.

The particulars

Uncle Dave Macon Days: A Roots Rendezvous runs Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13, at Hop Springs, 6790 John Bragg Highway.

Here is the part that tends to surprise people: admission is free. Parking runs $10 per car, and that is the whole cost of attending a three-day festival of old-time music. Split across a carful, it is one of the better entertainment values in Middle Tennessee this month.

Saturday morning is the real event

If you only come for one thing, come for the National Old-Time Banjo Championship, held Saturday morning. It is exactly what the name says — a national title, decided in Murfreesboro, in a format that has not been meaningfully modernized because it did not need to be.

The competition slate runs well past banjo: bluegrass banjo, traditional fiddle, beginner musician, old-time singing, Dobro, mandolin, flat-pick guitar, and — the category with the best name in American music — shade tree pickin' band.

The beginner category is worth watching on purpose. Old-time music is one of the few American traditions that still formally makes room for people who are not yet good at it, and watching somebody compete in public in their first year is a different and better kind of entertainment than watching a professional be flawless.

Who is playing

Friday opens with the MTSU String Band and the Cripple Creek Cloggers, followed by the Howlin' Brothers and the Joey Fletcher Band.

Saturday brings Leroy Troy, the Noelle Goodin Band, Jackson Harris, the Jake Leg Stompers, and Monroeville.

Sunday closes in the traditional shape: Lisa Law's Gospel Showcase, then Delyn Christian and the John Prine Tribute Band, then the Hop Springs Da Jam Band.

Three addresses in fifty years

The festival began in 1978 as a small banjo-picking contest on the Rutherford County Courthouse square. It grew, and moved to Cannonsburgh Village, where it stayed for decades and where a great many people in this county have a specific memory of a specific hot July afternoon.

Now it is at Hop Springs, on the John Bragg Highway, with room to spread out. Gloria Christy serves as the festival's president.

Moving a beloved festival is always a risk, and the ones that survive it are the ones where the thing being preserved was never the address. What Uncle Dave Macon Days actually preserves is a repertoire and a way of playing it — music that predates the recording industry's involvement in country music and has quietly outlasted several of the industry's ideas about what country music should sound like.

Going

Bring a chair. Bring cash for the parking. September in Middle Tennessee can still deliver a genuinely hot Saturday, so plan for shade, and be aware that the good spots near the competition stage fill early on Saturday morning.

If this is your entry point into the county's musical history, there is more of it than you would think — our piece on a decade of roots radio at 89.5 covers the modern end of the same tradition, and the local's guide to Murfreesboro will fill in the rest of the weekend.