Broadcast by the modern marvel of "kineoscope," it's Town Hall Party! Gut bucket country music played live onstage! Hillbilly music broadcast throughout the Southland from that Mecca of country music -- Compton, California.
Because you may have not been there at that exact point in history, you may in spite of yourselves have certain ideas and impressions about Compton, California. Similar to the real South, there were "colored people" though perhaps unlike the real South with a smattering of Asian and recent European immigrants. Due to the inrush of Dust Bowl refugees from Texas and Oklahoma, and so perchance more like the real South, there were way lots of hayseeds, crackers, rednecks, hillbillies, Okies, and lint-heads, not to mention poor white trash in Compton in those old days.
Nor was Compton in living memory always an area of urban density. A boy down the street from me corralled horses in his back yard. A more questionable neighbor poached for deer at night in the riverbed. Large, ancient apricot and shady walnut trees spread out through the neighborhood, many empty fields lay fallow though occasionally active with tumbleweeds, and even a dairy farm was clinging on for dear life at the edge of the city. The family on the corner had a player piano in their parlor and a producing oil well in their back yard. Next door to them, the Holy Roller church would be in full swing two nights a week and once in a great while a service would include burlap sacks full of wriggling rattlesnakes let loose on the floor. Kitty-corner from the church, was a small corner lot crammed full of house trailers, some rented out by the week. The only strangers who found a way to any door in the neighborhood were the peddlers -- people selling brooms made by the blind, foot soldiers who exchanged a red paper poppy for a donation to disabled veterans, or the occasional Bible salesman.
But enough of average days in average lives in the Compton of that time -- illiteracy, disposable workers in low-paying industries, small territories in small cities sometimes perilous to their inhabitants, and uneasy racial relations, those problems surely are no longer with us.
It's time for Town Hall Party! Even the very name went deep into history. Rural farmers had the rare festivity at the town hall as their only respite from back breaking work from sunup to sundown. Now, the hardworking tire monkeys at the Firestone plant and oil-smeared factory workers alike could gussy up and celebrate their time off from work every weekend with Town Hall Party!
Town Hall Party was broadcast from a large club with room way in the back for the dancers. Onstage, Joe Maphis was the bandleader for every show. He didn't like rehearsals, he just wanted to turn on the lights and go. Weekly regulars included Spade Cooley for a time and the Collins Kids who performed on every show. The program was so long-lived the whole Los Angeles Basin watched those kids grow up.
Everybody with real talent in country music appeared playing live. Among the guests were the genuine country greats -- Lefty Frizzel, Bill Monroe, the Carters, Tex Ritter, Ernest Stoneman, and one of my personal favorites, a "full-blooded Cherokee Indian" named Jenks "Tex" Carman. Carman played a regular flat top guitar laid flat and once in awhile after a dazzling break, he would surprise the audience by stamping his foot and letting out a real Indian war whoop. In fact, a young cowpoke named Dick Dale made his televised debut on that program, and as Dick Dale himself remembered for Jake Austen and Roctober, "Guys that would come on this show were guys like Johnny Cash before he ever wore black . . ." That's how very long ago it was.