Shop offers ‘a little taste of Appalachia’

By Debra McCown Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier Published: January 4, 2010

ABINGDON, Va. – Growing up in Southwest Virginia’s coalfields, Amy Braswell never liked hearing trash talk about Appalachia.
“It really, really bothers me,” she said of the region’s negative stereotypes. “The idea kind of implanted in my mind of what can I do as an individual to try to break those stereotypes.”
When she says Appalachia, she’s not referring to a tiny town with a legendary football team. She means a whole region, defined by its mountains, its music and its culture.
And when she says stereotypes, the Cleveland, Va., native means the questions people from outside the region often ask: “Do you have indoor bathrooms? Do you wear shoes?”
Ironically enough, she said, the very thing that once made this region the butt of jokes – its rural, traditional mountain culture – recently has become its biggest tourism draw.
So Braswell hopes the store she opened here with her husband three weeks before Christmas – Capo’s Music Store – becomes a stop for visitors interested in the region’s culture as well as an answer for natives searching for books and music reflecting the place they call home.
“Being from here, I wanted to have a place in Abingdon where you could get music and books and information and just sort of a little taste of Appalachia,” she said. “It was kind of a marriage of our two visions.”
Her husband’s share of the vision is on the music side: Gill Braswell wanted a place where people long steeped in mountain music could feel comfortable to play, even as newcomers to bluegrass sought advice on where to start. Read on...