"No one owns the traditions. We are all here as stewards."
A Q&A with Heather Krantz and Dylan Locke, co-owners of The Floyd Country Store
Heather Krantz and Dylan Locke are co-owners of The Floyd Country Store in Floyd, Virginia. Situated in the Appalachian mountains of Southwest Virginia, The Floyd Country Store has been an anchor of food, music, and community in Floyd County for 115 years. The store is best known for its Friday Night Jamboree, where an hour of gospel music is followed by two and a half hours of dance bands, and where the music and dancing inside often spills out onto the street. But it also has music going on almost every other night of the week, including Tuesday Tunes, Honky Tonk Thursdays, Saturday Americana Afternoons and evening concerts, and Sunday Music Jams.
If running a bustling, historic store and performance venue wasn’t enough, Heather and Dylan founded The Handmade Music School in 2016, which is dedicated to teaching young people old time, bluegrass, and traditional music and dance from Floyd County. The philosophy of school is to “hand down” the songs and dances from the teacher to the student — phrase-by-phrase and step-by-step — the way it’s been taught in the Blue Ridge for centuries. It’s a tradition sustained by relationship, both between the student and teacher, and between the teacher and all the teachers that came before.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the themes of tradition, stewardship, and durability came up prominently throughout my conversation with Heather and Dylan. What is the responsibility of community leaders like Heather and Dylan, who are stewards of traditions that they’ve both inherited and hope to pass along? How do they hold the tensions between sustaining communal traditions and adapting them to the times? And what will be the key for the institution of The Floyd Country Store — and the traditions that it carries — to be around for another 100-plus years?
This conversation, more than any other I’ve had through the newsletter, was imbued with a genuine reverence for the traditions, culture, and community of a particular place. Please consider giving the full interview a read. If you’d like to learn more, consider checking out The Floyd Country Store’s website, social media (Facebook, Insta), and TV and YouTube channels. And if you really want to experience the magic of The Floyd Country Store yourself, consider paying a visit to the Friday Night Jamboree — I went in May, and it was one of my favorite nights of the year.
- Sam
As someone who has visited The Floyd Country Store, I recognize that it’s way more than just a store. If anything, it’s a community and cultural hub for the region. But for our readers who may not be familiar with the store, how would you begin to describe all that you do?
Dylan (D): We cultivate and strengthen community through experiences in music, dance, art, and food that are rooted in our Appalachian traditions. Our products are these experiences: Meaningful and, hopefully, transformational experiences that make you feel invited into a community. Once we are all there in community, we can talk about ways to strengthen it through our traditions. We’re all about communities embracing their place-based traditions — in our community, that’s food, farming, and music — because these are the things that keep us connected to each other and our shared place.
There are four spokes that keep the wheel of The Floyd Country Store turning. Food is a spoke: You can meet here and have a meal together. Music is a spoke: You can meet here and dance together almost every night of the week. Intentional products are also a spoke: An old country store used to be a gathering place where you would go, get the stuff you needed, and see your neighbors and community. We’re trying to hold onto the magic of the old country store with our retail. And education is a spoke: The Handmade Music School is giving everything else oxygen, passing our musical traditions on to the next generation.
Heather (H): The music and traditions of our region are often carried by the people of our region, not written down. This is very different from the modern world. Learning this music and these traditions requires being in direct relationship with the person who is teaching you. With the Handmade Music School, I’m always looking for the right people who are carrying these traditions to teach the kids and pass them along. This gives the elders of our community a purpose, and parents are eager to have their kids participate in the program because it facilitates these intergenerational relationships.
It strikes me that you two share a sense of reverence — both for the particular traditions of your region, and for the particular relationships that pass along these traditions.
H: We’re drawing on an oral tradition, where things have been passed down knee-to-knee and hand-by-hand. Because of the mountains in this region, counties were isolated from one another, so every tune sounded different from county-to-county. You could be 30 miles away in Franklin County, and the same tune would be played differently than it was played here in Floyd County. We try to teach people how the tunes were played in Floyd; that way, our students and community members can stay connected to their regional identity and history. The music acts as this relational thread that connects our community across time and place.
D: This Appalachian music is some of the best music I’ve ever heard. It’s beautiful. It has a deep history and stories that connect all around the world. We understand the timeline of when this music landed here and how it swelled up into this incredible art form. When we present live music, we don’t do it frivolously or shallowly. We realize that when people are coming together to play music and dance on Friday nights, it is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. It is what the people who lived here would have done at the end of a long, hard day. This is keeping something alive that has superpowers.
It’s not like you both “started” The Floyd Country Store; you became owners of it 11 years ago. I also know y’all have regulars who have been coming every Friday and Saturday night for decades. How did you approach working with these regulars as you took over and became stewards of many of their traditions?
