The Live Music Era on Rural Midwestern Radio Stations Gretta Woodson's singing career began on a hot summer afternoon in 1925. Employed as an office worker, Woodson and her sister had enjoyed a quick lunch in a downtown Oklahoma City restaurant. With some time left to kill on their lunch hours, the two women strolled through the downtown area, eventually passing the studios of Oklahoma City's new radio station, WKY. Neither woman had ever seen a radio station, so they decided to ask for a tour. Much to their bewilderment, however, the staff member on duty mistakenly thought the two women had stopped by to audition for a job: We just walked in (to the studio) and we visited with her a little... finally she said, "Do you play or sing?" I said, "Yes, I do." She asked me to sing something, so I did. When I got through, a man walked in and said, "Would you mind doing that (song) over again?"'. . . He put a microphone in front of me and he walked out of the studio... I went ahead and finished my song ... he came back in and asked, "Would you like to be on our Saturday night program?"1 Before she knew it, Woodson was a radio star. In fact, she worked at WKY for two years and enjoyed such popularity that she left Oklahoma in 1927 and moved to Chicago, where she became a recording artist for the Victor Phonograph Company and a performer on radio station WGN. Woodson's sudden rise to regional fame as a radio performer illustrates how broadcasters in rural Middle America turned to their cultural roots in radio's formative years to tap and develop a valuable natural resource, the local musician. From the early 1920s through the post-war 1940s, station executives combed their back yards searching for talented singers, yodelers, accordion players, fiddlers and guitar and banjo pickers. This was the heyday of radio's homegrown musician, when live music, albeit parochial and usually greenhorn in quality, dominated local program schedules. Stations always had plenty of air time to fill, and in a geographical region known as a breeding ground for country and folk music, the talent supply was equally plentiful, as Richard Lutz, a former musician for KFAL in Fulton, Missouri, explains: Here in Calloway County (Missouri) there's a lot of what we call "down home, back porch" musicians .... This county is full of fiddle players, banjo players, guitar players, mandolin players and some horn players, too ... it's only natural that radio would have reflected this culture.2 Live music was not unique to stations in the towns and cities of the rural Midwest; from radio's earliest days broadcasters in all regions of the country relied on local talent as a programming resource literally. But, as cultural geographers have noted, music is a unique form of cultural expression, and regional influences greatly impact the style and appeal of this art form. As a result, a given station's musical identity was largely shaped by native culture and custom, which was, in turn, based on the availability of local talent. Thus, instead of the civic orchestras, opera singers, or concert violinists commonly found on early day stations in the cities of the Northeast, radio in the rural Midwest thrived on homespun melodies from the KMA Cornpickers, the Ozark Ramblers, the Harmony Twins, Johnny White and his Sons of the West, the Pleasant Valley Gang, and "Happy Jack," the fiddling Irishman. Rural audiences loved this folksy fare because, if for no other reason, local radio's entertainers reflected the conservative, agrarian values that so typified the regional culture.3 The relationship that developed between local broadcasting and its indigenous cadre of entertainers bred a unique programming phenomenon that historians have mostly left unexplored. Consequently, little is understood about the lives of radio musicians, their career aspirations or the professional demands placed on them. Many broadcast histories focus on the media giants who built networks or major companies. …