Cowtown Jubilee (Kansas City)

Kansas City Star
September 19, 1952

The Place to Go Is the Ivanhoe!

The Cowtown Jubilee from Kansas City, Missouri

By the time the Cowtown Jubilee show was launched, Kansas City audiences were already used to hearing a similar program, the "Brush Creek Follies". The Follies had been on air since 1938 and proved to be quite popular for its radio station, KMBC. Rival station WHB started its own live stage show, however, and the Cowtown Jubilee was born.

Kansas City Star
November 24, 1950

The first show took place on September 23, 1950. Initially, WHB, one of Kansas City's oldest radio stations, was home to the Cowtown Jubilee. However, the show switched to KCMO in 1952. The Jubilee was sponsored by the Sunny Slope Chapter of American War Dads, a charity organisation. The show was held on Saturday nights at the Ivanhoe Temple, an auditorium in Kansas City that had a capacity of nearly 2,000 seats. After the stage show portion had ended, a square dance took place at the auditorium. The Ivanhoe Temple had been previously home to the Brush Creek Follies for many years, which had moved to another venue by then, however. 

One might think that two shows of the same format would include the same musicians but that was not the case. Kansas City's pool of country musicians was big enough to furnish both shows with different entertainers. The Cowtown Jubilee offered a stage for a younger generation of singers, including Jimmy Dallas and Elmo Linn, Milt Dickey, Balin' Wire Bob Strack, the Sons of the Golden West, Peggy Clark, Cora Rice, Betty Riley, Neal Burris, Don Sullivan, and many more. Hobie Shep was also a featured act on the show, he also led the house band, the Cowtown Wranglers, and helped out as an emcee. In the early years of the Jubilee, local comedian Frank "Whizzo" Wiziarde was the emcee but he was replaced with Dal Stallard (probably with the move from WHB to KCMO).

When TV became the more popular medium, the Cowtown Jubilee ended its broadcast over KCMO, instead switching to television air time on WDAF-TV. It appears that the show was also carried by radio KCKN during this time. While the cast remained, the show was now hosted by Roch "Uncle Virgil" Ulmer, a local radio and TV personality. This incarnation of the Cowtown Jubilee remained on air until 1959, when the final episode was broadcast in October that year.

Kansas City Times
November 9, 1968

It was especially Hobie Shep who kept the memory of the Cowtown Jubilee and Brush Creek Follies alive. He organized a reunion show of both casts in November 1968 at Memorial Hall in Kansas City and would do so infrequently well into the 1990s.

Sources

• Hillbilly-Music.com entry

• Various newspaper items (incl. depicted ads)