No one knows when the violin and banjo were combined to create the colonial dance band of Virginia. The first players were black, but slave servants lived close to their owners in the "big house" Plantation tutur Philip Fithian told in his 1774 journal that his charges, the young Carter boys, Ben and Harry, were bedeviling him by joining black servants in playing the fiddle and banjo, and dancing. So it is clear these instruments were played together for a very long time before the minstrel craze of the 1840s made the combination of banjo and fiddle common. Singing to an accompaniment by the violin is also an ancient practice, one brought to the colonies from England and Ulster. In his autobiography, founding father Benjamin Franklin told that his father, a Boston candle-maker, made an agreeable music by accompanying his psalm singing with the violin. Among the places where America's oldest music is best kept is a tiny area of the central Blue Ridge Mountains, encompassing Grayson and Carroll counties and the town of Galax, in Virginia, and the adjacent Round Peak community in Surry County, North Carolina. Josh Ellis lives in Galax, and Eddie Bond grew up in Fries, a Grayson County town of 697, perched in a gorgeous bend of the north-flowing New River, and a musical epicenter in these mountains for a century. Eddie and Josh are members of the Ballard's Branch Bogtrotters, a Galax-based old-time string band beloved for its dance rhythms, a band frequently heard in the governor's mansion in Richmond. This band has family ties to the original Bogtrotters, a 1930s Galax band named by fiddler Eck Dunford in honor of his Ulster Irish ancestors. Many of the melodies played by American fiddlers for three centuries are commemoratives; tunes honoring a person, a place, a battle, a happening. this folk method of honoring good things extends even to beautiful flowers (Black-Eyed Susan) and to good food.