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PATSY MONTANA
*Editor's Note - In 1935 she gained national attention with "I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart and became the first million selling female recording artist. She was known as the yodeling cowgirl.

 

Patsy, born Ruby Blevens, is a native of Arkansas. Patsy is pictured with her husband, Paul Rose. They have a daughter, Beverly, 2-1/2 years old. Patsy not only sings cowboy songs, but has done a great deal of riding in rodeos.



Special honor goes to this group, selected by listeners as one of the three most popular acts on WLS. In their repertoire, cowboy songs, mountain songs, old-fashioned spirituals and side-splitting comedy. Four of them were born in log houses. The group is heard regularly on Smile-A-While Time, 5:30 A.M. Tex Atchison is one of the few left-handed fiddlers known.









THE PRAIRIE RAMBLERS
Photographed in one of their rare quiet moments, the Prairie Ramblers, above, are, left to right, Tex Atchison, Salty Holmes, Chick Hurt, Jack Taylor. Salty is the one with the trick voice.

 

Comedy seems to come natural to these boys, each with his own particular brand of fun. We haven't found anybody yet who could watch them without forgetting all his troubles in laughter.

In 1924, the National Barn Dance ...
radio program debuted on WLS in Chicago to provide country music for rural and urban listeners who had recently moved to the city. WLS' sponsor, Sears, Roebuck, complained about the show's "disgraceful lowbrow music" until it became obvious that the program was immensely popular. A year later, a station in Nashville, WSM, convinced WLS' announcer, George D. Hay (Judge Hay), to work for their Saturday night BARN DANCE radio show. Judge Hay would later dub WSM's program the GRAND OLE OPRY. These shows reached millions of homes across the eastern half of the continent, their popularity coalescing into what was arguably rural America's first attempt at self-expression on a national scale. This fledgling community soon gave way to country music's first bona fide star, Jimmie Rodgers, who made his initial recordings in 1927 in a warehouse in Bristol, Tennessee.



Bill Monroe and his Brother Charlie ...
got their start as dancers on Chicago's WLS BARN DANCE. Soon Bill and Charlie were known around the Southeast as the Monroe Brothers, a couple of fast-pickin', high-singin', professional musicians with an affection for flashy white suits and derby hats. By 1939, the Monroe Brothers had broken up and Bill had a new band, the Blue Grass Boys, which he auditioned for an appearance on the GRAND OLE OPRY. Judge Hay later recalled their audition performance as "a sample of folk music 'as she should be sung and played,'" a quote that belies Hay's belief in the OPRY's duty to present "authentic hill-country music."

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