Today is the 6th anniversary of the radio program “Sandhills Jubilee.”
Unless you have been in an episode, you probably are not familiar with the program.
Six years ago tonight, after a few days of brainstorming over Facebook Messenger, Kalin Krohe and Jeremy Fifield joined me in historic Radio City studio 14A to record the first episode. The first germ of an idea was shared several months earlier in a conversation between Fifey and me after recording our weird podcast “Ten Songs Will Survive.” I had an idea to do a parody of two different shows: “Prairie Home Companion” and “Midnight Jamboree”. “Jamboree” is a live music show done from Nashville’s Ernest Tubb Record Store every Saturday night.
From “Prairie Home” we took the idea of a honey-voiced emcee who told long, rambling anecdotes; from “Jamboree” we took the idea of a radio show done in a record store.
Then, building on those two elements, we forged our own little universe. In the world of “Sandhills Jubilee”, Antioch Nebraska is not a boom-then-bust town but a busy, bustling place with its own radio station (KMOO) , record store and a thriving downtown area. The show is broadcast live from Sandburn’s Record Store, where the third generation manager hates the store, hates the show, and wants to plow it all into a parking lot. The host, affable Durward MacGillovray, is a cowboy poet whose books of short, goofy verse are on sale in the record store.
The night we taped the first show, we had already figured out that Jeremy and Kalin would be our musical guests–first as themselves, then as a fictional combo called The Riverfront Boys. The song they wrote and played that night, “He Wasn’t Free”, surprised all of us. Over the next year or more Kalin and Jeremy kept playing the Riverfront Boys on the show, and kept writing and performing new, brilliantly loopy songs.
And then, all of a sudden, The Riverfront Boys were a real band:
The Riverfront Boys have played at Lincoln’s historic Zoo Bar, and entertained a huge crowd in downtown Alliance during Eclipse Weekend in 2017.
The “Jubilee” radio show, like all of the “internet radio shows” I’ve been a part of, holds to no schedule or season. When Jeremy is in town and we can find a free night, we do one. And we get lots of friends into the act, playing various lovable/weird citizens of Antioch. Since “Sandhills Jubilee” is supposed to be a concert performance show, we have featured acoustic performances by a wide variety of Nebraska artists. We even recorded an episode on location at Alliance’s 1910 Coffeehouse that was essentially a one-man show featuring Luke Redfield. (Luke was very game to do some schtick with Durward after the performance.)
So happy 6th anniversary to the Jubilee…here’s the first show we did, and the most recent show we did (the ending of the last show is Part 1 of a “cliffhanger”…)