In July 1927, record executive Ralph Peer set up mobile recording equipment in the unused upper floors of a hat company in Bristol, Tennessee. For two weeks, musical acts from the surrounding Appalachian hills performed dozens of takes of “hillbilly music.” These sessions were the first time that Southern, white, rural music had been professionally recorded. The recordings are immortalized in the Library of Congress, and Bristol is acknowledged by Congressional resolution as the birthplace of country music. Johnny Cash called Peer’s trip to Bristol “the single most important event in country music.” But while the sessions may have been the Big Bang of country music, the Great Depression was the gravitational pull that created country stars and their nationwide universe of listeners.

Before Peer’s recording sessions, Appalachian music was confined to the people who were born and raised in the region. But in the 1920s, an economic crisis that foreshadowed the national crisis pushed farmers off their land and threw coal miners and millhands out of work. Unemployed and desperate, people moved to cities–to Atlanta and Nashville, but also to the industrial centers of Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, where one executive crowed that his new workers “were glad to get whatever wages were given to them.” Farmers, miners, and textile workers packed their pitiful things and took their families north. One thing they would not leave behind was their love of the music of their beloved mountains.

When the economic crisis hit the rest of the country, the Depression enabled country music to go national. Phonograph sales atrophied–sales in 1932 were less than one-tenth of those in 1929–and radio and jukeboxes became music’s new inexpensive platforms. By 1932, radios that had been $139 were selling for $47. Paying in installments, nearly 60% of American households had a radio by 1933. Radio was a good entertainment value at a time when people struggled to pay rent and put food on the table. It became indispensable. A Kentucky survey found that radio “exceeded telephone calls, news service, and circular letters as a means of influencing rural people.” At the same time, the out-migration from Appalachia prior to and during the Depression meant that there was an urban market for country music.

The first radio station to feature country artists regularly was Atlanta’s WSB, which began broadcasting in 1922. Fort Worth’s WBAP followed with the first Saturday night “barn dance,“ a live stage show that featured traditional Appalachian music. Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, West Virginia’s Wheeling Jamboree and Des Moines’ Iowa Barn Dance Frolic followed quickly, as did similar shows from Tulsa to Minneapolis, Philadelphia to Los Angeles, Richmond to Cincinnati, and even to the Canadian province of Ontario.

Chicago’s WLS, owned by Sears, Roebuck & Co., then the “World’s Largest Store,” aired the local barn dance to its huge national audience to promote its catalog. Rural families responded. “This is an old-fashioned home,” one listener wrote in, “supper with us is done early on Saturday night–a big pan of popcorn and a dish of shiny red apples–a good fire and the radio dialed to WLS at 7 o’clock–we stay with you until you sign off.” In 1933, the National Barn Dance was picked up by NBC and carried nationwide, and country music went coast-to-coast.

Rural Americans were not the only ones drawn to the simple old-fashioned tunes, played on mandolins, fiddles, and guitars. Manhattan and Brooklyn residents listened to Village Barn Dance broadcast from Greenwich Village in New York City. The Wheeling Jamboree blanketed “much of Pennsylvania, New York, rural New England, and Eastern Canada.” Even urban-dwelling New Englanders came to listen to country music: country performer Bradley Kincaid spent the 1930s on the radio in Boston, Hartford, Schenectady and Rochester, New York. The first country music theme park, the C-Bar-C Ranch, was opened by a husband and wife radio duo. In 1941, they moved the ranch not to the south, but to Maine.

The barn dance phenomenon was not limited to the rural poor. By the early 1930s, the were society barn dances at Briarcliffe Lodge, in the Hamptons, in Newport hosted by the Vanderbilts, and in wealthy Westchester County. At a barn dance in Palm Beach, the society ladies and gentlemen “donned gingham dresses and overalls, sunbonnets and broad-brimmed straw hats.” Guests to Briarcliffe were promised “special rural dance music [arranged] by an orchestra.” Country music had spread coast to coast and across socio-economic lines.    

The popularity of country music received yet another boost: the powerful radio station from the la frontera city of Acuna, Mexico. American businessmen erected several border stations in the 1930s to evade U.S. regulations. Among these, it was the 500,000-watt XERA that meant the most to the expansion of country music. Border blasters lured budding country stars to play music and to sell products. The stations paid well. Ruth Pickard, whose family played music for a border station, remembered that “[domestic] stations weren’t paying much money in those days. My dad was making $1000 a week, which was a lot of money in those days, back when the Depression was on.” By comparison, a farm in 1935 would generate $775 for the year. According to country music scholar Bill C. Malone, these powerful stations “popularized hillbilly music throughout the United States and laid the basis for country music’s great popularity in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.” Country star Patsy Montana recalled that “I used to get up real early in Chicago, and listen to border stations before I went to work.”

The end of Prohibition in 1933 was another spur to the new sound. Bars, drugstores, and diners just had to have coin-operated “juke boxes.” By 1939, the nation’s 250,000 new jukeboxes were devouring 13,000,000 discs per year, introducing countless listeners to country music. For the record industry, which had depended on Americans having the money to buy records to play on the phonographs in their living rooms, the communal jukebox was a lifeline.

Record executives like Peer sought out new, authentic content. Two of Peer’s Bristol discoveries, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, became the first “hillbilly superstars.” Rodgers, “the singing brakeman,” broke first. As Peer later recounted to Billboard, “I was elated when I heard him perform. . . he had his own peculiar style, and I thought that his yodel alone might spell success.” Peer was right on. Within six months of recording “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas),” Rodgers’s royalties were $2,000 per month. “T for Texas” was “a national phenomenon.” By the early 1930s, Rodgers sold 3-4 million discs in an era when a regular hillbilly “hit” would sell 10,000 copies. Rodgers built a $50,000 “Blue Yodeler’s Paradise” in Kerrville, Texas, anticipating Graceland, the Memphis mansion of Elvis Presley.

If Jimmie Rodgers was a well-traveled troubadour who had seen and done everything, the Carter Family was devout, poor, and linked to their modest parcel of land. A.P. Carter sold fruit-trees and worked at a sawmill. His wife Sara sang and played guitar. After hearing that a “recording man” was to be in Bristol, A.P., a pregnant Sara, and her cousin Maybelle made the 25-mile trip over dirt roads to sing for him, recording “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow” and three other tunes. That session changed their lives. It also helped spark a new commercial art form and industry. “As soon as I heard Sara’s voice,” Peer recalled, “that was it… I knew that it was going to be wonderful.”

And wonderful it was. The Carters’ success was “phenomenal.” Between 1927 and 1941 they recorded for all the major record companies and their songs were released as far away as Australia. By the early 1930s, their “Wildwood Flower” had sold over 100,000 copies, and they followed this with a series of chart-toppers. Peer’s marketing efforts on behalf of the Carter Family made them stars.  “Mr. Peer made us famous,” Sara said, “and we made him rich.”