When the economic crisis hit the rest of the country, the Depression enabled country music to go national. Phonograph sales atrophied–sales in 1932 were less than one-tenth of those in 1929–and radio and jukeboxes became music’s new inexpensive platforms. By 1932, radios that had been $139 were selling for $47. Paying in installments, nearly 60% of American households had a radio by 1933. Radio was a good entertainment value at a time when people struggled to pay rent and put food on the table. It became indispensable. A Kentucky survey found that radio “exceeded telephone calls, news service, and circular letters as a means of influencing rural people.” At the same time, the out-migration from Appalachia prior to and during the Depression meant that there was an urban market for country music.
The first radio station to feature country artists regularly was Atlanta’s WSB, which began broadcasting in 1922. Fort Worth’s WBAP followed with the first Saturday night “barn dance,“ a live stage show that featured traditional Appalachian music. Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, West Virginia’s Wheeling Jamboree and Des Moines’ Iowa Barn Dance Frolic followed quickly, as did similar shows from Tulsa to Minneapolis, Philadelphia to Los Angeles, Richmond to Cincinnati, and even to the Canadian province of Ontario.
Chicago’s WLS, owned by Sears, Roebuck & Co., then the “World’s Largest Store,” aired the local barn dance to its huge national audience to promote its catalog. Rural families responded. “This is an old-fashioned home,” one listener wrote in, “supper with us is done early on Saturday night–a big pan of popcorn and a dish of shiny red apples–a good fire and the radio dialed to WLS at 7 o’clock–we stay with you until you sign off.” In 1933, the National Barn Dance was picked up by NBC and carried nationwide, and country music went coast-to-coast.
Rural Americans were not the only ones drawn to the simple old-fashioned tunes, played on mandolins, fiddles, and guitars. Manhattan and Brooklyn residents listened to Village Barn Dance broadcast from Greenwich Village in New York City. The Wheeling Jamboree blanketed “much of Pennsylvania, New York, rural New England, and Eastern Canada.” Even urban-dwelling New Englanders came to listen to country music: country performer Bradley Kincaid spent the 1930s on the radio in Boston, Hartford, Schenectady and Rochester, New York. The first country music theme park, the C-Bar-C Ranch, was opened by a husband and wife radio duo. In 1941, they moved the ranch not to the south, but to Maine.