Long before Nashville, Chicago was the country music capital of the world — thanks to The National Barn Dance, a popular radio show from Chicago that aired for several decades.
Now, viewers across the nation will get a chance to learn why this old time radio program was so influential by watching The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance, a 60-minute PBS documentary to air WTTW/11 Sept.15 at 8 p.m., with encore presentations.
This is the first-ever documentary produced by Ralph Murnyak’s Image Base, known for corporate videos since 1983. The idea came from Image Base’s account executive, Stephen Parry, The Hayloft Gang’s executive producer.
“Country music was his passion and he asked us if we’d be willing to produce it if he headed it up,” says Murnyak. “The doc has taken close to eight years to complete, mostly spent on fund-raising and Stephen collected well over $300,000 over a period of time. He did a lot of grant writing,” Murnyak says.
“We wanted this documentary to be about much more than the story of country music. This is the story of changing rural America in the first half of the 20th century when you had a massive rural to urban migration and people left the farmlands for the bigger cities,” says Parry.
Co-executive producer Kevin Blake, president of Image Base, DP John Timmerman, formerly with Image Base and now freelancing and producer/editor Pieter Miller, guided the project. They shot original footage and wove it together with home movies, candid photographs, and rare performance footage in the editing process.
Narrated by Garrison Keillor — famous host of A Prairie Home Companion, an obvious direct descendent of The National Barn Dance — The Hayloft Gang tells the tale of how The National Barn Dance, which aired on WLS from 1924 to 1960, exposed eager ears to new country stars, like Gene Autry and Patsy Montana and comedians such as Pat Buttram and exemplified changing cultural tastes and styles.
“On Saturday nights, when the show would typically run from 7:30 p.m. to midnight, you’d hear everything from barbershop quartets to mountain string bands to cowboy crooners,” Parry says.
The doc draws a parellel with today’s uncertain times
Parry says The Hayloft Gang — which served as the nickname for the radio show’s cast — will resonate with contemporary viewers because it “draws parallels to the uncertain economic times of today. At times like these, as well as back in the 1930s and ‘40s, people tend to search for a usable past and look back to their roots, getting nostalgic for simpler times.”
While many of the performers have passed on who appeared before the National Barn Dance’s microphones at the Eighth Street Theater (today the Conrad Hilton hotel) in the South Loop, Parry and his crew were able to interview relevant survivors, scholars, folklorists, and media experts for the doc. They included Patsy Montana’s daughter Beverly Losey and historian Bill Malone.
Murnyak notes that the Barn Dance was “a milestone in broadcasting history. It was one of the first radio shows to have a live audience, and it really set the standard for variety programs that would continue to become popular on radio and later on television.”
The Hayloft Gang is a co-production of the Independent Television Service, produced in association with Kentucky Educational Television and presented by WTTW National Productions.
The doc began airing in Los Angeles, New York, Philadephia and Atlanta and will run on all 70 PBS stations until the end of the month.
Veteran freelance writer Erik Martin pens articles for national publications, such as the L.A. Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Sun-Times, Patch.com and others. Martin, who has a film/communications degree, runs CineVerse, a weekly film discussion group and accompanying blog. Email him at thewrite1@scbglobal.com.
