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

As Nashville matured into country music's commercial center and WSM's Opry protected its spot on network airwaves, the city's output strove to appeal to a diverse national audience. In Knoxville, though, without such broad obligations, regional tastes flourished. In addition to the shows mentioned above, dozens of other country music programs benefited from the receptive regional atmosphere. Knoxville brimmed with local up-and-coming country music stars, many of whom, including Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, Archie Campbell, and others, went on to greater success in Nashville and beyond. Unable to match Nashville's financial and geographical advantage, Knoxville's radio community instead developed into a training ground for the national country music industry.

According to historian Charles Wolfe, the audiences in Knoxville and the surrounding region also tended to prefer "more traditional, 'purer' forms of country music." As Nashville embraced newer and more progressive styles, the radio in Appalachian East Tennessee continued to reflect "the old styles and the old songs." By the mid-1940s, this meant hard-driving acoustic bluegrass music. Though the style was first heard in 1946 on the Opry and got its name and original sound from west-Kentuckian Bill Monroe, bluegrass resonated in central Appalachia, perhaps more so than anywhere else. This was due largely to the many Monroe followers and bluegrass pioneers, including Flatt and Scruggs, The Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, and dozens of others, who popularized the style on radio in Knoxville, East Tennessee, and throughout the Southern highlands.26

Following WWII, changing cultural circumstances caused a major shift in the development of the barn dance in East Tennessee and across the country. The FCC, after suspending new broadcast licenses during the war, started to actively encourage the growth of radio stations in less-populated areas. At the same time, young musicians returned home after serving in military, just as the popularity of the country style — a main source of relief and entertainment during wartime — continued to surge. For these emergent small-market stations, the availability of musicians and the continued success of the barn dance made live local country variety shows an ideal early programming format.

By the mid-1950s, though, with the emergent competition from television and the resulting increase in "formatted" radio stations, the success of the barn dance dwindled in larger metropolitan markets. By the late 1950s, the style, as a national phenomenon, had peaked in its live radio form. Most of the popular barn dance programs outside of the South were replaced by DJs spinning hit records. As an exception, the Opry, by then a bona fide American institution, persisted mainly on the strength of the powerful Nashville music industry and the city's growing tourism business. In Knoxville, the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round ended in 1961 and the Tennessee Barn Dance, though broadcast in various forms into the 70s, lost much of its appeal and operated on much smaller scale.

Nevertheless, the surprisingly resilient barn dance genre evolved to fit the changing conditions. Successful television stations, especially those in the Southeast, boasted new "barn dance[s] with pictures."27 Sponsors like Ralston Purina's Pet Milk, Chattanooga Medicine Company, and Martha White Flour began syndicating country music variety shows in television markets.28 Just as the early radio barn dance had popularized "hillbilly music" three decades earlier, these new visual renderings, including The Porter Wagoner Show, The Flatt and Scruggs Show, and the televised Grand Ole Opry extended the reach of country music farther into American popular culture. Alongside the larger nationally- and regionally-targeted programs, local variants also enjoyed success. In Knoxville and East Tennessee, well-loved homegrown programs like The Cas Walker Show, The Jim Walter Jubilee Starring Bonnie Lou and Buster, and Jim Clayton Startime, continued to foster a more distinctly regional barn dance idiom and atmosphere on television.

Watch a clip from Jim Clayton Startime: Jim Clayton, David West, Monroe Queener, and the Cider Mountain Boys, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," early 1970s, Knoxville, Tennessee (2:54 min).
Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound: Jim Clayton Collection.
RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime

During this same period, with television on the rise and older and entrenched radio stations relying heavily on formatting and recordings, small-town AM radio stations turned increasingly to localism as the top programming priority. Especially in Appalachia, the barn dance formula maintained a stable broadcast home on rural AM radio stations. In small-towns throughout East Tennessee, these programs provided a training ground for local musicians and allowed would-be country "stars" to sharpen their skills in the hope of landing a spot on Knoxville television, or, even better, earning a chance to move to Nashville, record an album, and play on the Opry. For the communities themselves, these barn dance programs were a meaningful display of resilient local culture and a broadcast setting in which to imagine the best about themselves and their values. One such small-town station was WLAF in LaFollette, Tennessee, and one such barn dance program was the Tennessee Jamboree.