The land Galax sits on was part of an 800-acre tract that the British Crown granted to James Buchanan in 1756 — a Buchanan unrelated to the future president, but a name that traveled west with the Scots-Irish settlers who shaped the region. The first plat map of Galax is dated December 1903. The site the founders chose, at 2,500 feet on a meadowed plateau where Chestnut Creek bisects the high ground between Carroll and Grayson Counties, is open in a way most of southwestern Virginia is not. The Blue Ridge crest rises just to the south. The New River Trail follows the abandoned Norfolk and Western railbed for 57 miles, threading the city and four nearby counties along the line that once carried Galax's furniture out and brought visitors in.

Since 1935 the Old Fiddlers' Convention has been held in Galax every August. It is the oldest such convention in the United States and has, for ninety years, drawn old-time and bluegrass musicians from every state and most continents. The grounds fill with campers, banjos, fiddles, and Appalachian dulcimers — including the distinctive Galax-style dulcimer with its straight sides and equal-tempered fretting, named for the town. Round Peak, North Carolina, fifteen miles south on the other side of the ridge, produced its own influential fiddle and banjo tradition. Galax sits at the cultural intersection: any night of the year, you can hear something genuinely old-time being played live in a town this size. The musical lineage here is unbroken. Ernest Stoneman, born nearby in 1893, made some of the earliest country music recordings in the 1920s, and his descendants are still making music in Galax now.

By the 1960s Galax was an industrial town: six furniture factories, a mirror factory, four textile companies, two large department stores, a Carnation Milk plant, a Coca-Cola bottler, and Clover Creamery. The Vaughan Furniture Company, founded in 1923 by the Vaughan brothers, employed more than 1,800 people at its peak. In 2008, after globalization had emptied the American furniture industry, Vaughan closed its last Galax factory and laid off 275 workers. The company shut down for good at the end of 2014. The separate Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company, run by another branch of the same family, fought back: in 2014 it won a $46 million anti-dumping case against Chinese furniture manufacturers and kept 700 people employed making bedroom furniture in Galax. The fight is ongoing. Furniture-making in Galax did not vanish. It became smaller, and more deliberate.

The New River Trail State Park passes through Galax and runs 57 miles to the New River, crossing two tunnels, three major bridges, and nearly thirty smaller trestles. The Blue Ridge Parkway is seven miles south, with Mabry Mill at milepost 176.2 about thirty-five miles east of town. The Blue Ridge Music Center, at milepost 213, anchors a concert venue and a mountain-music museum. Grayson Highlands State Park, with its wild ponies and the Appalachian Trail crossing Mount Rogers, the highest peak in Virginia at 5,729 feet, lies about forty miles west. The 2020 census counted 6,720 people in Galax, a modest decline from 7,042 in 2010 but a quiet population in a place where the music has more years on it than most cities.