Renfro Valley Barn Dance
Venues
The Renfro Valley Barn Dance is a long-running country music radio show and stage revue in Renfro Valley, Kentucky, created by promoter, songwriter, and folklorist John Lair. Lair first put the Barn Dance on the air over Cincinnati's WLW from the Cincinnati Music Hall on October 9, 1937 before relocating to his boyhood home and broadcasting from a real barn in Renfro Valley beginning November 4, 1939. The show launched the careers of Red Foley, Homer and Jethro, and the Coon Creek Girls, the pioneering all-female string band Lair built around Lily May Ledford's clawhammer banjo playing. In 1979 Lair revived the name with the New Coon Creek Girls, founded by bassist Vicki Simmons, who learned from Lily May herself. The group got its start on the Barn Dance stage and later rose to greater prominence in bluegrass circles with singer Dale Ann Bradley. Lair presided over the valley until his death in 1985, and today the Renfro Valley Entertainment Center carries on the tradition alongside the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
In the newsletter
- No. 7 Spring 1996