Beginning in the mid-1920s, radio stations that catered to rural audiences sponsored programs featuring country music, generically termed "barn dances." Ranking second in terms of longevity and perhaps in significance to the Grand Ole Opry from WSM Nashville came the Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia. It became the springboard for such country stars as Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Hawkshaw Hawkins, the Osborne Brothers, Doc and Chickie Williams, Lee Moore, Big Slim the Lone Cowboy, and m...

On September 13, 1876, the bell on Atwood Hall rang, students assembled, and Rio Grande College began its 140-year search for identity and its struggle for existence. Ira Haning, a Freewill Baptist minister, conveyed the idea of a college to a prominent couple, Nehemiah and Permelia Atwood. Nehemiah passed away in 1869, and supposedly, his last words were "Permelia, build the college." Permelia deeded 10 acres and financed Atwood Hall and the Boarding Hall, and Rio Grande College became a ...

West Virginia has been known for a century as a rich repository of traditional country music and musicians. Beginning in the mid-1920s, phonograph recordings and radios brought this music to a wider audience. With the passing of time and the influence of commercialization, this music developed into what became first known as "hillbilly" and then into the more refined "country" because of its long appeal to those of rural background. Although modernization has caused the traditional element...

Jamboree! To many country music fans the word conjures up memories of Saturday nights around the family radio listening to live broadcasts from that haven of hillbilly music, West Virginia. From 1926 through the 1950s, as Ivan Tribe shows in his lively history, country music radio programming made the Mountain State a mecca for country singers and instrumentalists from all over America.Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Little Jimmy Dickens, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Red Sovine, Blaine Smith, Cu...

Born in rural Ohio in 1897, Beryl Halley was educated at a strict Freewill Baptist school. After briefly teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, she joined the navy in 1918 before her unlikely path led her to Broadway, then to the Ziegfeld Follies (1923-1925). She also appeared in Earl Carroll's Vanities and other revues, as well as in films, and had a widely publicized brush with the law (over alleged nudity) in 1926.She retired from show business in 1930, married an insurance executi...