This can’t be for real. They must be making a film. I can hear the director’s conversation now: “Hello, central casting? I want some good ol’ Southern boys for my movie. Yep, the more clichéd, the better - dungarees, caps, accents as thick as molasses, eating peanuts and playing banjos.”

It’s real, all right. I’m in the barbershop in Drexel, North Carolina, where twice a week a bunch of guys straight off the set of Deliverance gather to make the most enthralling noise you’ve ever heard.

No entrance charge, no posters, no playlist - they don’t do it for a film director, or indeed for tourists (though anyone’s welcome to drop in). They do this for themselves, and that’s the joy of it.

Some call the sound they make “bluegrass”, some “old time”, some “mountain music”: whatever the name, it’s an anomaly in a nation dominated by slick superstars and corporate marketing. It’s home-grown, it’s small-scale, and it’s thriving at hundreds of jams, dances and gatherings like this, up and down the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia.

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Using tunes and techniques handed down from the Scottish and Irish settlers who came to these remote hills 200 years ago, this is America’s original folk tradition - the genuine soundtrack of a culture.

Finding it isn’t made easy for you. There are no packaged resort shows, no coach tours: to gatecrash the party, you need to do a little homework and a lot of driving. It’s well worth it.

ON REFLECTION, Drexel might not be the best place to start. It’s a communication thing. There isn’t much. The one word of English-accented English they will instantly recognise is “Deliverance”, which is the word you absolutely shouldn’t say. The film isn’t too popular around these parts: mountain people don’t really make a habit of kidnapping and raping outsiders, and quietly resent the implication that they do.

I try talking to the oldest guy there, Ernest Brandon, who at 85 still picks a mean guitar. How long has he been playing? “Ur sturted wayan ur wuh yay haar,” he replies, waving a calloused hand three feet above the lino.

“Et’s ayin mu blurd.” By the time I’ve puzzled that out, I’ve missed most of his description of growing up on a cotton farm during the depression, and Ernest and Joe Joe Patton have launched into another tune.

Joe Joe’s playing is astonishing. A glittering torrent of notes pours out of his banjo, as fast and staccato as his speech is slow and drawling. His finger-tips fly over the fretboards. Correction: some of them do.

Joe Joe had three of his digits cut a bit short by a band saw. In fact, a lot of mountain musicians seem to have mislaid bits of themselves along the way - fingers, thumbs, the odd limb - mainly lopped off in the sawmills and furniture workshops that provided the jobs around here.

Drexel, though, is a treat that can wait until your ear has tuned in to the accents. Swing by the metropolis first, where life is (a little) quicker and the speech (slightly) less impenetrable. Try the old-time jam at the Jack of the Wood pub in Ashe-ville, the biggest town in these parts.

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