Host Tim White

Tim is host of the PBS television concert series, Song of the Mountains and also hosts the Song of the Mountains Festival each summer.   The Song of the Mountains television program reaches over 21 million households and 52 million people annually across the nation.   

About Tim

Tim White left Roanoke, Virginia in 1974 and settled in east Tennessee, where he pursued his careers of artist, sign painter and banjo picker. Though the artist was there from the start and the sign painter was a logical career outgrowth, the banjo picker was learned later in life. As he said one time, “It’s amazing what one can learn when they don’t watch TV.”

Tim’s interest in the musical heritage of the region, a region which stretched from Roanoke to Knoxville and cut a broad swath into neighboring states, led to his painting a mural on State Street in Bristol in 1986. This mural depicts the principal characters of the historic Bristol Sessions, which took place in Bristol, TN-VA in the summer of 1927.

Victor Recording Company talent scout and record producer Ralph Peer, who had recorded Ernest and Hattie Stoneman of Galax, VA for several years, came to the region to find new talent for his records. At this two week session, he was able to record for the first time the Carter Family from nearby Maces Spring, Virginia and Jimmie Rodgers. From this recording event grew commercial country music as we know it today. The influences of A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter and Jimmie Rodgers are acknowledged by a wide variety of musicians worldwide.

The Birthplace of Country Music Mural became a local landmark and tourist draw that identified Bristol to the state, the country and the world. It became a site for regular summertime Tuesday night pickin’ sessions, where musicians could come and play their traditional and contemporary music, much as has been done on front porches and around store pot bellied stoves for the last two centuries.

Tim’s musicianship gained a following and he has fronted several bands over the past two decades, including Troublesome Hollow, The Beagles, and currently the VW Boys. The VW Boys perform music, magic and comedy. www.vwboys.com

Tim’s interest of recognizing, preserving and perpetuating the historic music of the area led to recruitment of others of a like mind and an organizing of the Appalachian Cultural Music Association. www.appalachianculturalmusic.org Tim currently serves as ACMA president and uses his many talents as artist, businessman, musician and radio announcer to further the aims of the ACMA. He has organized concerts and contributed his time and efforts to promote the music and the message. The ACMA helps to support the Mountain Music Museum, which Tim helped found, in 1999. The museum is dedicated to preserving the heritage of the music which was born in the Southern Appalachians.

As a public figure, artist, musician and radio announcer, Tim White has unselfishly contributed time, effort and energy to support and promote the music and the musicians of the region. Tim has been in radio since 1990. He has a syndicated radio program featuring bluegrass music, old time music and comedy which airs in the U.S. and streams on the internet via many of his affiliates. He has one of the most popular Bluegrass radio programs in the Birthplace of Country Music Region “The Bluegrass Show” on WAXM (FM 93.5). He is on every Saturday from 9 am ’till 12 pm. He has a full slate of sponsors who support his program. To quote Tim, he says, “I’m truly a blessed man”.