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

Fieldwork and research efforts continue on the Tennessee Jamboree project. There are more stories to tell, talents to reveal, and pieces to fit into a puzzle that is the program's character, history, and legacy. I have tried to resituate the Tennessee Jamboree in the expressive life of LaFollette and Campbell County, in the broad sweep of musical activity in the region, and in the incomplete chronicle of the barn dance. Radio was, and to certain extent continues to be, an integral part of life in rural and small-town America. More than any other modernizing technology, radio moved so-called isolated areas closer to the U.S. mainstream. But, even with the transformation toward a new "national" identity, there also emerged a complicated and perseverant notion of the "local." As the large national broadcast services quickly consolidated and offered "homogenous, rather than differentiated" programming, small local stations worked to fill this void, and, in doing so, to fulfill the early promise of diversity within the radio medium.41 The barn dance was one early and long-running favorite. The seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable national barn dance formula — with its rural representation via a mass medium, its sense of place on a place-defying technology, and its promotion of nostalgia in a world of the future — proved viable for many years across disparate scales and settings. While the National Barn Dance and the Grand Ole Opry were able to draw on local, regional, and ethnic musical traditions to craft a national entertainment format, programs like the Tennessee Jamboree readapted and readopted "country music" and the barn dance genre into a platform for thoroughly local expression.

Tennessee Jamboree reunion at the Louie Bluie Music and Arts Festival,
Caryville, Tennessee, June 2007.

The Tennessee Jamboree is but one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar programs that made their way into U.S. homes and lives. The program showcased the best in homegrown talent and brought the barn dance genre to the truly local scale. With its music, banter, advertisements, and atmosphere, the program reflected and imagined LaFollette and Campbell County, Tennessee, over the airwaves. Without the Tennessee Jamboree tapes, the program would be revered and remembered, but only by those who experienced it. With the discovery of these broadcasts, the Jamboree can be relived and appreciated as a testament to the vitality of local radio and local culture.