North Carolina highway named for a country music legend and native son
Country singer Ronnie Milsap has recorded dozens of hit songs, sold more than 35 million records and won numerous Grammy and Country Music Association awards.
Now he has a North Carolina highway named for him.
A 6-mile stretch of U.S. 129 near Milsap’s hometown of Robbinsville will soon be known as Ronnie Milsap Highway. The state Board of Transportation approved the designation Wednesday afternoon.
The renaming of the highway was done at the request of the Graham County commissioners and with support of local tourism and economic development groups. In a letter to commissioners last December, Milsap described himself as a “proud son of Graham County and the State of North Carolina” and said he would be honored to have a road named for him in his hometown.
“No matter how many miles and years since I left there, I will always remember the lessons I learned at Meadow Branch Primitive Baptist Church or going down to Faset Jenkins Store where as a boy almost all of my clothes were purchased,” wrote Milsap, 77.
Milsap was born blind, which, according to his website, his family thought was retribution for sin. He was raised by his grandparents, who sent him to the State School for the Blind in Raleigh, now the Governor Morehead School.
It was there that he was introduced to music, learned to play the piano and eventually formed a rock and roll band with some high school classmates called The Apparitions.
Milsap briefly attended college in Georgia before dropping out to pursue music full-time. He played and recorded with R&B artists and was a session musician on several Elvis Presley songs before he moved to Nashville in 1972 and began focusing on country music.
Milsap was one of the biggest names in country music in the 1970s and 1980s, with 40 No. 1 hits, six Grammy awards and eight Country Music Association awards, including Male Vocalist of the Year in 1974, 1976 and 1977. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2014.
Ronnie Milsap Highway will begin several miles north of Robbinsville at Yellow Creek Road and follow U.S. 129 north to the Swain County line where the Tapoco/Cheoah Dam Bridge crosses the Little Tennessee River. The winding two-lane highway follows the Cheoah River through a forested valley.
In Milsap’s letter, he quoted his 1974 song “Streets of Gold,” which he said always takes him back to his boyhood home. It begins, “I’m a Western North Carolinian, made of stone and red clay soil.”
The Board of Transportation also named a section of U.S. 441 in Jackson County for a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who worked to spread the Cherokee language, teach Cherokee history and culture and preserve the Cherokee game, Indian Ball.
Jerry Wolfe, who died in 2018 at age 93, was named Beloved Man of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 2013, the first man to receive the honor in more than 200 years. The highway will be named the “Beloved Man, Dr. Jerry Wolfe Highway,” and the signs will be in both English and Cherokee.