D: When we became owners, we started by intentionally building trust. We didn’t make a lot of changes really fast. There are people who have been coming here every Friday night for 40 years. We would always sit down with them and ask them for input on things, like changes to the ticket price or changes to the gospel set. We did that for quite a few years.
H: I started working for the store in 2006 with the previous owners. I got introduced to the fixtures and the regulars during that time, so when we transitioned to being owners, people already knew who we were. Those longstanding relationships were helpful for continuing to be caretakers of the space. The regulars have shared values around care for community: They look out for the space, they look out for each other. They always have a card going around for someone who is sick.
No one owns the traditions. We are all here as stewards. Many of the regulars act as if they’re hosts. Newer people have deemed themselves hosts, too. They’ll often go and grab people and invite them to join them on the dancefloor. It’s always been that way — people feel responsible for maintaining the tradition of invitation and welcoming. People also feel responsible for tending to the space if guests are out of line. They’ll enforce the norms of the space — kindly and respectfully.
D: The “dancefloor” stuff that happens is incredibly powerful. A few years ago, Mary Louise Kelly from NPR did an interview with the poet Tess Taylor, who visited Floyd in 2016, just after the presidential election. She was feeling a little unsure in our small rural Southwest Virginia town. But after she participated in the square dance — dancing with strangers, with very old dance forms, and upholding this responsibility to the process — she talked about having an “epiphany” on the dance floor. She saw this type of art and dance as “civic repair”: We can find ourselves, and one another, in those shared spaces.
I imagine it can be difficult to strike a balance between sustaining the communal traditions you’ve inherited and adapting these traditions amidst a changing community and culture. Have you made any changes? What have they looked like?
D: We understand that the traditions being presented in front of us are diverse, sharing contributions from Native Americans and African Americans, Scots-Irish and others. There are many cultures represented on the dancefloor every night. We are bringing these traditions into modern times — particularly, adding new flavors to the music and dance — without losing what they meant and were about hundreds of years ago. We host performances where you sit down and you listen. We have our lively Friday Night Jamboree. We host old time dances on Saturday — so you have more elbow room to do your dance thing — and we have Honky Tonk partner-style dancing on Thursdays.
But now I’m starting to bring in things like Black sacred steel music from North Carolina, blues, New Mexican string bands, and even Mexilachian fusion. As we’ve diversified our music, the audiences that are coming are diversifying. People are coming and saying things like, “I had no idea what to expect, and that was the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
The store also became more of a tourist destination about a decade before we became owners — when The Crooked Road Music Heritage Trail was formed. A lot of communities and musicians were initially turned off by it: The focus on tourism and economic development felt a little bit exploitative. But there’s been a softening in attitudes toward the heritage trail — even an embracing of it — over the 20 years it’s been in existence. Now, there are people from literally all around the world who come to The Floyd Country Store on Friday nights. These people may be from places locals see stereotyped in the news as “dangerous,” and then they’re nice people out on the dancefloor having fun dancing with you. I’ve never seen anyone ever give anyone else a hard time for being there.
We can also get stereotyped from the outside as having this hillbilly, yokel, backwoods type of culture. But, today, a lot of the locals have a sense of pride that the world comes to this little one stoplight town to appreciate, respect, and participate in the identity and culture of the place.
There are not many institutions that can say they’ve been a community hub for 100-plus years. What lessons do you think can be learned from The Floyd Country Store’s durability? What needs to happen to ensure that The Floyd Country Store is around for another 100 years?
H: We’re gardeners, and we don’t want these traditions to die off. Our kids are the seedlings. I’m doing the programming for the young people: We put a lot of energy and care into teaching our students the values and traditions of our community, and making them accessible. The work is a constant dance of responding to what the community needs now. It’s never done; there’s no ending point. Our job is to stay awake and pay attention and listen and help. Spread the fertilizer and give the garden the nutrients it needs to grow.
D: A tree can grow for hundreds of years if its ecosystem is healthy and things aren’t coming in to cut it down. The Floyd Country Store is meant to be here. Are there external forces — technological, financial, and otherwise — that can cut us down? Yes. But we’re also keeping our eyes open to the threats and we’re committed to protecting the ecosystem. We’ll tie ourselves to the tree if we need to. These traditions have lasted a long time and they aren’t going anywhere. The key to the durability of The Floyd Country Store is simple: We trust that humans will always be seeking the oasis — they will always be seeking connection.
In my small Appalachian town we have three institutions that reflect a lot of this beautiful story. 1) A 100+ year-old mill that’s now a farm/garden/local treasures store, 2) a community center that used to be a grange and hosts regular old-time music and partner dancing (plus yoga and Zumba!), and 3) a beautiful old theater that’s been restored and uses ticket sales to fund music education programs for kids. This is getting me thinking about ways to bring all three together ✨
Thanks for the wonderful tale!