Tim Thornton | The Roanoke Times

Owners Jackie and Woody Crenshaw look at some of the work being done on the Floyd Country Store.

The history

• 1913 or thereabout: What’s now the Floyd Country Store was built. Like any general store, it sold everything from overalls to mousetraps to coal scuttles. At some point, the building next door became part of the operation. It was a feed and seed store.
• 1983 or thereabout: A bluegrass band called The Bluegrass Travelers started practicing in the store on Friday nights. People started pecking on the door, asking to come in and listen to the music. Eventually, the Travelers just left the door open. The Jamboree was born.
• 1984: Freeman Cockram started running the store. Other bands had joined in. People were paying admission and flatfootin’ in front of the stage. But Cockram ran into financial trouble. He sold the feed and seed business. The store, then called Cockram’s General Store, was on its own.
• 1992: Hubert Roberson, one of the Jamboree’s founders, bought the store and renamed it the Floyd Country Store.
• 1998: Roberson sold the store to William Morgan and Mike Brough, a pair of North Carolina lawyers. They kept the Friday night jamborees and added monthly Saturday night concerts with nationally known bands. They planned to have gospel music on Sundays. They talked about recording concerts and starting a radio show.
• 2005: Woody and Jackie Crenshaw bought the Floyd Country Store.

FLOYD -- The Floyd Country Store hasn't really been a store for a long time. During the past 20 years it's been a landmark, a place for politicians to gather a crowd, a stop on the state's tourism-promoting Crooked Road and the subject of national media attention. But it's been years since a person could buy much there besides a can of possum and a raffle ticket that gives them a chance at winning a ham.

Woody Crenshaw plans to change that. Crenshaw and his wife, Jackie, bought the Floyd Country Store in the spring of 2005. It was the third time the store had changed hands since 1992. Like the owners that preceded them, the Crenshaws bought it to save the music that's been played at the Friday night Jamboree for 20-odd years.

"Everything we've done," Woody Crenshaw said, "has been really as a way to sustain the music."

The first thing they did was nothing.

The Crenshaws took a year to get to know the place and the people who came there.

"There's a wonderful group of probably a couple hundred people, local people, who really love this place," Woody Crenshaw said.

During that year, Crenshaw said he felt like he became part of the community. And he realized the music that draws people to the store can't support the place by itself. So he started planning.

"I'm determined to make it financially healthy," he said. "Without that, it remains vulnerable.

"Prior to now, it has depended on the good will of its owner."

The musical version of the store has never turned a profit.

"That," Woody Crenshaw said, "is unsustainable."

People might enjoy an expensive hobby for a while, but expensive hobbies can lose their luster. So the Crenshaws went looking for ways the store could pay its own way.

They had some ideas, but the size of the store was limiting. Then Ralph Hayden, Floyd's barber for 34 years, decided to retire. The Crenshaws bought Hayden's building, which butts up against the store, and got the room they craved. The hammering and sawing began.

The music has continued through the construction so far, but the store will close for a month after tonight's show so the project can be completed.

When it reopens in February, bands will play on a stage that's been acoustically tuned with fiddles, banjos and mandolins in mind. The stage will be 35 feet farther from the front of the store than it is now, which means the front 40 percent of the store can become a store again.

Searching the Internet, the Crenshaws found a 12-foot-long, 1,500-pound 1930s soda fountain in St. Louis. It's being restored and installed in part of that newly usable space. A small kitchen is going in there, too. Part of the old barbershop will become retail floor space.

The Crenshaws plan to sell clothes, kitchenware, local history and music books, some provisions and -- well, they're not sure yet exactly what else. They want the new incarnation of the Floyd Country Store to offer something to locals, so the Crenshaws are distributing a survey asking Floydians what they want the store to sell.

They know they don't want to create something that competes with existing Floyd businesses, so there won't be much in the way of arts and crafts or hardware.

Woody Crenshaw said he hopes to make a quilting demonstration part of the store, and he's looking for other activities and events that might fit in. He's already found a barber to take over Hayden's old chair.

But the music remains the main thing.

The Jamboree will continue to showcase local bands. There are plans for a concert series that would bring nationally known artists to the store's new stage. Crenshaw wants to find a way to get young local musicians up there, too.

He sees the irony in a man who's not from the area and who doesn't play an instrument taking such an active role in preserving the region's music.

Jackie Crenshaw, who grew up in England, is more familiar with the music than her husband is. She learned about the Carter Family -- one of the groups recorded during the 1927 Bristol sessions, the Big Bang of country music -- in London's folk music clubs. She plays guitar "a little bit," she said, "not well enough to get up on the stage."

Woody Crenshaw said he's on a crash course to learn about the music he's enjoyed hearing at the store. He made his first trip to the Carter Fold, a museum and concert venue, six months ago. He was impressed by the sophistication and endurance of the Carter Family's songs. Standing in his store,

Crenshaw started to call the Carters founders of the music. Then he stopped.

"I don't guess they're founders," he said. "I guess they're people who took their turn in the heritage."

The Crenshaws met when he was living in Giles County and she was there on a Fulbright exchange program. She was teaching biology at Giles High School.

They moved to Raleigh, N.C., to be near Woody Crenshaw's ailing father. When he died, Woody and Jackie Crenshaw began looking for a home in the mountains. They rode the Blue Ridge Parkway from Asheville, N.C., to Roanoke before settling on Floyd County.

They bought a few acres, built a house and Woody Crenshaw set up Crenshaw Lighting, a business his father had run before him, in a small studio.

Now they've taken responsibility for the Floyd Country Store.

"Financially, it's probably not a good investment," Woody Crenshaw said. "It doesn't help my retirement account."

Then he shrugged.

"All that will work itself out in the long run."

The Crenshaws are still newcomers -- they've been in Floyd County a little less than 20 years -- but they see the value of the county, the town and the country store, and they feel an obligation to do what they can to preserve what's good and make it better if they can.

"We see this as something really precious here," Jackie Crenshaw said. "And it's fragile."

Her husband said, "I think it has a natural allure to it because of its quality of life and the sense of place that you feel when you're here. ... It has a kind of genuineness about it that people can feel when they come."

It is, Woody Crenshaw said, the first place he's ever called home.