Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains are known for their speed demons. The moonshiners of old tore over country roads in 1940 Ford coupes, executing 180-degree “bootleg turns” and using bright lights to blind the revenue officers shooting at their tires. Legend has it that many of Nascar’s original drivers cut their teeth here, and modern stock car design is almost certainly indebted to the “liquor cars” dreamed up in local garages, modified for speed and for hauling brimful loads of “that good old mountain dew,” as the country song goes.

Even now, it is tempting to barrel down Shooting Creek Road, near Floyd, Virginia, the most treacherous racing stretch of all, where the remains of old stills decay beside a rushing stream. But instead I proceed at a snail’s pace, windows down, listening to the burble of the creek, the gossip of cicadas in the dense summer woods, and the slosh of a Mason jar full of bona fide moonshine in the back seat—a gift from one of the new friends I met along the road.

Slow is almost always better in this part of the world, I was learning. A traveler should be sure to leave time to savor another ready-to-levitate biscuit or a melting sunset or a stranger’s drawling tale—and especially, to linger at the mountain banjo-and-fiddle jams that the region is known for. This music cannot be heard with half an ear—it has 400 years of history behind it, and listening to it properly takes time.

The Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail, winds for some 300 miles through the southwest corner of the state, from the Blue Ridge into deeper Appalachia, home to some of the rawest and most arresting sounds around. Most of the trail runs along U.S. 58, a straightforward multilane highway in some spots and a harrowing slalom course in others. But the Crooked Road—a state designation originally conceived in 2003—is shaped by several much older routes. Woodland buffalo and the Indians who hunted them wore the first paths ...