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

Historians have lamented the fleeting character of radio. While it shaped, reported, and reflected history, radio's means of doing so, its precious aural content, often vanished as soon as it emerged — especially at small rural stations like WLAF where preservation was simply not a significant concern. The story of "Radio" that gets told tends to devalue the local and fixate on the national ambitions of big stations and large networks. Radio historian Michele Hilmes's observations are worth quoting at length:

Many — the vast majority — of broadcast hours are lost forever. What does exist tends to privilege the dominant and centralized sources . . . . Records and accounts of the larger and more successful stations, programs, and performers are more likely to survive than… those [of the] small stations providing a different service to a more marginalized audience, those programs deemed of specialized interest of least appeal whose scripts and records have long been destroyed, limited regional and local broadcasts, those efforts that never made it to realization precisely because they went against the grain of dominant practice. Much research needs to be done in lesser-known areas to bring them to other scholars' attention and to reflect more fully our diverse and conflicted media heritage.36

The Jamboree tapes, then, are not just significant to an esoteric interest in the history of LaFollette, or East Tennessee, or country music, or the barn dance; they contribute scarce and sonorous new evidence into a history of radio that more carefully addresses the "local" as something valued and persistent.

The tapes reveal the music, stage banter, and advertisements that marked the Tennessee Jamboree as a program rooted in and catering to an idealized local culture. The barn dance genre worked to create an imagined sense of collectivity and a nostalgic sense of rural values. Jody Berland describes the relationship between the aural medium and an imagined "community" evoked over the airwaves:

[T]he community that speaks and is spoken through [the] medium is . . . constituted by it, and is formed by its structures, selections, and strategies. . . . [R]adio comprise[s] an ideal instrument for collective self-construction, for the enactment of a community's oral and musical history. . . . [Radio] is oral, vernacular, immediate, transitory; its composite stream of music and speech . . . has the capacity to nourish local identity . . . 37

The Tennessee Jamboree must be understood in the broader context of the barn dance genre, and as exhibitive of the regional preferences of East Tennessee. At the same time, the Jamboree, as the tapes reveal, was crafted to the specific scale, social geography, and imagined character of LaFollette and Campbell County. To explore this assertion, I will look closely in this section at one of the surviving complete Tennessee Jamboree broadcasts. Representative of the entire collection of tapes, this broadcast, likely made in 1969, provides an accurate example of the style and format employed on the Jamboree throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

From the first moments of the opening musical number — a spirited instrumental arrangement of the traditional tune "John Hardy" featuring the quick-picking of L. C. Edwards on banjo and Monroe Queener on dobro — it is clear that the Tennessee Jamboree is a fast-paced affair. Over the course of the hour, the Blue Valley Boys and Girls, led by Elmer Longmire, managed to squeeze in seventeen musical selections. In accordance with the barn dance formula, the songs are very different from each other and feature varying instrumental soloists, lead vocalists, and shifting arrangements. Unlike the nationally prominent programs with their sprawling roster of performers, the Jamboree's entire workload is carried by the Blue Valley Boys and Girls.

The Jamboree's musical diversity stems from the ability of the group to move among styles and settings. Calling the Blue Valley Boys and Girls a bluegrass band does not do justice to their performances. East Tennessee radio audiences preferred more "traditional" sounds. Bluegrass, with its old-time roots and conservative aura — although it was not much older than rock and roll — proved a favored style in the region even as other forms of popular and country music dominated the airwaves and record sales elsewhere. Even so, the Blue Valley Boys and Girls, working in a bluegrass idiom, with an entirely acoustic instrumentation and heavy emphasis on "hot licks" and high harmonies, did not strictly adhere to the standard repertoire of the genre.

The seventeen songs performed on this particular broadcast included bluegrass standards, banjo instrumentals, faux-ethnic dobro numbers, harmony-rich hymns, sentimental vocal trios, cowboy songs, novelty songs, and classic country ballads. Throughout the program, as songs were introduced, Longmire mentioned the requests elicited, stamping this assortment as belonging to the tastes of an actively engaged audience. In taking on such a variety of material, Longmire and the band made a broader statement as well. Though the Blue Valley Boys and Girls performed frequently in and around LaFollette and Campbell County, the audience knew that the musicians maintained day jobs. While the national country music industry increasingly "discovered its best interests . . . in a package with clouded identity, possessing no regional traits," the Blue Valley Boys and Girls demonstrated that they could play in any country sub-style while their everyday lives infused the material with local integrity.38

Emcee Elmer Longmire varied the show's musical contents by creatively exploiting the distinctive talents of the Blue Valley Boys and Girls, giving the impression of a much larger roster. Most members of the group filled multiple roles during the hour. Longmire, as emcee, pitchman, bandleader, director, and stage manager, also performed as tenor vocalist in the Jamboree's trio. Alongside Sara Miller, the requisite "girl singer," and guitarist Fred Longmire, the full-voiced elder Longmire performed throughout on a wide range of material. Just after the show's introduction, the trio launched into rollicking rendition of bluegrass favorite "Roll, Muddy, River." A few minutes later, they led the group through adaptations of classic country hits "Just Before Dawn" and "You'll Always Be My Blue-Eyed Darling." When the time came to cover the cowboy song "Way Out There," and the hymns "The Holy Hill" and "Nearer My God to Thee," the trio again guided the ensemble.

Listen to a clip from the Tennessee Jamboree: "Then I'll Stop Loving You." Vocal Trio (Fred Longmire, Elmer Longmire, Sara Miller), late 1960s (2:43 min).
The collection of L.C. Edwards and the Tennessee State Library and Archives
RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime

Bassist Red Harrison, when leaving his position as the solid foundation of the ensemble, often moved to the forefront and performed as the Jamboree's most skilled solo singer. His rich baritone voice, on par with some of the finest country singers of the day, was featured on the sentimental ballads "Just Before Dawn," "Today I Burned Your Old Love Letters," "Its Not Love, But Its Not Bad," and several others. Never mere sidemen, banjo player Edwards and dobro player Queener, though not showcased as vocalists, also moved between group supporting roles and featured instrumental soloists. Their playing secured the vibrancy of the group's acoustic sounds, and their solos added the standard breakdown instrumentals.