Bradley Hanson, The Tennessee Jamboree: Local Radio, the Barn Dance, and Cultural Life in Appalachian East Tennessee; Southern Spaces

Tennessee Jamboree promotion, late 1960s

The Tennessee Jamboree: Local Radio, the Barn Dance, and Cultural Life in Appalachian East Tennessee

Bradley Hanson, Brown University

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Rural Radio:

The introduction of radio into the rural United States in the 1920s brought outlying populations into an expanding "network of modernity."3 Along with the automobile, telephone, and electricity, radio emerged as a key technological component in the negotiations between rural people and government agencies over the future course of U.S. cultural and social life.4 The diffusion of radio encouraged the transformation of rural life toward the cosmopolitan utilities of mainstream urban living. As Ronald Kline points out, for government officials interested in both uplifting and maintaining America's strong agricultural base, radio's presumed benefits included "the ability to relieve isolation, bring the city's culture of highbrow music and higher education to the country, and keep youth on the farm."5

With the onset of the Great Depression, radio's significance for rural families grew despite the lean conditions. During the 1930s, the number of farm families nationwide who owned a radio grew from twenty-one to sixty percent.6 The appeal and importance of radio during this time cannot be exaggerated. "Poverty stricken families," writes C. Joseph Pusateri, "would choose to surrender an icebox or furniture or even a bed before they would part with their radio sets. Radio somehow symbolized lifelines to the outside world that must be preserved at virtually any cost."7 "Unlike other major technologies—automobiles . . . or trains—that move us from one place to another," adds Susan Douglas, "radio . . . worked most powerfully inside our heads, helping us create internal maps of the world and our place in it, urging us to construct imagined communities to which we do, or do not, belong."8

Marion Post Walcott, A coal miner listens to his radio, 1938

Marion Post Walcott, A coal miner listens to his radio, West Virginia, 1938.

Richard Peterson explains the Depression-era situation:

For the potential consumer, radio entertainment had the great advantage of being free of charge, an especially important consideration in those . . . years. [R]adio had an almost magical power for rural people growing up in the 1930s, drawing families together and at the same time opening isolated communities to the larger world beyond the country and even the state.9

To speak, however, of one common rural radio experience is misleading. Conditions were not equivalent across the country's vast regional and geographical expanses. Residents in southern regions, especially those in the rugged mountainous tracts, lagged in the acquisition of technology as compared with farmers elsewhere in the US.10 In Appalachia and the Deep South, income never kept pace with the national average. For farmers and miners throughout the southern mountains, the cost of radio was not easily absorbed.11 By 1930, when nearly half of midwesterners owned radios, only one in ten residents of the U.S. South could say the same. But evidence does not suggest that radio was less popular or had less of an impact here. The social conditions simply developed differently as radio listening became a more communal experience, with several families often gathering at the homes of those who managed to afford the expensive device.12

Even though rural listeners constituted a dedicated and sought-after audience, early radio stations emanated from larger population centers. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, while some locales boasted independent "farmer" stations, most rural dwellers received the signals of dominant clear-channel stations located in regional hubs. In an effort to regulate the airwaves and prevent signal interference, the FCC authorized these prominent stations to broadcast with high-power and to hold exclusive claim on their frequency, day and night. Without local stations, rural and small town listeners became adept at picking up signals and tuning in to programming from the many large stations.13

A couple listens to their radio, West Virginia, 1938.

Radio's big-city bias changed after World War II. Eager to promote the growth of the medium, the FCC declared in October 1945 that it was resuming "normal consideration of applications for new stations." Broadcast radio entered a new era.14 Across the country, post-war entrepreneurs began to realize the commercial potential in radio and soon triggered an explosion of new AM, and now FM, stations. In contrast with radio's early period, during the late 1940s and early 1950s ambitious young broadcasters began to locate in smaller, underserved, and less-populated places. During the first few years following the war, the number of cities and towns with local radio service doubled.15 AM 1450 WLAF in LaFollette, Tennessee, took to the airwaves in 1953 and, for the first time, provided the town and surrounding county with a broadcast platform for cultural self-projection.

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