Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round Music Analysis

WNOX’s Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, which aired from 1936 to 1961, was a pivotal program in the history of country music. Wildly popular throughout East Tennessee and bordering states, the show’s legacy outside of Knoxville will likely remain as something of a farm team for acts who would go on to make it big in Nashville. A few off-air and studio recordings from the 1950s have been found, but it’s long been thought that no recordings of the show’s earliest days survived. Turns out a recording of the Merry-Go-Round from Friday, November 11, 1937 has been in the Radio Archive of the University of Memphis for years, and it reveals a vastly different Merry-Go-Round than most might expect.

The Bensman Radio Program Archive was started in 1969 when Dr. Marvin Bensman, a University of Memphis professor, began collecting recordings of American radio programs. The
Of the dozen or so songs performed, only a few have a distinct country or old time sound. Instead, the dominant style is jazz. The Dixieland Swingsters were something of a house band at the time, and in this show member “Haywire” Dave Durham, an accomplished trumpet player who host Lowell Blanchard introduces as “the hottest fiddle player on the air,” blazes through two jazzy fiddle tunes. Accordion player Tony Musco plays two numbers that have more jazz and polka inflection than country flavor. Even a group singalong of old time tune “Back to Old Smoky Mountain” is more swing than western. After a series of corny jokes, the performer referred to as Monk sings the equally corny “Oh Susanna, Dust Off That Old Pianna” a saloon song recorded by jazz artists such as Fats Waller and the Harlem Hot Shots. “Looks Like I’m in Love Again” is performed as a show tune, and toward the end of the program Blanchard himself takes a crack at crooning with “At the End of the