Culture Warrior Segment

Dear FOX & Friends Weekend's Alisyn Camerota: It's GAY-lax not GAL-ax, Virginia, home of the Old Fiddler's Convention that ran for a whole week ending Friday. BTW Galax is a flowering evergreen plant.

My husband was watching Fox & Friends Weekend on Saturday and reported to me that FOX did a piece on the convention with shots of toothless guys. His words, not mine. Apparently co-hostand flatlander Dave Briggs snickered he couldn't wait to go there.

Dave: I live 30 miles from Galax, Virginia on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Thousands of FOX News viewers and conservative political thinkers flock to the world's oldest and largest bluegrass convention now in its 74th year attracting nearly 2,000 musicians and thousands of fans including me. There is more musical talent per square mile here than anywhere else on the planet - and a New Jersey escapee on every mountain (including the former boss of New York's Lucchese crime family's New Jersey operation who beat the feds in a famous RICO trial, but that's another story.)

Galax was home to the legendary first lady of banjo Roni Stoneman. Dave Briggs, I defy you to listen to the Nashville star and "Hee-Haw" veteran with your uninformed snide view of "Flyover Country" intact. Roni milked the stereotypical hick wife on "Hee-Haw" but was everything but.

I was fortunate to see banjo virtuoso Roni perform at Galax's Rex Theater a couple of years ago where FM one-hundred-thousand-fucking-watt blowtorch stick WBRF (double U barf I call it) broadcasts live performers on Friday nights. My holler 30 miles away has a small AM station WCOK - double U cock - which you'd probably make fun of as well. WCOK bills itself as the hit kicker.

WBRF is owned by a couple of Baptists, and I'm guessing, Glenn Beck FOX News fans in Andy Griffith's real Mayberry (Mount Airy, NC) down the road a piece from Galax where they own another radio station. The yahoos and their young'ins have been laughing all the way to the bank for decades.  NPR did a piece on the stations' founder Ralph Epperson when he died in 2006 .  In 2008 Epperson was posthumously inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame with the likes of Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, and Dolly Parton.