The Admiral Grill

Northern Virginia was a center for the development of country music and especially blue grass as I’ve mentioned before on this blog. One of the legendary moments in the expansion of blue grass beyond local hillbilly migrants came in 1957 at a local watering hole called the Admiral Grill. The Admiral Grill was located on Columbia Pike at the current site of the storage company and stood roughly where the main office/entrance currently stands. The restaurant was there from at least the mid-fifties until the mid-sixties before becoming a restaurant called Westwoods, then a furniture store and finally a storage company. Back in the late fifties and early sixties was just a simple crossroads with a few small restaurants and an airport at the current site of Skyline Towers.

In 1957, Northern Virginia was filled with musicians playing a new brand of “folk” music that was a new take on old-time mountain music. It was called a variety of things before the name blue grass stuck deriving from the name of Bill Monroe’s backing band, the Bluegrass Boys. The sound was very popular among the transplanted Virginians and Carolinians yearning for the sounds of home, but it was stuck being played in small bars and restaurants with limited appeal.

The event happened by accident on July 4, 1957 when the Buzz Busby’s Bayou Boys were heading back to DC after playing a gig on the Eastern Shore when their car crashed. The band’s banjo player, Bill Emerson, had been riding in a separate car and was determined to keep the gig that night at Admiral Grill. He called on a guitarist, Charlie Waller, mandolinist John Duffey, and bassist Larry Leahy to fill in.

The gig went so well that the group formed a band and settled on the Country Gentleman because the members were city boys rather than “mountain boys”. The band they would go on to form was different from many country or folk bands playing around DC because they were young and spent most of their lives in an urban setting.

The band would become the most important and influential bluegrass band and formed a second-generation of bluegrass musicians that would spearhead the growth and popularity, particularly in the DC area. The band took influences from many genres, moving the music beyond its strict mountain roots by exploring rock and jazz. This widened bluegrass’ audience beyond the ex-mountain people into young urban kids from blue collar bikers to college kids.

The music would find a home in the Birchmere on Four Mile Run Dr. in Arlington and the Shamrock on M Street in Georgetown where rowdy hillbillies and college kids would mingle to the changing sounds of bluegrass.

Sadly, besides this single evening of fame, almost nothing is known about the Admiral Grill. The building was unceremoniously torn down to make way for development of the storage company and Radley Acura. If you drive behind Radley, you can get a sense of what Bailey’s Crossroads was like before the current development. One building that stood at the same time as the Admiral Grill was the service garage for Radley Acura, which was a auto repair shop. Otherwise, the Admiral Grill lives on in legend only.

Former Site of WARL Radio Station

For more on the radio station's significance, see this post.

How did NOVA become redneck? Pt. 2

The DC area was a sleepy backwater town untl the thirties. During the mid-1800s the city experienced an influx of immigrants, mostly Irish. The area didn't experience the turn of the century immigration like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. However, southerners did flock to the city starting in the thirties. This migration was a gush at first and then became a trickle until it stopped in the early seventies. The large numbers of "hillbillies" turned the area's nightclubs into honky tonks and the area came to have a much more southern feel.

DC and surrounding areas had significant (possibly majority) southern sentiments during the civil war, so the addition of southen migrants just added to the southerness of the city. The migrants settled in Southeast DC, Prince Georges County, and Northern Virginia, but grappled with huge housing shortages. This led to enormous, almost ramshackle, housing developments populated almot exclusively by southern whites. For example, Pimmit Hills in Tysons is a huge neighborhood of homes that look identical and are quite small. Way back the legend told that the Fairfax police were too afraid to go into the neighborhood so it was some kind of hillbilly free for all. I doubt that was really the case.

Nonetheless, these newcomers wanted nightclubs to themselves and they got their wish. Across the area, including NOVA, there were nightclubs hosting legendary country artists playing to their kin folk. This was how the DC area was until things began to shift in the nineties. The redneck nature of the area disappeared almost overnight and has been washed from the area as if it were never there.

How did NOVA become redneck?

Sitting in Arlington now, it's hard to believe how redneck the DC area used to be. DC has always been a magnet for people looking for better opportunities. Economic downturns are always blunted by government spending. Nowadays, folks come here to work for government contractors, but back in the middle of last century there were a ton of unskilled jobs available and they were primarily related to the federal government.

1950 marked the first census in which a majority of Americans lived in metropolitan areas. The DC area grew during this time from the expansion of the government during the depression and World War II. By 1960 DC joined the top ten metropolitan areas in population. Looking at the population numbers show the explosive growth: Arlington grew from 6430 in 1900 to 135,449 in 1950; Fairfax grew from 18,850 in 1900 to 40,929 in 1950; and Alexandria grew from 14,520 in 1900 to 61,787 in 1950. Meanwhile, Appalachia was experiencing difficult economic times and the people living in that region began migrating to find better jobs. In some cases they ended up as coal miners, but many came to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and DC. In fact DC was the second largest recipient of Appalachian people. The folks that came were among the poorest in the nation and often came to cities directly competing with African Americans and immigrants for jobs.

These folks were called hillbillies back then and reports show they did not fit into their new communities. People wrote about them being disorderly, clannish, untamed, with an affinity for alcohol and violence. We all know when people arrive in large numbers to a new area, these reports are typical and probably overblown.

The wonderful thing they brought to DC was their music and made the DC area the major hub for Appalachian music which was evolving into Bluegrass and Country. Thank god for that.

Article on Speedy Tolliver

An Arlington resident and fiddle legend, Speedy Tolliver is featured in this Connection article.

Roots of Country Music

While country music was born in the hills of Southwest Virginia, Arlington played a critical role in the development of the country music industry.

The radio station WARL was located on Lee Hwy between Harrison and George Mason. WARL had a show called "Town and Country Time" that supposedly gave birth to the term country and Patsy Cline became famour from her live performances on the show. Most recently the building served as a Whitman-Walker clinic, but you can still see the huge (still in use) radio tower behind the building.

I came across some interesting bit of information from a Washington Post article from August 19, 1953 about WARL. On Saturdays during the summer of '53, the station held "lawn parties" in which the live show moved to the lawn of the station. I searched old Billboard magazines and found the performances contined into the summers of '54 and '55. During the summer of '54 Jimmy Dean, Roy Clark, and Patsy Cline performed at the Saturday evening show.