Country and western music really got under way when phonographs and radio programs (especially, after the 1930s, broadcasts from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry) turned isolated rural folks into a mass audience. The first country-music hit was Fiddlin' John Carson's "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" recorded by Ralphy Peer in Atlanta in 1923. Even Peer thought it was "pluperfect awful," but it set off a boom in "hill-billy" music, which Variety called the "sing-song nasal-twanging vocalizing" of Southern mountaineers with "the intelligence of morons." But there was gold in them thar hills, and Peer struck it again in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, when a call for singers of "prewar melodies and old mountaineer songs" brought the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers to his studio. Here Jimmy Dean sings his magnificently funny "Bumming Around," available on King Records' Country & Western Hits anthology. (AU Format) (Real Audio Format)