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.

Well, that’s a bit misleading I suppose. They do, I’m sure, have speed limits in Japan. The band No Speed Limit is not traveling to Japan anytime soon that I am aware of. They are, however, being listened to there. And written about on my favorite Japanese bluegrass blog. If you don’t read Japanese, here it is in English.

It seems Nino discovered the Virginia band, No Speed Limit, via internet radio and purchased the CD Sweet Virginia via iTunes. What a wonderful world we live in. Someone half way around the world can hear your music on the internet, and immediately purchase your album, listen to it, and begin telling others about it.

I thought that was worth telling you about. And if you haven’t heard No Speed Limit, then take a minute and give Sweet Virginia a listen. The CD is available for purchase directly from the band on their site. They have an audio player on the site, to the left under the links, but it didn’t tell me what I was listening to. Four songs are available for your listening pleasure on their myspace page, or you can hear samples of all the songs on iTunes.

The winner of the 2006 SPBGMA International Bluegrass Band Championship was Billie Renee & Cumberland Gap, from central Kentucky. The top three finalists also includes Texas’ Cadillac Sky, and No Speed Limit from Galax, VA.

See the winner’s list here.