Lofty aspirations

BARN BURNER The Hoosier Hot Shots were WLS favorites.

Photograph: Southern Music and Radio Photographic Collection, Southern Appalachian Archives, Berea College

Chad Berry says he received some strange looks when he told his colleagues in academia that he was putting together a book of essays about The National Barn Dance, a popular country-music variety show that aired on WLS radio from 1924 to 1960, reaching an almost nationwide audience thanks to the AM station’s powerful signal. He says the typical response was: “What a trite, quaint, irrelevant topic.” Well, people didn’t actually say that to his face, he admits, “But you could tell in the body language.”

But Berry went on to edit The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance (University of Illinois, $24.95), a collection of essays that makes the case that Chicago was once the capital of country music, Nashville be damned.

And Berry, a professor in Appalachian studies at Berea College in Kentucky, insists that the topic is relevant in many ways. The book’s essays show how the WLS program shaped country and bluegrass music while at the same time bringing female performers to new prominence in the recording industry. And for rural listeners and Southerners who migrated to the North, those singers, fiddlers and comedians on the Barn Dance seemed like friends and family. “A little old radio show can really be an important cultural icon,” Berry says. “And it came right smack-dab out of Chicago.”

The book actually began as a movie. Chicago filmmaker Steve Parry has been directing a documentary called The Hayloft Gang since 2004, collecting rare photos, film and audio while interviewing people who performed on the Barn Dance or listened to the show in their living rooms. When Parry interviewed Berry for a segment in the film, he suggested Berry edit a companion book. Now, the book is out, but the film is still a year away from completion, as Parry seeks funding to finish it up. “It’s a labor of love,” he says. “My wife calls it ‘the other woman.’ She’s going to be glad to see it finished.”

Chicagoans will probably get to see The Hayloft Gang on WTTW Channel 11 in fall 2009, Parry says. In the meantime, they can read all about the Barn Dance in Berry’s book. While the book’s essays are somewhat scholarly, the cast of characters is undeniably colorful. Gene Autry was the biggest star to emerge from WLS, but the show was chock-full of talent, including the Girls of the Golden West (who were actually from downstate Illinois) and Patsy Montana. She came to Chicago in 1933, after her family grew a hundred-pound watermelon in Arkansas. While her brothers showed off the megamelon at the World’s Fair, Montana auditioned at WLS and became a star. Her self-penned 1935 song “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” was the first million-record seller by a female country singer.

Unfortunately, readers of The Hayloft Gang will have to use their imaginations to picture what The National Barn Dance sounded like. Few tapes of the show exist, and only a tiny fraction of the 78rpm records made by WLS stars are available on CD.

The early days of The National Barn Dance offer a history that runs parallel to the standard narrative about the Jazz Age, which typically recalls images of 1920 flappers swinging to big bands. But at the same time, people all over the country were holding hoedowns to the sounds of WLS performers such as Arkie the Arkansas Woodchopper.

“It was marketed toward rural America,” says Paul Tyler, a Chicago fiddler and folklorist who contributed an essay to the book. He says the message was: “We’re here for regular folk.”