Tuckasegee Reader offers this essay, from musician and busker Ian Moore, who peppers his words with videos demonstrating Asheville's musical heritage, from Okeh records to Bill Monroe to Bascom Lamar Lunsford (excerpts below):
And so the powers that be (for the moment at least) look all set to unhitch the City of Asheville from its moorings and float it down to the foothills. I imagine they will use hundreds of little gasbags full of hot air, and once firmly in Republican territory the inhabitants of that hapless city will be deloused and given severe haircuts and our western mountain counties will thereby have had their Dixiecrat fangs pulled. ...

So let’s make Asheville our next stop on a musical mountains-to-sea-trail, and I will do my best to explain to the nefarious powers-that-be why redistricting Asheville over to the outskirts of Charlotte seems, at least from my humble musical standpoint, an unseemly example of legislative heavy-handedness.

Let me play you a tune that I heard on the first LP record I ever bought when I moved to these mountains. The record was called Deep in Tradition and it was made by a fiddler named Tommy Hunter — I found this and a Byard Ray album at a thrift store that has long since passed on. Really, I had no idea how much of a jackpot these two albums were for a newcomer. Both these fiddlers were Madison County fiddlers, both were strongly influenced by the body of knowledge that J. Dedrick Harris had passed down, but neither of them were static or stuck in time, they were constantly taking on new knowledge and new playing experiences. ...

The tune I want to play you is listed as ‘Asheville’ on Mr Hunter’s album. ...

And if nothing else about Asheville serves to tie together the truly antique world of J. Dedrick Harris with the more modern stylings of Bill Monroe and thence onwards into the institutions keeping Appalachian folk music alive and current today, may I quickly mention the life and works of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the so-called ‘Squire of Turkey Creek,’ whose resolve and tenacity truly put Asheville on the map for folk music lovers the world around. ...

Click link below to read the story and catch the other video.