The Mabe Brothers and Branson's First Show
Near Branson, Missouri
Branson calls itself the live music capital, and the whole tradition traces back to four brothers and a converted building on the waterfront. In nineteen fifty-nine, the Mabe brothers, Bill, Jim, Lyle, and Bob, began performing a couple of nights a week around Branson. They took the notorious old name of the local vigilantes and called their act the Baldknobbers.
Their show mixed popular country songs with Ozark mountain music and a heavy dose of hillbilly comedy, and they played wherever they could gather a crowd. It caught on. In nineteen sixty-eight the Mabes built a theater out on Highway seventy-six, and that act became one of the longest running shows in Branson, still performed by the family generations later.
But they were not quite the first onto the strip. In nineteen sixty-seven the Presley family opened the first music show on what is now Highway seventy-six, the road everyone came to call The Strip. Between the Mabes and the Presleys, a farm-country town accidentally invented an entertainment industry, one homemade variety show at a time.
