Hey, did you know that “Scooby-Doo” was inspired by “Dobie Gillis”?
Putting aside the semi-coherent dog for a moment, you’ve got Fred (Dobie), Velma (Zelda Gilroy), Daphne (Thalia Menninger) and Shaggy (Maynard G. Krebs of course). Now that inspiration was only a starting point–of the four main characters, only Shaggy bears any resemblance to his “Dobie Giillis” precursor.
I tell you this–and there are dozens of stories like it I could have chosen–to start to try to explain “Sandhills Jubilee.”
I first told my friend Jeremy Fifield about my idea for “Sandhills Jubilee” one summer when we were doing a podcast called “Ten Songs Will Survive”. I was inspired by “Prairie Home Companion”, which I had heard and enjoyed many times; and by “Midnight Jamboree”, a show I had heard of that was broadcast from a record store in Nashville every Saturday night. The early speck of an idea I had was to do a spoof of that kind of thing, a show done from a record store with music and spoken word material.
By March of 2013 Kalin Krohe had joined the conversation (which I have preserved on Facebook) with Mr. Kite and me, and we nailed things down quickly. Kalin was the VIP of this process, as it was he who came up with “Riverfront” as the family name for our regularly appearing bluegrass band; Antioch, NE as our home city; and Sandburn’s Record Store as the name of our fictional origination point. I created a character for myself as host: I would be cowboy poet Durward MacGillovray, who reads his inane verses in-between musical numbers. And I devised the idea that, although Durward would try to tell a Garrison Keillor-style anecdote each week, The Riverfront Boys would grow impatient with his meandering tales and hit him in the head with a guitar.
All that remained to make each episode great was for Kalin and Jeremy to get together for about 20 minutes and create fully-formed, hummable, memorable songs. And they did it over and over and over again. I have no idea how. Jeremy is a brilliant producer and gifted singer/instrumentalist. Kalin is a uniquely talented songwriter. They made magic.
After a while we “rested” the Riverfront Boys (they were arrested at the conclusion of a broadcast for causing yet another drunken riot at the record store) and Jeremy and Kalin appeared for a couple of episodes as The Dot Commune, a folk duo. But those irrepressible Riverfronts could not be contained. In fact, they made their own record album, which included all of the songs they wrote and performed in their earliest versions on the Jubilee. I wrote lyrics for one of their songs, and they were nice enough to depict me getting hit right square in the ass by lightning on the album cover.
The Riverfront Boys, incidentally, have appeared multiple times for live performances at Lincoln’s world-famous Zoo Bar. In this respect “Sandhills Jubilee” is kind of like the “Tracey Ullman Show” to the Riverfront Boys’ “Simpsons”.
In addition to the songs Kalin and Jeremy created for the show, we did lots of comedy bits. Bob S. Bestos was a frequent visitor in the earliest episodes as the show’s sponsor. Guest stars including Mitch Garner, Dangerous Dave Kuskie, Moriera Rau, Steven Crabb and more helped us populate our fictional Antioch with a variety of characters.
We did special episodes that stand out, including an entire episode recorded on location at a Luke Redfield concert; a 70th anniversary episode featuring “historic audio” from the archives; and so forth. And every episode was made greater by guest performers from all over Nebraska. Jeremy and Kalin have always made these picks, and they have welcomed great independent musicians to share their talent.
If it seems like I’m talking about the show in the past tense, well…kinda sorta. Even before the pandemic we were averaging about one episode a year…Jeremy is in Lincoln full-time now and our last new episode was at least two years ago. But as Diana Ross and the Supremes once said, someday we’ll be together. The Riverfront Boys will live to hit poor old Durward in the head with a guitar again.
Until then…