100 WLS Barn Dance Favorites

100 WLS Barn Dance Favorites was published in Chicago by M. M. Cole in 1935, compiled by John Lair from the music library of WLS, the Prairie Farmer station. The contents came largely from a listener popularity contest, after which the editors dropped anything they could not license and anything already printed in every song book on the market, which pushed the folio toward material that was hard to find elsewhere. Lair’s foreword admits to eight editorial insertions, older numbers the staff wanted back in circulation, naming “I’m Going Home to Clo,” “Over the Hills to the Poor House,” and “Save My Mother’s Picture from the Sale” among them. Most of the 102 titles are nineteenth-century sentimental, minstrel, and gospel songs, with cowboy and mountain material through the middle and a run of fiddle tunes and play-party numbers at the back, including Miss McLeod’s Reel, Durang’s Hornpipe, Gray Eagle, Leather Breeches, Soldier’s Joy, and Arkansas Traveler. Five years after this book was published, M. M. Cole issued One Thousand Fiddle Tunes, which reprints Elias Howe’s 1883 Ryan’s Mammoth Collection of 1050 Reels and Jigs under a new title and stayed in print into the 1990s.

WLS signed on in 1924 under Sears, Roebuck, whose “World’s Largest Store” supplied the station’s call letters, and passed to the farm paper Prairie Farmer in 1928. Its Saturday night National Barn Dance started the week the station did and became the model for the format: a 50,000-watt clear channel signal that reached much of North America after dark, an NBC network pickup from September 1933 that carried an hour of it coast to coast under Alka-Seltzer sponsorship, and a paying audience filling the 1,200-seat Eighth Street Theatre in the Loop twice every Saturday. Writing at the back of this folio, promotional director George C. Biggar counts nearly sixty stations carrying the program and a 400,000th theatre guest honored in November 1935. The audience was farm families across the Midwest together with city listeners raised on farms, a split the station courted deliberately. WSM’s Grand Ole Opry, launched in Nashville by George D. Hay after a stint announcing at WLS, was the most durable of many imitations.