The Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, has a brand new web site, with a fun twist and a chance to win a custom built mandolin or guitar. The Trail is the state of Virginia’s official tour guide for traditional music lovers, which offers a driving route that connects major venues and historical sites throughout southwest Virginia that would appeal to fans of Appalachian music.

The new site has a clever option where you can build your own custom bluegrass song, and send it to a friend. The site will ask you to respond to a series of questions to obtain the name of your song’s recipient, their relationship to you, and some of their interests and hobbies. Immediately after responding to these queries, it will present you with a song, played and sung by No Speed Limit, which includes references to all of your responses.

You’ll then be able to send the song to whomever you wish, by either phone or email, and enter the contest to win a new mandolin or guitar.

The Build-A-Lyric site will surely give you a chuckle, and you may find yourself sending them to several of your friends. They don’t have the ability to create a song for every name that you might choose, and the other responses are limited as well, but it’s still a hoot – and the music is great.

The instruments in the giveaway are from southwest Virginia luthiers. The mandolin is made by Gerald Anderson, who studied with Wayne Henderson, and the guitar by Spencer Strickland, who is Anderson’s apprentice.