The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance

Edited by Chad Berry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, August 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-252-03353-7, $65.00; paper: 978-0-252-07557-5, $24.95. 232 pages

Review by Sara Boslaugh

When you think “country music,” what American cities come first to mind? Most likely Nashville, followed perhaps by Branson or Bakersfield, with Chicago way down the list if it comes up at all. And yet Chicago was a center of country music in the genre’s formative years and played a crucial role in popularizing the country sound to a broad audience. An important aspect of this influence was the radio program The National Barn Dance (NBD), a variety show including string bands, singers, and comedy sketches, which began broadcasting on WLS from Chicago on April 19, 1924 and remained on the air until 1969.

NBD launched the career of many popular country musicians, including Gene Autry and Patsy Montana. Bill Monroe also made his professional debut as a square dancer on the show, which was recorded live before an audience at Chicago’s Eighth Street Theatre. NBD served as the model for the WSM Barn Dance (now The Grand Ole Opry), which began broadcasting from Nashville the following year. Ironically, while nearly everyone has heard of The Grand Ole Opry, its predecessor has largely faded from public memory.

Reclaiming that lost heritage is the goal of the essays in The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance, edited by Chad Berry, director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College. Some of the essays stick close to the topic implied by the title and trace the programming, economic history, and other aspects of the program. Others venture farther afield, discussing broader cultural aspects of country music.

Paul Tyler and Wayne W. Daniels remain close to the source as they trace the history of NBD: Tyler covers the program from its origins in 1924 through the 1930’s in “The Rise of Rural Rhythm,” while Daniel’s “Music of the Postwar Era” picks up the story from the 1940’s through the station’s demise in 1969. Both essays are loaded with information and together create a convincing picture of the program and its place in American culture of the period. Lisa Krissoff Boehm discusses the importance of the city of Chicago in the popularization of country music in “Chicago as Forgotten Country Music Mecca,” while Susan Smulyan places NBD in the context of a young but rapidly-growing radio industry in “Early Broadcasting and Radio Audiences.”

Michael T. Bertrand, in “Race and Racial Identity,” argues that NBD was one among a number of contemporary radio programs that promoted the benefits of traditional rural culture against what some saw as threatening aspects of modern life, including urbanization and new styles of music. He also notes that blackface performers appeared on NBD as they did on many radio programs of the period, and that “minstrelsy” touring acts were popular as well. Kristine M. McKusker traces patriarchal attitudes, as exemplified by NBD programming, as well as other aspects of contemporary culture in “Patriarchy and the Great Depression.” In “Cowboys in Chicago,” Don Cusic takes a look at an obvious question, yet one I can’t recall having been addressed previously: how did the image of the cowboy come to be identified with country music, and why did rural southern performers frequently adopt western stage personas? For example, Ruby Blevins of Arkansas became “Patsy Montana” and as such sold over a million copies of her hit song “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.” Cusic argues that the cowboy was a wholesome, all-American image that replaced that of the less attractive and less marketable hillbilly. Finally, in “The National Folk Festival,” Michael Ann Williams looks at the relationship between the National Folk Festival (begun in 1934) and NBD.

If Chicago and country music seem to go together like chalk and cheese, consider two powerful cultural myths debunked by several authors in this collection. One is the commonly-accepted “creation myth” of country music, which places its origins entirely in the South; the other is the popular image of Chicago as a haven for crooked politicians, gangsters, and jazz. Both are oversimplifications: Paul Tyler convincingly argues that country music is more rural than exclusively southern, and Lisa Krissoff Boehm makes the case that Chicago was a diverse city which included many rural people who migrated there for employment; it’s not surprising that they brought their musical tastes with them. Furthermore, Chicago was the headquarters of Sears and Roebuck, who owned WLS at the time (the call letters stand for “World’s Largest Store”), a company which understood that rural and small-town America constituted an important source of customers for their catalogue sales.

Overall, the essayists did an admirable job, often working with a dearth of available materials: although the show was broadcast for 4 ½ hours weekly, the main source of recordings is the one-hour national broadcasts carried by NBC, and these were not representative of the program as a whole. A greater problem, treated less effectively, is that it’s impossible to determine who was listening to the program, or why: assumptions can be made, extrapolating from statements by station management and the type of programming included, but they must remain speculative. True, listeners did write to the station, revealing their tastes and preferences, but these form what social scientists call a self-selected sample. There’s no way to know if attitudes expressed by people who chose to write letters to the station (or make telephone calls, or send telegraphs) were representative of the broader listenership; modern survey research suggests just the opposite.

Other readers will no doubt take issue with other specific points included in one or more of the essays in The Hayloft Gang, but together they present a variety of viewpoints on NBD and form a valuable addition to the history of radio and of country music.